Mass Surrender

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

 

Recently a friend asked me why I write as often as I do.

 

Partly it’s force of habit. I wrote many more words each day at my old gig than I do at this one, if you can believe it.

 

Partly it’s boredom. One must fill the hours somehow and Forensic Files reruns grow tedious by the eighth or ninth viewing.

 

Partly it’s impostor syndrome. I work with Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson; if my newsletters are doomed to be half as insightful as theirs, I can only provide equivalent value by writing twice as often.

 

But mostly it’s therapeutic.

 

I am a nuclear reactor of bitter disillusionment about the American character, and that energy has to go somewhere. It’s a fortunate man who can earn a living by blowing off steam.

 

The reactor was humming on Tuesday night as I watched Nikki Haley endorse Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention. Her smile seemed more pained and plastic than usual to me, but that was probably wishful thinking. If she was unhappy to be there, she would have followed Mike Pence’s dignified lead and simply … not been there.

 

Although Pence didn’t have much choice, realistically. Facing a crowd of boisterous Trump fanatics would have put him at risk of being murdered, and not for the first time.

 

“America has an amazing ability to self-correct,” Haley told the convention audience in her address. Does it? The guy she was there to celebrate tried to stage a coup the last time he was on the ballot and our allegedly amazing country is preparing to gamble on him again, this time with more of an electoral mandate than he had in 2016.

 

It’s actually Nikki Haley who has an amazing ability to self-correct. By one count, this was her sixth flip-flop with respect to Trump; there may be six more by 2028 if I’m right about the agonies he’ll visit on America in a second term. “Many of the same politicians who now publicly embrace Trump privately dread him,” she warned her supporters in February. “They know what a disaster he’s been and will continue to be for our party. They’re just too afraid to say it out loud. Well, I’m not afraid to say the hard truths out loud. I feel no need to kiss the ring.” Last night, terrified of saying the hard truths out loud, she kissed the ring.

 

In the end she resorted to the same stupid, nihilistic reasoning to which partisan conservatives always resort when selling out classical liberalism to authoritarians: The most sinister Republican is still preferable to any Democrat. The Reaganites who supported her in the primary are “not going to be persuaded by Nikki Haley to vote for someone, they’re going to be ashamed they voted for her in the first place,” Chris Christie said after her speech, hopefully correctly. Ultimately it’s not the Trump enthusiasts of the Republican Party who supply most of the fuel that keeps the reactor running, it’s frauds like her.

 

In a best-case scenario for Haley, this will all pay off by making her a top contender to replace Lindsey Graham in the Senate when he finally keels over in 2050. And her reward if she wins will be having to do the bidding of President Barron Trump.

 

But in fairness, it wasn’t Haley who inspired the most contempt for the American character this week. It wasn’t any Republican, Trump included.

 

We need to talk about Grandpa Joe.

 

***

 

I remember predicting around a year ago that a comfortable Trump victory was the one scenario we could safely rule out in November.

 

Don’t ask me to find the specific newsletter. When you write every day, it’s all burps in the wind. 

 

The logic seemed sound. Trump might win narrowly despite his unpopularity, as he did in 2016. Or Biden might win narrowly because of Trump’s unpopularity, as he did in 2020. Or Biden might win comfortably as Americans awakened from their torpor and punished Republicans for nominating a civic menace who’s since been convicted of dozens of felonies.

 

Whatever happened, there would be no Trump landslide.

 

On Tuesday, CNN projected that Trump is on track to win 330 electoral votes. Or more.

 

The most disillusioning thing about that isn’t that the great and good American people are ready to hand this creature and his cult total control of the federal government. The most disillusioning thing is that the opposing candidate appears not to care and the opposing party appears more or less okay with him not caring.

 

Trump isn’t just poised to easily win an election liberals regularly describe as “existential.” The Democratic Party is prepared to effectively forfeit.

 

A freakish number of destabilizing events have happened in American politics within the last three weeks that are either without precedent or without recent precedent. A presidential nominee was nearly murdered; a sitting president couldn’t form coherent sentences during a debate; a political party semi-officially abandoned the ideology that’s governed it for more than 40 years; a shoeshine boy was nominated to be vice president.

 

Stranger and more disturbing than all of that, though, is the fact that Joe Biden seems to regard winning his party’s nomination as his highest political priority. It’s increasingly clear from polling data that he’ll lose to Trump this fall, maybe decisively enough to bring about a down-ballot disaster. It’s also increasingly clear from reporting that he’d prefer that outcome to one in which he’s replaced as nominee.

 

And it remains doubtful that his party can muster the will to stop him, which would make this the first political mass surrender in American history.

 

Last week I made a list of ways in which the president has begun to behave like his opponent, but one thing I overlooked is how similar Biden’s conduct lately is to Trump’s after the 2020 election. In both cases an egomaniac was unable to cope with his own political mortality and in both cases that egomaniac responded by retreating into denial and surrounding himself with cronies willing to tell him only what he wished to hear.

 

“Biden Circle Shrinks as Democrats Fear Election Wipeout,” the New York Times revealed on Tuesday. Since the debate, the president apparently hasn’t consulted closely about the election with his chief of staff or even his own campaign manager(!) but rather with longtime flunkies like Mike Donilon and family members like Jill and Hunter Biden. As you’d expect, people who have spent decades riding the Biden gravy train have different political incentives than Democrats who are frantic to beat Trump and don’t care who ends up doing the honors.

 

The incentive of the gravy train conductors is to prolong Joe Biden’s political career as much as possible, at whatever cost.

 

In the past few days, Biden has started to privately convey a new message to Democrats: The conversation about my future is over, and I’m getting irritated that you’re not realizing that. Biden has called several prominent allies individually to tell them to spread the word.

 

“We think we’ve got a good plan to fight through this,” a senior Biden aide said. …

 

That strategy, as described by multiple Biden aides and allies, is to run out the clock.

 

They’re not kidding about running out the clock. The president and his allies are so eager to make his nomination official before he suffers another catastrophic cognitive breakdown in public that Democrats plan to nominate him in a “virtual” roll call vote before the convention—even though the ballot-access timetable they’ve been using as a pretext to justify doing so is no longer operative.

 

Apart from Trump’s behavior leading up to January 6, it’s the most selfish thing I’ve seen in politics. Insofar as there was an inkling of truth in the image of old-school patriot Grandpa Joe, it’s been incinerated by his own vanity. Biden and his team want to saddle the party with his official candidacy as soon as possible not because they believe he’s up to the job of campaigning effectively this fall but because they believe he isn’t. 

 

And he isn’t, as some of his latest public appearances have affirmed.

 

***

 

As the feeble, halting effort to oust him from the ticket drags on, the president’s attempts to impress reluctant Democrats have grown pathetic.

 

He mustered a modicum of energy last week for a rally in Detroit, which led observers who should know better to whistle past the electoral graveyard and coo about his defiance and “resilience.” It was his best event in ages, yet even here there was trouble afoot. For starters, the mood was Trumpy in more ways than one. And because Biden has no agenda for a second term and no way to get Democrats excited to vote for him again, he was reduced to rattling off a preposterous series of far-fetched legislative proposals to try to pique their enthusiasm.

 

Codifying Roe v. Wade, raising the minimum wage, banning assault weapons: None of that is happening next year or the year after, let alone in the first 100 days of his second term. Republicans will almost certainly control the Senate in 2025 and will block all of it. And if they don’t control the chamber, the filibuster will block it for them.

 

Desperate pandering is all Biden has now. On Tuesday he endorsed national rent control. Then news broke that he’s planning to demand that Congress pass term limits for Supreme Court justices, which would almost certainly be unconstitutional and would end up even deader in a Republican Senate than an assault weapons ban would. The GOP isn’t about to squander its current advantage on the court by acceding to a plan for its phaseout.

 

The most one can say for the idea is that it takes balls for the oldest president in American history to sponsor a plan that would prevent judges from working into their dotage.

 

In any case, Democrats don’t need a Christmas list of policy goodies to justify voting for Biden again. What they need is reassurance that he’s fit for a second term, and the president has sought to provide them with it by engaging more with the press lately.

 

He’s failed. Because he’s no longer capable of succeeding.

 

Apart from his Detroit rally, which was serviceable, the most one can say about Biden’s recent appearances is that they’ve been marginally better than his pitiable debate performance—usually. But not always. At times in the past week, he’s seemed unable to articulate words. He’s lost his train of thought. On Tuesday he wildly misstated his own rent-control policy by telling an audience that his administration would cap rent increase at $55. What he meant to say was 5 percent.

 

During a conference call with congressional Democrats on Saturday afternoon, one of his aides handed him a note that said, “Stay positive, you are sounding defensive.” Biden … read the note aloud. Sources claimed later to NBC News that he did so to provide some “levity.”

 

The note was accurate, though. According to Puck, he was defensive and even angry at points as House members warned him of an electoral disaster brewing. When one complained that his achievements on foreign policy weren’t “breaking through” with the public, he blamed the caucus. “You oughta talk about it!” he snapped. “On national security, nobody has been a better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me one! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”

 

Mind you, he said this in defense of his right to lose in November to a successor who’s preparing to abandon Taiwan to China.

 

That was one of Biden’s more lucid moments, too. “The call was even worse than the debate,” one person who participated told Puck. “He was rambling; he’d start an answer then lose his train of thought, then would just say ‘whatever.’ He really couldn’t complete an answer. I lost a ton of respect for him.” Another participant claimed 50 Democrats on the call would have come out against him in the hours afterward—if not for major breaking news out of Pennsylvania that suddenly interrupted political plans of every stripe.

 

We’re now four days removed from the attempt on Trump’s life. The intended victim is well enough to attend the Republican convention. Yet those 50 Democrats haven’t come forward. Nancy Pelosi is reportedly taking calls from anxious House colleagues who fear their seats are in jeopardy but it’s not clear what, if anything, she’ll do or could do. Rep. Adam Schiff did speak up on Wednesday and ask Biden to stand aside as nominee, but he has the luxury of running for one of the safest seats in the Senate.

 

Meanwhile, the polling has turned grimmer.

 

After the debate, as he resorted to Trumpy tactics to try to extinguish the rebellion against him, Biden alleged that it was Democratic “elites” who wanted him out as nominee, not the rank and file. It was nonsense at the time and it’s bigger nonsense now: A new poll from the Associated Press released Wednesday finds nearly two-thirds of Democrats want a different candidate. Another recent poll conducted by NBC News found 62 percent of the party wishing it would nominate someone else.

 

The president, his advisers, his allies in Congress, and his friends in the media have for weeks engaged in a gaslighting campaign so ambitious in its shamelessness that even Donald Trump must be impressed by it. But it simply isn’t working. Whether because Democratic voters are made of sterner stuff than their perpetually gaslit Republican counterparts or because the evidence of infirmity is too blatant to be ignored, there will be no Biden revival.

 

The party seems ready to nominate him anyway. The nuclear reactor is about to melt down.

 

***

 

Here’s one more item to add to the list of destabilizing political developments that are without precedent: a revolt by party delegates against a sitting president.

 

I doubt it’ll happen. But we’re nearing a point of such political despair that a palace coup might plausibly be the least bad outcome when Democrats get together next month.

 

It would be a terrible outcome, splitting the party between pro- and anti-Biden camps and igniting ferocious recriminations between the two. Time heals all wounds, but Democrats don’t have time. There’s an election in less than four months. Dragging Joe Biden kicking and screaming off the ticket is pointless if the hard feelings that linger afterward will ensure that his replacement is unelectable.

 

Which, of course, is exactly what our selfish president and his selfish advisers are counting on to ensure that he’s nominated after all.

 

But a capable nominee leading a bitterly divided party seems like a marginally better bet to me now than an incapable nominee leading a demoralized one. Democratic delegates voting their conscience—which Biden has permitted them to do—by denying him the nomination would amount to them daring the party’s Trump-hating base to punish America and themselves by not turning out for the new nominee in November.

 

It’d be an insane gamble. But at least there’s an upside to it, which there no longer is with Joe Biden.

 

There’s also the possibility, though, that this cake is already baked and whoever ends up leading the Democratic ticket will end up losing to Trump. Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro: It might simply be too late to matter now.

 

That’s not to say that Biden shouldn’t be replaced, as losing narrowly to Trump rather than losing badly could be the difference between a Republican House majority and a Democratic one. But an election between Trump and a last-second liberal to be named later is likely to become a referendum on the latter, not the former. And Americans, to their great disgrace, seem comfortable enough with the devil they know that I have trouble believing they’d gamble at this hour on one they don’t.

 

The right is ecstatic about its candidate, the list of grievances about Democratic governance is long, and the civic case against Trump that’s been vigorously prosecuted for the better part of 10 years seems not to matter to a critical mass of Americans. It’s a nuclear disaster. The only suspense is how far the fallout will spread.