No, I Mean That Literally... Trump Is Satan
Last night, the Washington Post published an OpEd, President Biden should not run again in 2024, by Biden’s favorite columnist, David Ignatius. Ignatius is a Biden fan and his style of governing from the center and sees him as “a successful and effective president” who needs to step aside now. “[I]f he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement— which was stopping Trump.”
Ignatius wrote that he’s too old for the job and Harris is too disliked. He suggests that even replacing her with Karen Bass (not a terrible choice) or Gina Raimondo (the most terrible imaginable choice) wouldn’t help at this point.
Biden has never been good at saying no. He should have resisted the choice of Harris, who was a colleague of his beloved son Beau when they were both state attorneys general. He should have blocked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which has done considerable damage to the island’s security. He should have stopped his son Hunter from joining the board of a Ukrainian gas company and representing companies in China— and he certainly should have resisted Hunter’s attempts to impress clients by getting Dad on the phone.
Biden has another chance to say no— to himself, this time— by withdrawing from the 2024 race. It might not be in character for Biden, but it would be a wise choice for the country.
Biden has in many ways remade himself as president. He is no longer the garrulous glad-hander I met when I first covered Congress more than four decades ago. He’s still an old-time pol, to be sure, but he is now more focused and strategic; he executes policies systematically, at home and abroad. As Franklin Foer writes in The Last Politician, a new account of Biden’s presidency, “he will be remembered as the old hack who could.”
Time is running out. In a month or so, this decision will be cast in stone. It will be too late for other Democrats, including Harris, to test themselves in primaries and see whether they have the stuff of presidential leadership. Right now, there’s no clear alternative to Biden— no screamingly obvious replacement waiting in the wings. That might be the decider for Biden, that there’s seemingly nobody else. But maybe he will trust in democracy to discover new leadership, “in the arena.”
I hope Biden has this conversation with himself about whether to run, and that he levels with the country about it. It would focus the 2024 campaign. Who is the best person to stop Trump? That was the question when Biden decided to run in 2019, and it’s still the essential test of a Democratic nominee today.
To Sidney Blumenthal— probably somewhat less of a fan than Ignatius— it’s already too late and he tells Democrats to buck up and make the best of the inevitable (a Biden candidacy, not a Trump win). “[I]t is the Democrats,” he wrote, “who pull Biden underwater [in the polls and if the 21% of discontented Democrats were to change their opinion, his favorability would be near or above 50%.] They see his physical faults and shudder at his political fall. He is 80, his hair thinned, his gait slower and more careful. He is not eloquent. The slight hesitation of the stutter he overcame as a child seems occasionally to return. He is not Mick Jagger strutting at 80. The intensity of concern among Democrats about Biden is in direct proportion to their panic about Trump. They see in his fragility their own predicament. He is the screen on which they project their anxiety, insecurity and fear. They suffer from a crisis of bad nerves. The Democrats’ withholding creates a self-fulfilling prophesy. Spooked by the shadow of Trump, they react with disapproval of Biden, whose numbers are stagnant, flashing the sign that makes them more frightened. They do not censure Biden or dislike him. But they hope for a counter-factual scenario. There is none… If Biden were not to run, the counter-factual dream of a Hollywood ending with Michael Douglas from The American President materializing would be replaced with a ferocious primary of centrifugal force exposing the party’s fractured divides and the survivor most likely at no better rating than Biden at the current fraught moment. Biden’s presence leaves that bloodsport to another day.”
Blumenthal asserted that “the older Biden, to those who have known him over the decades, is a more capable Biden than the younger Biden… The election of 2024 will be the second referendum on Trump, but the first held on the attempted coup of January 6t. Just as the 2004 election, which President George W Bush won, was in effect a referendum on the terrorist attack on September 11, the only election since 1988 in which the Republican won the popular vote, January 6 is the overwhelming political factor that establishes Trump’s assertion to his party’s nomination by means of incumbency. His forthcoming trials are not peripheral, but central to his claim. When the illusion of a counter-factual alternative fades, and the choice is between the incumbent and the false incumbent, then Democrats may consider something other than the age of Biden and whether they wish to contribute to a new political age of Trump.”
I haven’t read The Last Politician and I doubt I ever will. From the first I ever read about Biden as an overtly race-baiting Senate candidate in 1972, I loathed him. I haven’t hated him as much since he became president— and I like that he ended the war in Afghanistan— but I know I could never get through a book about him. Dave Weigel wrote that Biden comes across well in the books about him and thinks it’s too bad that no one else reads them either. Franklin Foer’s far-reaching new book, he wrote, “presents an aging president who’s nonetheless fully engaged in the job, stumbling more when he loses his temper— blurting out Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s private negotiating position, telling a Democrat who resists the Build Back Better package that she’s ‘the opposition’— than when he loses his train of thought. But this story is so distant from most coverage of Biden, especially on the right, that it reads like alternate history. To many voters, Biden is presented as too frail to carry out even basic duties, leaving his aides to secretly run the country in his stead. In the first books to document his presidency, the picture is of a leader who sounds shaky in public, but is the dominant force in his White House… Biden, he found, ‘buries himself in details’ and ‘takes technocratic charge’ of issues.”
“It’s weird; people are always saying, ‘well, it’d be great if we saw more Biden,’” Foer said. “He gives public speeches almost every single day. He sticks to his message. He doesn’t say anything insane. He does have kind of a low-key style in these speeches, but I don’t think that’s abnormal for a president. It’s just abnormal in the aftermath of Trump.”
…Book-buyers don’t seem especially interested in reading more about a figure they’ve seen in politics for decades who is now overseeing a relatively quiet White House. At this point in Donald Trump’s presidency, 47 Trump-related books had hit the New York Times nonfiction list, including two editions of the Mueller Report, two Michael Wolff blockbusters, two Trump tributes by Newt Gingrich (Understanding Trump and Trump’s America), and a fake memoir from Trump’s SNL stand-in Alec Baldwin.
Fired FBI Director James Comey turned his wash-out into a number one hit, A Higher Loyalty, soon joined by fired FBI agent Andrew McCabe’s tell-all The Threat. Books on an alleged Russian plot to steal the presidency filled shelves faster than Tolstoy: Russian Roulette, House of Trump, House of Putin, Proof of Collusion, Collusion, and, for the defense, Ball of Collusion. All of this before Trump’s first impeachment.
Biden had a best-seller then, too— Promise Me, Dad, a gutting memoir of his son Beau and his early death from brain cancer. In power, Biden’s enemies see him less as his own man than as Barack Obama’s vice president and Hunter Biden’s dad. Conservative media interest in Obama often out-paces interest in Biden; a lack of stories about Obama manipulating the president becomes evidence that this is happening, and the press is covering it up.
That’s not what the reporters who’ve embedded in the White House have found, but their word doesn’t mean much to media skeptics. What’s mattered is what Roger Ailes called the “orchestra pit theory”— that if a substantive speech is followed by someone stumbling into an orchestra pit, the stumble will make the news. And Biden has a tendency to fall into the orchestra pit.
…In The Bulwark, Mona Charen advises Biden’s handlers to let him talk. “People have come to believe that he is in sharp mental decline. When you see him in a Q&A, it’s clear that he isn’t.”