About a decade ago, on one of my Time Magazine road trips, I attended the North Carolina Republican Party’s annual dinner. The featured speaker was Donald Trump. My presence at the event was greeted with enthusiasm by the local GOP’s communications director; he told me there would be a press availability after the speech. Okay, I said. Trump was deep in Birther mode at that point. His speech was utter nonsense—which surprised me not at all, having gotten to know the guy back in the 1980s, when I wrote a few pieces about the frenzied world of New York real estate developers. (Trump was considered a mortal jerk and a business-phony by just about every one of his peers in those days.)
After the speech, I met a couple of high-tech farmers, fascinating guys, libertarians—you know the type—and fell into a deep conversation about how they did business. The GOP communications director approached and said the press availability was starting. I said, okay, and continued my conversation with the farmers. Twenty minutes later, the GOP guy approached me again and said, “Mr. Trump noticed that you didn’t attend the press availability. He’s willing to give you a one-on-one.”
“No thanks,” I said.
“You don’t want to speak with Mr. Trump?”
“Nope.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Sure,” I said. “The guy is a toxic carnival act. If the North Carolina Republican Party wants to be a party to that, that’s your business. But anything I write about Trump, even the most horrible things I can come up with, will only serve as helium for his balloon. These high-tech farm guys are more interesting in any case.”
That was, shall we say, cavalier on my part. I couldn’t imagine that the citizens of the United States would elect this fetid huckster to any public office, much less President. And then, several years later, my beloved daughter-in-law, a Latina, woke up crying in the middle of the night, terrified that Trump might get elected and come after her. (She had a green card then; she’s a citizen now.) I still didn’t believe that Trump could be elected President, but I started writing about him. 2016 was the last Presidential campaign (of 11, God help me) I actually went out to cover—and I wrote about Trump a lot. And I can say, with absolute certainty, that not one of the thousands of words I wrote had the slightest effect on the election. The Trump voters were unreachable. They didn’t even bother to argue back. I found that terrifying, worse than death to any itinerant columnizer. I was irrelevant.
Trump remains very much with us, perhaps in a more subtly dangerous way now than before; he seems less credible, having been wounded by electoral reality. Actually, for the last three or four months, since the 2022 election, I’ve enjoyed a bout of feeling relieved. People, it seemed, had tired of the Trump silliness and his chuckleheaded candidate choices. Even the GOP, a hotbed of irrationality, seemed to have had enough. There was a good chance that some other candidate, maybe Ron DeSantis, would take him out…just as the Access Hollywood tape was going to kill his 2016 candidacy, and just as his traitorous support of the January 6 mobsters would end his viability and…and…But then I read Mark Halperin’s account of the DeSantis speech at the Reagan Library and began to think: What if DeSantis is John Connally or Joe Lieberman or Rudy Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg? What if he’s a dud? He sure doesn’t seem as much fun as Trump. And then I read Tom Nichols in The Atlantic about Trump’s CPAC bluster…and I began to wonder: what if I was deluding myself, as I had been back in North Carolina? What if Donald Trump was still plausible? And if that were true, what could I do about it?
Nothing, probably. Except maybe one thing: not take any chances. There ain’t no Sanity Clause in politics. If there’s the slightest scintilla of a wisp of a possibility that Donald Trump might be elected President in 2024, we must take the safest, most direct path to stopping him. And that is to vote for the Democrat who opposes him, and that probably means Joe Biden. No futzing around.
This has become a matter of interest because of the current dustup in Sanity Circles between two admirable groups, No Labels and the Third Way. No Labels is spending $70 million to lay the groundwork for a bipartisan third-party presidential effort in 2024. Third Way thinks it’s a bad idea. So do I.
I’ve had a long-standing flirtation with the idea of a third party. I don’t feel comfortable in either of the current two. Even before Trump, I couldn’t abide by the GOP’s warmongering abroad, or its no-tax politics and utter hypocrisy about deficits —and, above all, its pandering to racists and religious extremists. As for the Democrats, I think they’ve gone all Norfolk & Southern with their identity politics and Wokery and I’ve long believed that their alliance with the public employees unions makes it impossible to reform government in a way that is even vaguely relevant to the 21st century.
But. All my qualms are nothing compared to the prospect that Donald Trump might become president again. I’m not sure our democracy could survive that; in fact, I’m pretty sure that a Trump presidency would mean most Americans don’t care if our democracy survives. I would not want to visit that on my grandchildren or even Tucker Carlson’s.
I’ve known Joe Biden a long-time and always thought he was as advertised: a good guy and a very smart politician. I am disappointed in some things he’s done, like his wholesale toadying to the teachers unions. (We really do need an actual Education President before our children slide into illiteracy and stupor.) I also worry that Biden’s too old for the job; he certainly would be by the end of a second term. My preferred candidate is Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, but that’s another story for another year. Biden lives on the same planet I do, if not the exact same part of the jungle. He has followed Sanity Caucus policies in many areas, especially overseas. That’s good enough for me, for now.
The story will change, of course. Something will happen. Between now and 2024, “a pope will be born,” as Mario Cuomo used to say, “and a pope will die.” In the interim, though, we can’t take any chances. We can’t try to finesse it, or deploy clever strategies, or dream about—or spend money building—third parties. Sanity’s legions must be strong and united. Efforts must be made to lure as many Republicans as possible into the coalition. Trump must be defeated…or America will be.
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Trump is a no more reasonable candidate than he was in your NC encounter…but far more frightening having one over 30+% of the electorate who are frightened still behind him
it's nice to read someone who makes sense.