Even though I still believe that the 2024 presidential race will change drastically in the coming months, I fear that the ever-excellent Jonathan V. Last is on to something here:
No one living has seen an election in which two presidents have run against one another.
But I disagree with Last’s extrapolation: that the most important question about a prospective President is whether he or she can do the job. And both Biden and Trump have proven that they can. (Yeah, well: Trumpies certainly think he did.) But I believe the true threshold question is different now that politics has devolved into a form of televised entertainment. That question is: Who do I want living in my house for the next four years? Who do I want in my kitchen, my family room, my bedroom, anyplace I have a screen?
My working assumption has been that Trump was a fling. People were bored in 2016, they were angry, they didn’t like Hillary Clinton. They allowed Big Orange in their homes and he pissed all over the carpet for four interminable years. This pleased his cult, disgusted most of the rest of us and the public voted against distemper in 2020 and 2022. Biden has been a much less intrusive presence. He may give the appearance of doddering, he may not inspire, he may have given the left too much, but he is palpably sane. Advantage Biden, I believe.
And yet…
Though appalled beyond human calculation, I’ve been impressed by the way Trump has run his campaign this time. Oh, he’s doing stupid, solipsistic stuff in Iowa—offending a popular governor because she won’t endorse him—but his demolition of Ron DeSantis has been masterly (though suicide-assisted by DeSantis himself). And he seems finally to have a grasp of what the presidency is all about, as the New York Times notes in this terrifying report:
Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands…
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
This, in contrast to his utter ignorance of what the office entailed when he came to power in 2017. That ascension was unplanned. If he wins in 2024, it won’t be—various radical-conservative think-tankers are working out the details. It will be full metal Orban-Putin this time. It is not too much to say that our democracy will be at stake.
So, I’m in a bit of a zeitgeist rut. Trump is more competent than expected; everyone else is less so. And the dilettantes are on the march. It is simply amazing to me that formerly sane people like Joe Lieberman and coal-shill Joe Manchin are playing footsie with the risk of authoritarianism via the No Labels third party route. As Jesus never said, “In my father’s house, there is one too many Manchins.” (Belated hat tip for that to Jerry Brown.) Even former Senator Bob Corker, a man I esteem, gets it entirely wrong: “My sense is [No Labels] will ultimately decide that their best chance of success is with a Republican center-right candidate,” he said. “And I just scratch my head at the Democrats having their hair on fire about this.”
My hair is on fire because those moderate-conservative never-Trump voters will be needed to put Biden over the top.
And then there are the flamers: Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. West is the greater threat now that he’s teamed up with the Green Party’s Russia Stooge Jill Stein. With Putin’s cyber-assistance, Stein took enough black votes away from Hillary in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to swing Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to Trump in 2016. That was the ball game. West recently told the New York Post, “Well, I think …Joe Biden contributed to a crime against humanity when he became the architect of the mass incarceration regime in the 1990s.” A crime against humanity? The “mass incarceration regime” had its excesses—though many of the “non-violent” drug offenders jailed were big-time narcos, or small-time violent offenders who made plea deals. The 1994 crime bill proved a deterrent: it accelerated already-falling crime rates and led to the current reduction in prison population. And it sure made a lot of black people feel safer with the bad guys off the streets. But Cornel West hangs out in guilt-ridden liberal salons, not in the neighborhoods where crime is real.
West is a card-carrying member of the silly left, but a smart one, with a ton of verbal facility—and an embroidered black preacherly way of speaking. (See Amiri Baraka’s Blues People for a brilliant discourse on this African-descendent style.) Joe Biden does not have a ton of verbal facility. He once called Barack Obama “clean” and “articulate.” That may come up in West’s campaign. I’m not sure how Brother Cornel feels about dictatorships, but he may be in the process of enabling one here in America.
As for Robert F. Kennedy, the less said the better. But there’s so much being said. Most recently, Kennedy tweeted this in his attempt to wriggle away from his antisemitic and anti-Chinese assertion that covid-19 was engineered to target whites and blacks, and to avoid Jews and Asians:
…I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I accurately pointed out — during an off-the-record conversation — that the U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons and that a 2021 study of the COVID-19 virus shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races since the furin cleave docking site is most compatible with Blacks and Caucasians and least compatible with ethnic Chinese, Finns, and Ashkenazi Jews. In that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered. That study is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32664879/ [Italics mine.}
Say what?
Kennedy will not be president. But he will be a receptacle for anti-Biden voters and pro-Trumpers who can cross over to vote in some primaries like New Hampshire. He is a sad case, to be sure; an embarrassment to his family and to his father’s memory. But he is a prime example of the self-indulgent dilettantism—if I feel it, it’s okay to say it—that has flooded American life in this age of affluence.
Jonathan Last is right: this election is unprecedented. If Trump wins the Republican nomination, the stakes are immense. Every last vote is crucial. There can be no messing around—and I fear that we live in a country that has forgotten how to take things seriously.
So Sign Me Up…
For a new organization called Citizens to Save Our Republic, announced in a press release today:
A bipartisan group of prominent Republican and Democratic Party leaders has declared that a third-party presidential ticket led by the “No Labels” organization would likely lead to a Trump victory in 2024, and presents a clear and present threat to democracy.
The group —Citizens to Save Our Republic—is forming a super PAC to fight the effort, and promises to fully disclose its funding and finances.
Today they released polling that shows that in an extremely close race such as 2016 and 2020, a significant third-party effort would drain support from President Biden and almost certainly return Donald Trump to the White House.
In a head-to-head race, the June survey of 5,700 registered voters nationwide, including over-samples of 500 voters in each of seven swing states, favored President Biden 52% to 48%, a 4-point margin that mirrors the 2020 results. However, the entry of a No Labels candidate could attract 21% of the vote, and would deliver a victory to Trump with 40% of the vote, compared to 39% for President Biden.
Citizens to Save Our Republic’s supporters include Democratic and Republican members of Congress including Maryland congressman and former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, former congressman and Presidential candidate Richard Gephardt, Congressman Brad Schneider, Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, Congressman Dean Phillips, former Senator Bill Bradley, former Secretaries of Defense Chuck Hagel and Bill Cohen, former Senator and Presidential candidate Gary Hart, former Senator Tim Wirth, and former Congressman Tom Downey.
And Speaking of 2024…
The invaluable John Ellis has gleaned this analysis of the coming presidential election from Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund. Read it and fear.
If you’re not a member of the Sanity Caucus, you can push this button and join our merry band—it’s free for now:
This was a thoroughly depressing read, but I’ve been thinking about the same things a lot recently.
I’m in my mid-50’s and can’t remember a time of greater uncertainty and peril, not even in the 2 months after the 2020 election, or the months following 9-11.
Too many people didn’t take Trump seriously in 2016 and they’re not now. That New York Times article should chill the blood of anyone who’s not a MAGA Republican. We are standing at the precipice and the only thing between us and the abyss is 80 year old Joe Biden.
Biden has done a very good job as President but that doesn't mean that someone else couldn't do an equally good or even better job. The Democratic Party has several excellent possibilities among its higher profile members; all one would need is Biden's blessing. The best thing Joe could do for the country is anoint a successor who is just as competent and more electable and holds the kind of promise that Obama did in 2008. The Trumpies will stay with their orange monster; Dems should be able to gather everyone else in.