G.I. Joe
Whilst praising his achievements, Scott Montgomery asks whether Biden is the right man for the moment.
For readers in the UK and Europe, America must seem like an endless carnival of unexpected acts and broken rides. For Americans themselves, meanwhile, it is a tug-of-war between anguish and disbelief, with a pause now and then for numbness.
The U.S. presidential debate on June 27 was no exception. It has been widely portrayed and thus seen as a disaster for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. This is not just a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it doesn’t include the fact that the troubles are different for each. Biden’s performance was stunning, the saddest ever seen in more than 50 years of such televised events. It was bound to generate panic and gloom, and it has done so. And it is also true that his more recent appearances, in interviews and the NATO press conference, haven’t been forceful enough to wipe the debate image clean.
But the reaction has exceeded the original injury, damaging candidate and party both more than is sensible. At this point, a large number of Democrats have joined, officially and unofficially, with their Republican opponents to try and defeat Joe Biden. Calls for him to end his campaign have become the equivalent of attacks. They’ve come not only from political circles but from the editorial boards of the New York Times, Washington Post, the FT, the Atlantic, and other discerning mandarins of the media. Even so experienced a political voice as George Clooney has joined the dark chorus of nay.
These calls against his candidacy have therefore placed Biden at odds with much of his own party, which has itself splintered. Behind doors both open and closed, Democrats who remain loyal to a Biden candidacy are at angry odds with dissenters who demand he leave the race, as well as those on the fence who may well join the latter group. Given such turmoil, it is too late for a graceful exist—being forced out may earn some thanks but will bring no mercy for failure. Democrats do not share the right’s call for Biden to be put in jail, but they are not far from suggesting he consider an assisted living facility. They have come to agree with what Trump himself has been saying all along about “sleepy Joe”—that he is too frail and impaired by age to cook a hamburger let alone lead the country.
My personal opinion is that the biggest error committed by the Biden campaign was to agree to a debate and then participate in it. Biden has often said that he doesn’t believe what the polls have to say, but these appear to have been a source of pressure, presumably revealing that his significant lead in 2023 had vanished and was heading into negative territory (which it did). Apparently, the hope was to shake things up and prove a solid stance against Trump. Biden’s team urged him to propose moving the debates up by three months—before either candidate had been declared officially. To say this was risky is like saying there’s a chance Trump may not tell the truth, the whole truth, or nothing of the truth during the debate.
The problem for Biden was not that Trump is unbeatable as a speaker. It is because of who and what he is—an authoritarian persona powered by a mendacity without limits. Presidential debates in the U.S. are a one-act drama in which somebody is supposed to lose. The goal is to avoid playing that character. Without theatrical prowess—commanding presence, combative gestures, a voice of operatic force—you cannot easily debate, rationally or otherwise, a person who lies and fabricates at will. But Trump goes even beyond this: he lies with conviction and pleasure, without effort or conscience. It is a pathology but one with a goal. Like Putin and other authoritarians, he ruptures or ignores the truth as a sign of power.
During the debate, one heard from Trump that the violent assault by thousands on the U.S. Capitol, visually documented and viewed millions of times, was merely “a small number” of legitimate protestors “ushered in by police.” Viewers also ‘learned’ that Biden’s support for Ukraine was all a ruse, since the president was actually the one who encouraged Putin to attack. Americans were further informed that the 21% rise in food costs was, in fact, 300%, and that 18 million “illegals” from “prisons, jails, and mental institutions” were allowed across the border and were “killing our people like never before” (the world’s total prison population is 11.5 million). Democrats as a whole, moreover, are ready to “take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth.”
This, many will say, is just Trump being Trump. More of the same nonsense. What else is new? But such is precisely the response that an authoritarian leader wants—it is the sign that his falsification and warping of reality has become normalized, expected, and seen as unthreatening. The two CNN moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper (not chosen for their suggestive last names), were told by CNN, which put on the debate, to be “questioners, not umpires.” This lack of any responsibility for calling out falsehoods was inevitably going to give the edge to Trump.
It helps to recall what Hannah Arendt, among other political philosophers of the immediate post-WWII era, said about tyrannical personalities: they employ the lie not as a weapon but as a wand. to weave a web of untruth that includes denial of what a majority knows as fact creates a spell. Here is a leader who assents to nothing from the existing order, who is able to do “bad” things to a “bad system.” Lying in so clear, consistent, and fluent a manner becomes a reflection of what must be done, a promise of tearing things down to enact change. All of this Trump and his followers made evident in his first term. Now, however, he’s made himself more vindictive and dangerous.
At this writing, there is no telling how things may end, as the Biden camp battles on. Forced into the background, now fainter than before, are those who insist this is not merely an election but fork in the road for democracy, and not only for the U.S. A true authoritarian government in America will greatly enfeeble the cause of freedom everywhere, enable repressive regimes everywhere, as well as repressive policies, and send the world into a new and more violently degraded era, setting a precedent for democratic failure everywhere. It is not only Trump in 2024, in other words, but the elections that come after, and still after, that are at issue.
As the calls for Biden to withdraw continue at high decibel levels, sounding more and more like right-wing attacks—“too frail…and delusional!”—he shows no sign of relenting. He may realize at this point, or not, that he is now serving as one of Trump’s best supporters, just as Trump is his own.
There is the possibility that Biden does suffer from an unwillingness to interpret the situation in more than one way. He has said many times—with enormous legitimacy from his own life history—that overcoming adversity counts as the core of his being. This is admirable, but not as an absolute. We do not have the full picture; Biden has been rather careful with what is allowed to be seen and known. This leaves room and adds weight to suspicions. For the present juncture in his career and in the history of his party and the country, the question may be whether this principle is the right one for the reality at hand. Will it serve as the sail for moving forward, or the anchor dragging the ship back?
Biden and the Democrats, and thus the U.S., are in a grave moment. For nearly everyone in the party, Biden has done some excellent things (though not for Gaza), and his domestic policies, if continued, would be good for the country and thus democracy. The Republicans, as the New York Times recently put it, will provide “a pledge of allegiance to Donald Trump.”
That this would-be wrecker of democracy has said very little since the debate, allowing the Democrats to do his work for him, is a worrying sign. He is more seasoned now, uses his advisors in a more mature way, and is thus more dangerous than ever. The Democrats would do well to overcome their current declaration of disunity and agree on a path to November. If that be an open convention, with several contending candidates, so be it.
Addendum (July 14):
If the presidential debate brought humiliation and calls for withdrawal for Biden, the recent assassination attempt has given Donald Trump a new platform for rage and a chance for historic image-making. In the immediate wake of the shooting, which left Trump with a minor wound to the right ear but a blood-spattered face and clenched fist for the cameras, the two parties played their parts. Biden told the country, there “is no place in America for this” and “it is not who we are,” while GOP Senator J.D. Vance, a contender for Trump’s VP, negated this by blaming Biden himself for the shooting.
Biden’s comments are tragic fantasy, while Vance’s suggest righteous revenge. Political violence, in word and deed, are brutally common in US history (more than 25% of presidents have been the targets of assassination). In the past 7 years, since Trump’s election, it has become closer to the norm. Violence during white supremacist marches, attacks on Muslims, Jews, Asians, and Blacks, insurrection at the Capitol, the 2017 shooting of Republican Steve Scalise, the 2018 mailing of pipe bombs to Trump opponents, a 2020 plot to kidnap and likely execute Michigan Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, the 2021 hammer assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and so on. To kill Trump, the gunman chose an AR-15 rifle, favored by mass shooters everywhere. Indeed, he himself qualifies for this designation, having shot four people, killing one, critically wounding two. It seems a point worth contemplating.
Photo by Aaron Kittredge
