Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Trump & Fascism: The Beast That Be & the Mock Shock Crock

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On 9 Sept., a campaign account for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted (or "X'd"), "President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets." The same day on the same platform, Trump's running mate J.D. Vance was ranting about "illegal Haitian immigrants" in Springfield, Ohio, and posted that, "reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country." Two days later, Trump himself was repeating this in his debate with Kamala Harris:

"...what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War 3... What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States... In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating--they're eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what's happening in our country."
It was a typical Trump campaign narrative: false in every particular (there has been no known pet-killing or eating; the Haitians being attacked were legal, not illegal, immigrants), aimed at demonizing and utterly dehumanizing a powerless "out group," and to spark and create a justification for ugly retribution against that group. It didn't just sound exactly like what neo-Nazis say about immigrants every day, Trump's "source" was, in fact, a neo-Nazi group (called Blood Tribe). In the days that followed, Vance continued to repeat this and to escalate the rhetoric, continuing to pretend the legal Haitian immigrants were "illegal" and that they were responsible for "a massive rise in communicable diseases" and "crime" in Springfield (also false).[1] Presenting Jews as an alien infestation of unclean creatures who commit crimes, live like (and are) animals and spread disease were central themes of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, the groundwork for the Holocaust. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday network news shows repeating all of this.

And then on Monday--literally the very next day--Vance was on X whining that "the rhetoric was out of control." Not Trump's rhetoric or his own but the rhetoric of Democrats, for reacting to this sort of "campaign." Their condemnations of Trump's words and behavior, not Trump's words and behavior themselves, were, Vance bleated, encouraging "violence" and assassination attempts against Trump.

In a sign of things to come from far-right media, Fox's deplorable Sean Hannity had this written up and further circulated it.

Hold that thought.


At the beginning of the Trump regime, I wrote a pair of articles about "Trump & Fascism," the first outlining the substance of fascism--so often treated, these days, as an empty political curse--and delineating Trumpism from it, the second a series of appendices outlining Trump's use of fascist language and the fact that this had drawn to him a massive following among the overtly white nationalist/Nazi/fascist subculture in the U.S.. A third article, written in 2020, was intended as, among other things, an update, one that covered events since the first two and expanded their scope, showing how Trumpian protofascism was a manifestation of what far-right media had been preaching to its followers for years. It grew to book length then was, unfortunately, lost in one of those awful mechanical accidents to which this overly computerized age is subject. Months later, some of the surviving notes on that one went into another piece, written in the immediate aftermath of Trump's efforts to overthrow the 2020 election. Our dysfunctional institutions failed to properly respond to that, just as they'd failed to curtail what had led to it.

Trump has only gotten worse since then, the accusations of fascism by his opponents--when his opponents bother to make them--only more justifiable. As, in fact, the examples already noted indicate, Trump has, of late, been delving into straight-up Nazism.

That's what he was channeling in December when, paraphrasing "Mein Kampf," he repeatedly said immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our nation," directly contextualizing his virulent anti-immigrant campaign as racist blood-and-soil Nazism. As that and the false pet-eating charge demonstrate, that campaign[2] has radically escalated in the current race, where he's made one of his central themes the false insistence that immigrants are carrying out a violent crime-wave. In Grand Rapids, Michigan in April, he was describing them as "animals":
"The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals.' Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said 'please don't use the word "animals," sir, when you're talking about these people.' I said 'I'll use the word "animal," because that's what they are.'"
In that same appearance, he outlined his fantasy that other countries are
"sending [to the U.S.] prisoners, murderers, drug-dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have in every country all over the world... They're coming from all over the world."
Sentiment he's often repeated. Last week at a rally in Tempe, Arizona, he hit on the idea of calling the U.S. "a dumping ground. We're like a -- we're like a garbage can for the world," immigrants being the "garbage." In Colorado earlier this month, he said immigrants to the U.S.
"are the worst criminals in the world... Our criminals are like babies compared to these people. These people are the most violent people on earth."
A few days before that, Trump had been dabbling in Nazi pseudoscience, suggesting that immigrants commit murder because they're genetically predisposed to do so: "it's in their genes." Reuters describes Trump's rhetoric:
"Migrants who had come across the U.S. border were slaughtering people across the country, [Trump] falsely claimed.

"'These are people at the highest level of killing that cut your throat and won’t even think about it the next morning,' Trump told the crowd. 'They grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents'... [They are] 'savages' and 'predators' who 'sexually assault' young girls... At a rally in the small Wisconsin town of Prairie du Chien last weekend, Trump suggested migrants want to 'rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill' the nation’s citizens and that they would 'walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.'"
Trump has literally described immigrants as an infestation--a pestilence one kills--and, even more often, as an invasion--something one violently resists. Earlier this month, he told a crowd in Reading, Pennsylvania
"I will liberate Pennsylvania and our entire nation from this mass migrant invasion of murderers and child predators and gang members, terrorists, drug dealers, and thugs."
...later described as a "nation-wrecking border invasion."

One can point out that none of this is true, that all available data indicates that immigrants commit crimes at notably lower rates than the native-born, that even if one accepts "migrant crime" as a real presidential issue--and it isn't one--it's a microscopic one, that Trump's "sources," on the rare occasions when he even has any, don't at all support his assertions, but fact-checking such talk completely misses the point, which is to demonize and dehumanize brown untermenschen as a means of politically organizing Aryan voters around hating them.[3] It is, on point after point, a direct appropriation of the propaganda of the Third Reich.

It's the fascism, stupid.

Trump's "politics" remain the same palingenetic ultranationalism at the core of the fascist project, and he pitches it the same way, obsessing over imagined national decline that he and his movement will fix, cast in a stew of populist and faux-populist bromides, raw hatred of those in designated out-groups and relentless authoritarianism.
"Together, they built America into the single greatest country anywhere in the world. But now we're a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has quite simply lost its way, but we are not going to allow this horror to continue. Three years ago, we were a great nation and we will soon be a great nation again. It was hardworking patriots like you who built this country and it's hardworking patriots like you who are going to save our country. We will fight for America like no one has ever fought before. 2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the war mongers. We will expel them. We're going to drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communist, Marxist and fascist, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will route the fake news media and we will evict crooked Joe Biden from the White House on election day 2024. The great silent majority is rising like never before. And under our leadership, the forgotten man and woman will be forgotten no longer. We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God. And together we will make America powerful again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again."
As that suggests, Trump allows for no legitimate political disputes. Those who disagree with him or who otherwise fall afoul of his "politics" are, in his presentations, evil, ill-intentioned, filled with and motivated by hatred, looking to do no less than destroy the country, they're scum, dangerous, Marxists, communists, fascists--any word with a negative connotation, it doesn't have to be consistent or even make any sense--and Trump, again echoing classical fascism, has explicitly said they, his fellow Americans who disagree with him, aren't part of the "nation" he's pitching, are enemies of that "nation" and are the greatest threat in the world to that "nation":
"[T]ogether, we are taking on some of the most menacing forces and vicious opponents of our people I've ever seen. We've never seen anything like what’s happening in our country. The danger from within is far greater, in my opinion, than the danger on the outside of our country. That’s danger. But this is serious, the fascists, the communists, the serious socialists... It's horrible what's happening. But no matter how hateful and corrupt the communist and criminals we are fighting against may be, you must never forget this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage."[4]
Offering a vision that is fundamentally incompatible with a liberal democratic society, Trump's authoritarian program is aimed at ending such a society. Defining everyone outside his narrow notion of "the nation" as enemies of the people--a phraseology most prominently associated with no less than Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin--he advocates that the state be weaponized against them. In May, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) went through Trump's Truth Social posts and reported that "threatening political opponents"--and promising to weaponize the government against them--"has been a consistent fixation for Trump." In Sept., NBC News noted that Trump "has become increasingly explicit in describing plans to use the Department of Justice to prosecute scores of people he has declared corrupt, if he wins in November"--something that, because of the recent lawless presidential immunity ruling by a far-right Supreme Court majority, he could do with virtual impunity. Reuters notes that Trump "has vowed to investigate or prosecute political rivals, election workers and left-wing Americans if he becomes president again," and goes through some of the examples. In a Fox interview earlier this month, Trump said
"We have two enemies; we have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."
...and suggested using the National Guard or the U.S. military against "the enemy from within," which he defined as "radical left lunatics" and whom, he assessed, are a bigger problem than even immigrants (which, in case anyone forgot how much he despised immigrants, he then said are "totally destroying our country").[5] This "enemy from within," Trump has said, is a worse enemy than murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He told a 7 Oct. rally in Wisconsin
"[T]he enemy from within, the crazy lunatics that we have, the fascists, the Marxists, the communists... Those people are more dangerous, the enemy from within than Russia and China and other people."
At an 11 Oct. rally in Colorado, he said, "It's the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country, that's a bigger enemy than China and Russia." Doling out more straightforward Nazism, he told a November rally in New Hampshire,
"[W]e pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."[6]
And so on.

Trump has, over time, liberally bestowed these labels on, well, everyone. The "radical left lunatic" and "enemy from within" labels have been directly applied to even some of the most conservative Democrats in politics--everyone from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi, Jon Tester and Adam Schiff. Earlier this year, Trump dubbed a "left lunatic" Robert Kennedy Jr., who was so "radical left" that, a few months later, he endorsed Trump for president. Many times, Trump has called the press "the enemy of the people", "the true enemy of the people", "scum." He's called Harris a "Marxist," a "communist," a "fascist." "Comrade Kamala," he says, "she's a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist." The 2024 election
"is not a choice between Democrats and Republicans. It's a choice between communism and freedom. That's what it's about."
Joe Biden is a socialist too, one "surrounded by fascists around the Oval Office," one who is "running a Gestapo administration." Conservative members of Trump's own party who aren't, in his view, sufficiently deferential to him are "Never Trumpers" who
"are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!"
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsome is "Governor New Scum." Trump expressed his opinion of the 1st Amendment rights of the filmmakers behind THE APPRENTICE by writing
"So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!"
The "people that surround" Nancy Pelosi are
"scum, they're scum, and they want to take down our country. They are absolute garbage."
And on into infinity. Everyone who isn't MAGA gets tagged with the same language with which he's described "the enemy from within."[7]

This fascist contempt for liberal democracy is all over Trumpism. In my lost fascism article, I went into a lot of detail about how baseless "voter fraud" conspiracism by Trump and the far-right media that birthed and back him is fundamentally anti-democratic--a campaign in reaction to their diminishing electoral prospects that undermines and destroys liberal democracy, sold as "protecting" it. The subsequent 2020 election denialism by these same elements and extensive efforts by Republican-controlled state and local governments and election officials, premised on Trump's lies of 2020 fraud, to hinder and restrict the franchise reinforce this conclusion. Trump continues to make the same fraudulent fraud claims and to insist he actually defeated Joe Biden. In Dec. 2022, Trump came along on Truth Social and helpfully made my original point for me, arguing that his fraud fantasies allow for the termination of all rules, including the constitution itself:


Trump, of course, launched a criminal scheme to defraud the government with fake presidential electors and generated a terrorist assault on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overthrow the results of that election. The Sept. 11th Commission documented, in excruciating detail, the fact that Trump was fully aware, right from the beginning, that the claims of widespread fraud he was making in the aftermath of losing that contest were baseless and false, but while that kind of granular debunking is important for the historical record, it--again--misses the point. Trump uses this kind of talk as an organizing force to gain and hold power and neither he nor his hardest-core followers care a whit about the actual election results. For them, the only "legitimate" election would, by definition, have been one in which Trump wins. Any other result was, by definition, an illegitimate theft, with the supporting details manufactured around that predetermined conclusion.

That's what happened in 2020. A fact given far too little attention is that Trump's efforts to overturn that election didn't begin in its aftermath. While president, Trump spent most of that year telling his followers that Democrats were not a legitimate political entity operating within the parameters of liberal democracy, that they were, rather, depraved, malevolent, a "radical left movement that seeks to obliterate and destroy everything that you hold dear," that if Democrats won, they would literally be killed in the streets, that America would be violently and entirely ended. As I wrote in 2021, "hyperbolic demagoguery so far outside any reasonable or legitimate political discourse that it would require scientific notation to graph the distance"--essentially not only a declaration of open season on Dems but an argument that it would be suicidal, both personally and nationally, not to open a season on them. This was his story, day after day, a boilerplate fascist aggrievement fantasy that represented a complete abandonment of the social contract necessary for the functioning of a liberal democracy. As part of this, Trump was telling his followers that Dems, being such depraved creatures, were working to steal the upcoming election. "[T]he only way they're going to win," he said, "is by a rigged election." After the election, Trump and his goons set out to find something--anything--from which he could manufacture a case for the conclusion he'd been openly pitching many months before a single vote had been cast, that the election was rigged and stolen from him. He came up with nothing, then tried to hold on to power by resorting to a criminal scheme then, at the end, to terror.

I covered all of this in some detail here.


Trump was, by every report, absolutely delighted by the attack on the Capitol, not only refusing to call off his supporters or do anything to assist its victims as it went on for hour after hour but tweeting an angry attack on his own vice-president, who was in the Capitol being pursued by a mob out to kill him for not assuming dictatorial powers he didn't have by refusing to certify the election results. Later that day, Trump addressed the mob in a brief video in which--fully aware that he'd lost--he said
"I know your pain. I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side... It's a very tough period of time. There's never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from out country. This was a fraudulent election. But we can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You're very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel."
No contrition and the people injured and dead, the rule of law and democracy be damned. While continuing to repeat and vehemently insist on his "stolen election" lie in the years since, Trump has has called J6 "a day of love" and tried to present the J6 rioters, who, among other things, violently assaulted 140 law enforcement officers, as heroes. He's referred to them as "hostages" and "unbelievable patriots", "political prisoners":
"The moment we win, we will rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime and I will sign their pardons on Day 1."
He recorded a "patriotic" song with some of those charged with crimes for J6 and has played it at his rallies, saying the proceeds from its sales will go the families of the rioters. He's tried to make Ashli Babbit, a Trump supporter who was shot and killed in the Capitol while trying to smash through a barricade and get at members of congress, into a full-blown martyr, recording a video honoring her and denouncing the law-enforcement officer who shot her as a "lunatic" and a murderer who shot her "for no reason." When he raised the matter at his debate with Harris,[8] Trump seemed to suggest that it was an outrage that the Capitol's defenders didn't just let his goons attack and/or kill the elected officials they were protecting:
"Ashli Babbit was shot by an out-of-control police officer that should have never, ever shot her! It's a disgrace!"
Babbit has become Trump's Horst Wessel.

Instead of being condemned as a criminal and going to prison for his coup attempt, as would have happened in any functional liberal democracy, Trump has held on to his cult, escaped accountability and is now running another presidential campaign, with a credible chance of winning--a consequence of our system's usual vile deference to elites, the incredibly bad decision to elect Joe Biden (who, predictably, proved to have no stomach for pursuing justice, until shamed into it), and the more general breakdown of public support for the liberal democracy.[9] Trump went into office in 2016 despite losing the popular vote and was able to appoint 3 Supreme Court justices who joined a court majority in granting Trump immunity from prosecution for crimes he committed while in office, which didn't just free Trump from some of the late prosecutions aimed at him but, if not soon reversed, effectively ended the American experiment.[10]

A few years ago, I drew some objections for insisting on some subtle nuances in the discussion of Trump and fascism. At the time, Trump was, in my estimation, more properly characterized as protofascist, albeit one who did preach fascism. If one takes seriously what he says, that's what it is. It's a lot harder to justify those distinctions in the face of what Trump has said and done over time. The sort of things I've described in this article stretch back to Trump's very first campaign appearance in 2015, when his description of Mexicans as rapists and criminals (and his insistence that the government of Mexico was engaged in a conspiracy to ship such elements into the U.S.) instantly made him the Republican front-runner, but it has gotten much worse in recent years, and it's the thing to which commentators--both responsible, informed ones speaking in good faith and others--are responding when they call Trump a "fascist" or a "threat to democracy."

That order is significant. Intelligent, informed people didn't start calling Trump a "fascist" as some empty epithet, as so often happens in our degraded political discourse. It was because he preached and, increasingly, practiced fascism. If liberal democrats--of both the conservative and liberal Democratic, Republican and everything else varieties--argue fascism isn't a legitimate political exercise, fascism, by its very nature, rejects their form of government and disqualified them. Regarding fascism, history charges us with one mission: Never Again. We often do a pretty poor job at seeing to that but it would be a complete abrogation of our obligation to our history if, when faced with fascism, people of good conscience chose to ignore it, rather than to speak out and to resist its progress. It would also be insane.

That brings us to, well...

When Sean Hannity approvingly reposted J.D. Vance's best impression of self-righteous outrage over allegedly harsh Democratic rhetoric aimed at Trump--rhetoric offered in reaction to Trump's own words and deeds--it was exemplary of how this matter is being treated by far-right media. For weeks, Fox News has been an endless stream of this kind of fake outrage. Anyone who dares suggest that if Trump looks like a fascist, talks like a fascist and goosesteps like a fascist, he may just be a fascist is denounced as "reprehensible," as engaging in "violent rhetoric," and "encouraging violence" and encouraging Trump's assassination (one of Vance's complaints). In one rant on the topic, Emily Compagno found it "reprehensible" that a "dignified, wonderful gentleman" like "grab 'em by the pussy" Trump was being called a fascist. On the same show, Kayleigh McEnany raved that headlines in liberal publications noting that Trump was talking like a Nazi were "totally irresponsible." Playing clips of various figures noting that Trump's talk was that of dictators, she chirped
"Really responsible, after two assassination attempts, right? Nice. Vice President Harris, meanwhile, campaigning on the 'Trump is a threat to democracy' message."
Harris Faulkner said of calling Trump a fascist, "this is hate speech now." And so on. When retired Gen. John Kelly, Trump's own former chief of staff, told the New York Times that Trump "falls into the general definition of fascist," right-wing media suggested that Kamala Harris was inspiring assassination attempts against Trump by repeating it.[11]

The Republican congressional leadership--always choosing complicity with every Trump political atrocity--got in on this circus as well, issuing a joint statement condemning Harris for calling Trump a fascist.
"[T]he Democratic nominee for President of the United States has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus. Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over... Labeling a political opponent as a 'fascist' risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day."
This was too much for CNN's Jake Tapper, who, in reaction, offered a segment showing, among other things, clips of Donald Trump repeatedly calling Kamala Harris a fascist and many other bad things, which is, of course, what Trump has done with his every political opponent since he entered politics. Tapper could have pointed out, to those offering the same objections to calling Trump a "threat to democracy" that Trump himself has repeatedly described the upcoming election as a "final battle" and told a right-wing gathering in July that if he's elected,
"in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not going to have to vote."
..and, conversely,
"If this election isn't won, I’m not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country... I don't think you’re going to have another election in this country if we don't win this election. I don't think you’re going to have another election or certainly not an election that's meaningful..."

But one won't find that sort of thing in the appalling 24/7 mockery of moral outrage staged on far-right media. If one were to have the thought that, if anything, Trump's fascism, rather than those who have only just pointed it out, is what may inspire assassination attempts, one wouldn't get it from these outlets, because Trump's own rhetoric and behavior, as covered here, is entirely absent from those segments and only turns up in others, wherein, with no sense of decency, the same hosts angrily roasting Democrats for calling out Trump's fascism actively promote that same fascism.

It would, however, be a grave error to focus solely on the hypocrisy of these MAGA howls about Democratic rhetoric. Hypocrisy is an easy charge to make, easy to understand, easy to politically use but here, it's mostly just another case of missing the point. These attacks on those who call out Trump's fascism aren't meant as a serious critique, certainly not as a call for civility (not even "civility for thee but not for me"). They're part of the same Depraved Democrats narrative that Trump has been spewing for years. They're encouraging violence in the guise of condemning it. They're part of the fascism.

It should all perhaps be a Sobering Reminder that while he undeniably accelerated some bad trends, Trump is a symptom, not the problem, and even if he's defeated, his followers and the broader right conditioned by this toxic media machine and the politicians empowered by it will still be with us. Trump has been priming as many of them as he can to reject any Trump loss this year as a fraud, just as he did in 2020.[12] Anyone wanting to save the American liberal democracy will have a lot of hard work ahead of them.

--j.

---

 [1] Trump himself had been presenting immigrants as disease-carriers since at least 2021.

 [2] When Trump entered his first presidential campaign in 2015, he used his speech announcing his candidacy to say Mexicans who came to the U.S. were rapists and criminals and to suggest the government of Mexico was conspiring to ship such elements into the U.S.

 [3] Trump has done a version of the same thing with transgender people, a politically powerless minority hated by the far-right. Among other things, Trump has been telling his followers on the campaign trail that not only are schools performing gender reassignment surgeries on children but are doing so without parental consent or knowledge, a black lie with no basis whatsoever in reality. Transgender people make up only 1.14% of the population but CBS News reported on 16 Oct. that Trump's campaign spent $19 million airing anti-trans ads 55,000 times in the first two weeks of the month. Trump has promised that, if reelected, he'd use the federal government to roll back trans rights and both impose discrimination against trans people and force localities to do the same.

 [4] To virtually no apparent notice by our dysfunctional institutions, Trump has been offering variations on that same sentiment in his stock stump-speeches since at least the Summer of 2021. He was offering a version of it at his Madison Square Garden rally this weekend, where, among other things, Stephen Miller--a white nationalist and longtime Trump hand--gave a speech on the theme, "America for Americans only," a slogan and longtme theme of the Ku Klux Klan, and "comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as "literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean."

 [5] Trump is, of course, as casually authoritarian as any fascist. A July CREW analysis of his Truth Social posts gives a small slice of this, reporting that

"from January 1, 2023 to April 1, 2024, Trump has vowed at least 19 times to weaponize law enforcement against civilians. This includes deploying state and local police, multiple branches of the military and federal law enforcement agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, FBI and Homeland Security agencies against people crossing the southern border, homeless people and protestors."
Disruptors of "the nation." In 2023, he told the annual CPAC Klavern meeting that

"'he would use a second term in the White House to implement an authoritarian vision for policing crime that would include deploying the National Guard into US cities with high crime rates.

"'I will send in the National Guard until law and order is restored. You know we’re not supposed to do that,' Trump said in his address closing out the annual Conservative Political Action Conference conference in Oxon Hill, Md., where he easily won a presidential straw poll of attendees."
 [6] When some called out Trump for this Nazi language, a Trump campaign spokesman sought to dispel the concerns by telling the Washington Post that those who were complaining were "snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House."

 [7] If the rest of this article doesn't make it clear enough, Trump's authoritarianism would be difficult to overstate. Cumulatively, he advocates centralizing law enforcement power that now rests with states, cities, towns and localities in his own hands, forcing police to essentially create a police state. He has said he wants to force local law-enforcement agencies to implement a stop-and-frisk policy--police just randomly stopping and searching people--which the courts have already ruled is unconstitutional (as if one needed a court ruling to understand that). He's said he will "increase vital [legal] liability protections" for police that shield them from being sued for abusive behavior, "direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical leftist prosecutor's officers" around that U.S.--that is, duly elected prosecutors--if he doesn't like how they're doing their jobs, "[deploy] federal assets, including the National Guard, to restore law and order when local law enforcement refuses to act." While president, Trump rescinded President Obama's executive order barring the transfer of military-grade weapons and equipment to civilian law enforcement and resumed those transfers; Biden reimplemented it and now, Trump promises to do away with the ban again. Trump has promised to implement the death penalty for drug dealers. He's advocated revoking the citizenship of anyone burning an American flag in protest and sending them to prison for a year. He's pledged to deport demonstrators protesting Israeli mass murder in Gaza ("[I]f you get me reelected, we're going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years," he said). In 2016, Trump pushed for a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S., which, once he was in office, was whittled down to a ban on travelers from predominately Muslim countries. He's pledged to bring back and strengthen this ban.
"I will ban refugee resettlement from terror infested areas like the Gaza Strip, and we will seal our border and bring back the travel ban... Remember the famous travel ban? We didn't take people from certain areas of the world. We’re not taking them from infested countries."
Some of the new restrictions on entry into the U.S. he's advocated:
"I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants. If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion--which a lot of them don't--if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right? We don't want you! Get out of here!"
And:
"I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists. Those who come to and join our country must love our country. We want them to love our country. We don't want 'em when they want to destroy our country... So we're going to keep foreign Christian hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists out of America."
And "what do we do with the ones who are already here?" he asked. "I think we have to pass a new law for them."

In foreign affairs, the story is the same. Using his long-running firehose-of-falsehoods approach, Trump posed as an anti-war candidate at times while, at the same time, advocating a persistently belligerent foreign policy. During his first administration, Trump
"[escalated] conflict in every theatre of war he inherited, repeatedly brought the country to the brink of new wars, and recklessly threw around U.S. power with no regard for the many lives it would cost... Trump’s foreign policy was characterized above all by an aversion to diplomacy and a knee-jerk reliance on hostility. Attacking diplomatic relations and torpedoing successful multilateral agreements like the Iran nuclear deal, Trump instead tried to strongarm other countries into doing his bidding through threatening rhetoric, military brinkmanship, and suffocating sanctions. The result? Not a single one of Trump’s targets for hybrid warfare is any closer to doing his bidding now than when he started (often for the best). In the meantime, countless thousands have suffered the consequences."
And so on.

 [8] In that same clip, Trump suggested that he told the J6 crowd to protest "peacefully and patriotically," but while, in real time, he said they would protest in that way--in a single throwaway line that seemed to have been included solely with an eye toward dodging legal liability later--he never, in fact, suggested to them that course of action, in a speech devoted to telling an angry mob the election had been stolen from them and they needed to fight against this. Continuing, Trump entirely washed his hands of any responsibility for anything bad that happened.

 [9] That breakdown is apparent across the political spectrum, where MAGA Republicans are boldly anti-democratic but in the name of protecting democracy while Clintonite-right "Democrats" pose as defenders of the liberal democracy while trying to kick third-party candidates off ballots.

[10] Faced with conviction and prison, Trump ran to the courts with the notion that presidents enjoyed "absolute" legal immunity for crimes committed while in office, his "lawyer" agreeing, during argument, that a president could order SEAL Team 6 to execute his political rivals and that immunity would still apply, unless he was first impeached and removed from office--a thing the same president could avoid by simply having the same SEALs also kill enough members of congress to prevent a quorum. While it reflected Trump's authoritarian view of his own power (and why he never should have been president in the first place), it was an entirely frivolous claim, directly at odds with the entire American experiment and made solely as one of Trump's many delaying tactics, but shockingly, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case eventually landed, ruled in Trump's favor, holding that the constitution was unconstitutional and the president above the law.

[11] Kelly is one of many former Trump officials who have offered this characterization of their former boss. When asked about why so many of his own former officials refuse to support him in the present campaign, Trump claimed that "the people who don't support are a very small portion. We have a tremendous-- about 97% of the people in the administration support me." In reality, half of Trump's own cabinet officials have refused to endorse him for reelection, as has his Vice President, after Trump essentially tried to have him killed on J6.

[12] MAGA has been working on 2024 for years now, putting in place all manner of new voting restrictions, absurd, illegal and unconstitutional rules, crackpot election officials who spread outlandish misinformation and vow to challenge the results without regard for whether they have any authority to do so, and filing scores of lawsuits to try to restrict the franchise, manipulate the outcome of the vote and cast doubt on its ultimate results, should Trump lose.

Monday, July 22, 2024

Biden & Bad Riddance To Bad Rubbish: An Editorial

Finally correcting a long series of mistakes that never should have been made, Joe Biden has belatedly dropped out of the presidential race. In a move that inadvertently illustrated one of Biden's biggest problems (and the one that has now ended his campaign), his initial press release neglected to endorse his Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor and he had to quickly issue a follow-up that said some of the same things except made that endorsement.


The decision--by whomever made it--to have Biden run for a 2nd term was criminal and just further underscores why Biden never should have been president in the first place and never should have been the 2020 Democratic nominee. Instead of acting as what he said he would be--a righter of the ship of state and a "bridge" to a new generation of leaders--he's managed only to waste over a year of everyone's time, during which a vibrant Democratic primary to pick a contender could have been held, and leave his party in a very difficult position, bearing the weight of his failed administration with a potential 2nd Donald Trump regime looming and only a few months to introduce a new standard-bearer.

Biden's very belated exit does manage to significantly increase Democrats' chances in the Fall; Biden was looking down the barrel of a terrible loss. Somewhere out there, Trump is fuming (Stephen Miller, one of Trump's pet Nazis, has already had a public meltdown on Fox).

Biden is backing Harris. Many have been pitching her in the weeks since Biden's disastrous debate performance, and there is a certain logic to it. Harris is the shortest distance between two points. Everyone understands VPs are there to take over when presidents can't continue. Harris has name-recognition, an important consideration when time is short. Because she shares the ticket with him, the war-chest of dirty money Biden has amassed from prostituting his potential 2nd term to entrenched interests can be transferred to her, which wouldn't be the case with other contenders. Because of her unique position, she could decide how beholden she is to those interests. Unfortunately, her history strongly suggests she'll cast her lot with them.

Harris isn't, to be clear, a good choice. She is, first off, extremely unpopular.--remarkably so for a VP (though most of that is probably just due to her association with this disliked administration). She's a former prosecutor, with all the baggage that entails. Her first foray into presidential politics was a corporate press invention, but even with years of that press trying to make her the next big thing, she failed miserably, displaying terrible political instincts and coming across as inept, insincere, uninformed and flighty; she washed out of the race in a single-digit 6th place before a single vote had been cast.
Harris is no visionary. She's completely out of her depth, even as VP. As the 2024 Dem nominee, she would solve the problem of Biden's cognitive decline--any alternative would--but she's still a face of the same failed administration everyone had already disliked for years before Biden's impairment became too big a problem to ignore. She's also been used by the White House to help cover up Biden's condition, gaslighting the public and insisting he was a competent leaders with all of his marbles in the sack (this will likely become a point of attack by Republicans). It isn't a guarantee the party with rally behind her as the nominee--and a fight over it would be more entertaining--but it is very likely.

Harris isn't smart, but if she has some smart advisers, for a change, she will adopt
a few big, progressive policies on which to run, one of them will be "fix the Supreme Court," she will hit Trump hard but avoid only running on "orange man bad" (Biden's sole 2nd-term campaign plank until Bernie Sanders convinced him--only days ago--to offer a slate of progressive reforms), she will try to separate herself from Biden, present herself as at least partly a new thing, not a continuation--"I'm Biden but younger" would be a total loser--and she won't under any circumstances, get bogged down in defending this failed and disliked administration. Those last items would be a tough needle for any politician in Harris' position, even the most talented, to thread. She's not among those "most talented."

Whatever happens next, the 2024 race just got interesting. For the moment, at least.

As for Biden, he was past his expiration date
for the presidency well before he ran in 2019. He got by on a hated incumbent, a "lucky" pandemic and a nothing-to-see-here deference by party and media elites so extreme that it isn't at all inappropriate to characterize it as an ongoing cover-up. An awful presidency later and a reelection campaign, given his numbers and his own poor health, was unthinkable, yet he forged ahead, exploiting the profound dysfunction of our institutions to try to force his candidacy on a country that had made clear it didn't want it, then only conceding to the obvious at the very last minute, having to be relentlessly pressured out of a race he was going to lose but was determined to continue and leaving us to clean up the mess. Before he left the race, his only real legacy was going to be a 2nd Trump presidency. In his absence, that may yet be that legacy. Whether or not Dems win this year, history will not look kindly on him.

--j.

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Biden Had A Letter Written...

Joe Biden has sent a letter to congressional Democrats. "I want you to know," writes an unnamed Biden underling in his name, "that despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump." He wants to tell the legislators of his own party "clearly and unequivocally" that "I wouldn't be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024."

This is the spokesman for the Biden whose approval rating went into majority-disapproval only a few months into his regime and has stayed there.


It's the Biden who has, in an unbroken line, been losing to Trump--to Donald Trump--in the head-to-head polling averages since mid-September.


It's the Biden who has been losing nearly every swing state since last Fall and every one of them since December. Recently-leaked polling from OpenLabs, a shady Dem firm that polls for Biden's main super PAC, showed Biden not only losing across all 7 of the major swing states but also in states that he comfortably won in 2020 (including Virginia, New Mexico and New Hampshire), while other states he won are now in play for the Republicans.[1]

Supermajorities of his own party said, for years, they didn't want him to run again, didn't want the party to renominate him.[2] The same is true for even larger supermajorites of Americans.

For over a year, supermajorities of Americans have also said Biden is too old--by which they mean too cognitively impaired--to run for reelection, too old to serve another term. For something over a year, supermajorities of Biden's own party's voters said the same.[3] In fact, a supermajority of Biden's own 2020 voters say he's "just too old" to be an effective president. Only 34% of voters even believe Biden could complete a 2nd term, if reelected.

Biden has been polling at sub-Jimmy Carter levels since last year.
He's in far worse shape, insofar as his standing with the public is concerned, than any first-term president at this point in his administration in the history of polling--the most disliked president in 7 decades. Every incumbent in that history who ran for reelection on comparably low numbers--although all had better numbers than Biden's--lost. Hillary Clinton, who wasn't an incumbent, had numbers significantly superior to Biden at this point in 2016 and lost.

Biden's letter-writer is insisting that Biden, this historically-unpopular candidate, who is also regarded as too impaired to even hold the office he has, is going to pull off an upset that no president in history has ever managed. If Biden had written that and sincerely believed it, it would only be a question of whether he was too stupid, too cognitively impaired or too much of both to be president.

The really obscene part comes when the letter-writer tries to wrap his boss in the flag of democracy:

"We had a Democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively. I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process. I have nearly 3,000 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin.

"This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run. Only three people chose to challenge me. One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent. Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated. The voters of the Democratic Party have voted. They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.

"Do we now just say this process didn’t matter? That the voters don’t have a say?

"I decline to do that. I feel a deep obligation to the faith and the trust the voters of the Democratic Party have placed in me to run this year. It was their decision to make. Not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well intentioned. The voters--and the voters alone--decide the nominee of the Democratic Party. How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party? I cannot do that. I will not do that."

As the letter-writer knows, whenever an incumbent president decides to run for reelection, the party apparatus closes ranks around him, and that's exactly what happened in this cycle. With a large majority of Dems saying they wanted to see primary challenges to Biden, Biden and the DNC literally would not allow any meaningful primary contest to occur, and none did. In order to advantage himself (and future conservative "Democratic" candidates), Biden insisted the DNC rearrange its primary schedule to make South Carolina--a double-digit Republican state that hasn't voted Democratic in nearly 5 decades--the first Democratic contest (it was the first state Biden won in the 2020 primaries after embarrassingly losing the first 3). With 8 in 10 Dems saying they wanted to see Dem primary debates in 2024, the Democratic party said "it will support Biden's reelection, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates." And didn't. The DNC and the Democratic parties of all 50 states and Washington DC integrated with Biden For President from the beginning of the campaign.[4] The Democratic parties of both Florida and Delaware engineered the cancellation of their states' primaries, simply giving all of those states' delegates to Biden, while in North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Alaska and Mississippi, only Biden was allowed on the ballot. This automatically gifted Biden with 569 delegates--nearly 30% of the 1,975 delegates needed to win--before a single vote was cast; Biden only needed to take 41% of the remaining delegates from the other states to win; any competitor would have had to win 60% of the remaining delegates to beat him.

In such circumstances, no ambitious politician is going to launch a pre-doomed challenge to a sitting president, and none did. With only 3rd-stringers with no name-recognition as opposition, Biden went on to "victory," the one his writer tries to make sound like an accomplishment, running, in effect, unopposed in no-turnout "primaries," drawing only 14 million votes--significantly less than even the 19 million he did back in 2020 when he had 20 name-brand opponents splitting the vote between them.

This is the process Biden's letter-writer describes as "open to anyone who wanted to run," the one he's treating as if it's worthy of those saccharine bromides of sacred reverence toward democracy. "[W]e are standing up for American democracy," says the mouthpiece for the president who insisted on launching a destructive, democracy-ending reelection campaign when most of his own party had made clear they didn't want him to run again and hadn't for ages. It's the process by which Biden's writer is now claiming a democratic mandate for his candidacy. Here's some more on what protectors of democracy Biden and the Dems have been under his watch--among other things, spending millions of dollars to try to keep competitors off the ballots.

Biden's letter-writer doesn't have any use for democratic dialogue on how to move forward either, if it involves questioning the wisdom of making his employer the Democratic nominee:

"The question of how to move forward has been well-aired for over a week now. And it's time for it to end... Any weakening of resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. It is time to come together, move forward as a unified party, and defeat Donald Trump."
Biden's problem is that Americans are already pretty unified on one point: they don't want Biden running for president.


--j.

---

[1] Illustrating the extent to which Biden is a drag on Democratic candidates (and threatens to swamp the party), Biden is trailing--usually quite badly--the Dem Senate candidates in all 5 swing-states holding Senate races this year.

[2] Democrats have softened on this in some of the more recent polling, with only about half or sometimes just under that saying they don't want Biden back. But given the longterm nature of their opinion on this, it would be foolish to read that as growing approval of Biden's candidacy. It seems, rather, more like voters acquiescing to what many of them must feel as the inevitable after they've had a candidate they did not want rammed down their throats--a recipe for resentment, indifference and low Dem turnout.

[3] Coming to this conclusion later than most Americans, more recent polling show Dems softening on this too but the same dynamic as outlined in footnote #2 applies here too.

[4] In a Sept. 2023 interview with ABC News, Jaime Harrison, the corporate lobbyist Biden placed in charge of the Democratic National Committee, made the position of the DNC clear.
"[Biden has] said that the job is not done, that he, Kamala Harris and Democrats in the House and Senate still have more work to do, and we're gonna do everything that we can to make sure that they get that opportunity to do that work and finish the job."
ABC's Linsey Davis noted that a supermajority of Democrats didn't want their party to run Biden again and repeatedly tried, in vain, to get Harrison to address the fact that Democratic voters wanted a competitive primary process, rather than a coronation. Harrison wouldn't budge: "As it relates to the primary, listen, we are following the tradition; never have we had a debate during, when we've had an incumbent president... and so we're not starting in 2024 under my tenure as DNC chair."

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

King President: The Supreme Court, Trump & Nixon's Last Laugh

This editorial comes to you from a place devoid of hope;. It will offer you none. What's needed now isn't false hope but a clear-eyed assessment of where some things stand.

In ending one long tradition, the U.S. Supreme Court just ended another.

When, a few years after being driven from office by the Watergate scandal, disgraced former president Richard Nixon sat down with David Frost for a series of interviews, he made an extraordinary remark about his own view of presidential power: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." It became a very famous quote, an "I Am The Law" assertion of royal prerogative by the former president of a system of government explicitly created to repudiate such prerogatives. One could trot it out as exemplary of a particular out-of-touch criminal who'd let the height of his office go to his head, repeat it with a chill at how far gone someone can get under the corrupting influence of power or rattle it off with a mordant chuckle at a fool who, sworn to uphold a system in which no one is above the law, came to believe himself above the law. Everyone who repeated it over the years and canonized it as a classic reference-point was of one mind that what Nixon had expressed was a place we never, under any circumstances, wanted to go.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, those people don't have Nixon to kick around anymore. It can't be said that in Trump v. United States, the court just enshrined Nixon's words into U.S. law because the ruling is, by definition, a lawless one. What the court did, rather, was impose Nixon's stated principle as the status quo. In a repudiation of the entire American experiment, the court took the occasion of the nation's upcoming 248th birthday to rule that the President of the United States is now, in effect, above the law. That tradition that no one is above the law--a lot longer one than jabbing at Nixon for his failure to understand it--is now over.

Former president Donald Trump sent his comical excuses for lawyers into court to argue that presidents can order SEAL Team 6 to murder their political rivals and had "absolute immunity" from prosecution for this and any other action taken while in office, unless they were first impeached then removed from office by congress. Since the same president could then order the assassination of sufficient members of congress to prevent any such impeachment, the "absolute" in that "theory" is just that. The argument was entirely frivolous, not only without any basis in U.S. law, practice or precedent but fundamentally contrary to the entire constitutional order and Trump advanced it solely as one of many delay-tactics aimed at saving his own hide in the face of multiple prosecutions.[1] It was laughed out of the District Court, then a 3-judge panel unanimously laughed it out of the D.C. Court of Appeals. That the Supreme Court even took the case would, under any prior court, be regarded as shocking. In a sign of how badly the court has fallen, a majority of the justices, when it was argued, seemed amenable to immunity.

The final ruling was 6-3. Five of the six had been appointed to the court by presidents who, in their elections, lost the popular vote then were placed in office by the electoral college; three of those five were placed on the court by the very former president who had brought the case and who, when he'd lost his reelection bid, undertook numerous criminal actions to try to stay in power and even sicced a terrorist mob on congress to try to overthrow the results. The sixth, Clarence Thomas, has, in recent months, been exposed as a corrupt slug who, for the whole of his long tenure on the court, has been leveraging his position for a lavish lifestyle financed by right-wing billionaires; rather than facing impeachment and prosecution, he's being left to hear and rule on cases like this, stemming from Trump's efforts to undo the results of that last election--efforts in which his own wife was involved.

In the court's ruling, that majority invented an expansive presidential immunity for all "official acts." If a president is using his "official" powers, no matter how corrupt the end to which he's using them may be, he is, according to this majority, above the law. The majority ruled that presidents would be hindered in the performance of their duties if they thought they faced criminal prosecution; no concession to the fact that every president in U.S. history right up until Monday has done his job under that same "constraint." While the court rejected Trump's claim that presidents couldn't be prosecuted unless first successfully impeached and removed, the immunity it has invented is more expansive than anything even Trump requested. While it allows that "there is no immunity" for "a President's unofficial acts," it held that "in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives... Nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law."
In short, corrupt acts by presidents are still crimes; it's just that presidents may no longer be held accountable for committing them. Trump's lawyers argued at every stage of this case that a president's use of SEAL Team 6 to murder political rivals could, in their formulation, be considered "official acts" for which the president enjoys immunity. For no other purpose than to save a protofascist dimwit from the legal consequences of his own actions,[2] the U.S. Supreme Court just agreed.[3]


That's what the Supreme Court just did to us, in a decision that instantly joins the ranks of the worst in the court's history. Everyone who, on Sunday night, went to bed as a United States citizen awakened Monday morning as, instead, the subjects of a monarch. The damage this ruling inflicts is incalculable. The narrow focus of the corporate press, which has almost entirely concerned itself only with how this negatively impacts the current prosecutions of Trump, only highlights that institution's complete failure as a bulwark of liberal democracy.

There isn't much hope of fixing it either, at least institutionally. No constitutional amendment correcting it would ever come close to passing as long as the result of reversing it would be the prosecution of the far-right's personality-cult leader. Fixing the court by expanding it should have been the Democrats' top priority after 2020, but Joe Biden opposes this. There are some other reform options but no one in Bidenworld is even talking about any of them or is ever likely to do so.[4] Biden and his presidency are spectacularly unpopular, and he has ignored the long-stated wishes of Americans and even most of his own party's voters in insisting on running for reelection. In the unlikely event he should win, that would just ensure four more years of not fixing the problem while the court continues to chainsaw civilization. But Biden's cognitive decline--papered over for five years by a systematic campaign of fraud by Dem elites and corporate press outlets but so dramatically displayed for all the world in last week's presidential debate--makes it even more likely he'll lose, and we'll be stuck with Trump while this continues and while Trump works to make it worse. Some Swiftian wags have circulated the meme-ified modest proposal that Biden immediately alert SEAL Team 6 that there's a Republican candidate and some Supreme Court justices who need to make their acquaintance. That ain't happening.

There are, at present, no good options. No way of sugar-coating it, this is as bleak a situation as the U.S. has faced in a very long time, and there isn't even any light visible at the end of this long, dark tunnel in which we're trapped. For those of us who, large and small, have been vainly ringing the alarm about all of this for so long, it's maybe an even bigger drag. The failure of our institutions to properly react to any of this just reinforces the dysfunction that leads so many to have--and rightly have--so little faith in them. If Nixon was still alive, it would only be for as long as it took him to laugh himself to death.

--j.

---

[1]
During Trump's 2nd impeachment trial, Trump's own lawyers had argued exactly the opposite as they were in this case.

[2] And make no mistake, h
ad the former president being prosecuted been a Democrat, the court would have made the opposite ruling by a vote of 9-0.

[3] The majority ruled, in effect, that the constitution is unconstitutional. Article 1, Section 3 of the constitution provides that officials can be impeached for "treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors," and says that officials who are impeached and removed from office "
shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law." The courts ruling means that a president who is impeached and removed for, say, taking a bribe in exchange for an "official act" can't be prosecuted for it, as that would require examining his motives for that act.

[4]
On Monday, Biden roundly condemned the ruling, which could, if managed properly, be a political gift but, being Biden, he offered no proposal to fix either it or the out-of-control court, no vow to even try. Instead, he just used it as propaganda for himself, saying he should be reelected so that Trump won't have that unrestrained power.

Friday, June 28, 2024

Debate-Rate: The Night Trump Defeated Biden

So Joe Biden debated Donald Trump last night and it was... not pretty. In a debate format that spotlighted his shortcomings, Biden was mumbling, sputtering, often unable to complete thoughts or even sentences and, in the absence of such basic communications skills, babbling incoherently, while spending nearly the entire debate looking glassy-eyed, slack-jawed and confused. At 81 years of age, Biden could have passed for 101. Trump, by contrast, sounded sharp, confident and on-point, despite a few obvious stumbles, and landed repeated haymakers simply by making cutting references to Biden's ongoing gibberish. Even as everything coming out of his mouth was bullshit--and usually outlandish bullshit--Trump faced no real pushback from his addled opponent, who couldn't lay a glove on him and who, himself, fumbled even the easiest layup questions. It was a dreadful spectacle. If Biden loses this election, as seems even more likely than ever now, future historians will, fairly or not, look back on this evening as where that loss happened.[1]


That "fairly" is a caveat because, of course, none of this is new. This is how Biden has been since he launched his presidential campaign in 2019. Regular readers have seen this writer go on about this for years now, and I'm only one of many.[2] This is, in fact, exactly how Biden performed in nearly all of the 2020 Democratic primary debates and, as I wrote more than once at the time, how I expected debates between Trump and Biden to go as well. But the 2020 debate format allowed the candidates to argue with and talk over one another while an audience of partisans cheered, booed and rooted them on--and drowned out a lot of the discordance. Last night, there was no audience, the moderators controlled the participants' mics and there was just the cold glare of the camera.

Something that was new, though, was the reaction to Biden by corporate press pundits and Democratic elites. In the 2020 primary debates, they'd gone out of their way to cover for him (I'll return to that in a moment). Not so last night. On CNN, which hosted the debate, John King reported that this had been a

"game-changing debate in the sense that right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic party. It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now. It involves party strategists, it involves elected officials, it involves fundraisers, and they're having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal and which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket and they're having conversations about what they should do about it... I can tell you, it started minutes in, it started with the first couple of answers and it has continued throughout the night from an 'Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god!" to a 'what do we do about this?'"
"The panic that I am hearing from Democrats," said Abby Phillips, "is not like anything that I have heard in this campaign so far." NBC political analyst Chuck Todd:
"I've been talking to a lot of leaders in the Democratic party, electeds, um, coalition leaders. There's a full-on panic about this performance. Um, not like 'oh, this is recoverable.' It is more of a 'ok, uh, he's gotta step aside.' There's a lot of that chatter. This is... this is about as bad of a performance that Biden could have delivered... The panic level, particularly among elected Democrats who have to share the ballot with him, um, there's a full-on panic tonight."
That was the story across media from the beginning of the debate--bubbles very dramatically bursting. Democratic elites who had, for years, tried to gaslight the public into believing that, contrary to all appearances, Biden was actually an energetic, engaged executive saw all of their efforts in this vein very suddenly and permanently go up in smoke. Those who had been misled by them were made to suddenly face the no-doubt shocking truth. Those who'd understood Biden was cognitively impaired saw this dramatically confirmed again. Reactions ranged from fear and panic by Dems terrified of a return by Trump to anger that a broken system had resulted in Dems once again being saddled with this pathetic creature as their party's standard bearer to, in the case of MAGA Republicans, sheer ecstasy, as they felt victory was definitely within their strongman's grasp.

How did we get here? When he presented himself as a candidate for the presidency in 2019, Biden had been largely out of the public eye for years, and his cognitive decline was pronounced and shocking. Recognizing that it could sink him, his handlers mostly kept him off the campaign trail, letting the corporate press do the job of promoting him to a Dem electorate focused on defeating Trump as the "electable" candidate, as opposed to his main progressive opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was smeared as some fringe radical who would lose a general election, cost Dems the congress and lead to a downballot bloodbath of Dems in state and local elections. Acting as essentially a super PAC for the Biden campaign, the corporate press overcame the "threat" of a progressive victory and carried their guy to the Democratic nomination. Before it was over, the covid pandemic was underway, bringing a halt to nearly all traditional campaign activity. Biden wasn't really participating in much of that anyway, and the virus allowed him to basically just hide away in his basement through most of the general-election campaign and let the weight of months of covid-imposed hardship and a failed presidency drag Trump to oblivion. Even then, he barely won. Without covid, it's unlikely he would have.

Much of that campaign season proved a darkly surreal farce. A moment that has, for years, stuck out to me as a defining one--and after last night's fiasco this seems particularly true--was a debate during the lead-up to the Democratic primaries. I've written about it more than once. This account is from the introduction to a version of an article I wrote, in 2019, about Biden and his career:

On 12 Sept., 2019, the Democratic candidates for president held a debate in Houston. During the course of it, Joe Biden referred to his rival Sen. Bernie Sanders as "the president." At another point, Biden forgot Sen. Elizabeth Warren's name and fell back to referring to her as "my distinguished friend, the senator on my left." At still another, he seemed to forget Pete Buttigieg’s name and also settled for "my friend." He boldly declared "I'm the Vice President of the United States," a declaration that would certainly come as a surprise to Mike Pence.

Biden was asked a question about the legacy of slavery. His response, rattled off in the rapid cadence of one who is quite sure of himself, was so utterly incomprehensible it's difficult to even transcribe:

"Well, they have to deal with the-- Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved I started... dealing with that. Redlining. Banks. Making sure that we're in a position where-- Look, talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise that equal raise to getting out... the sixty-thousand dollar level. Number two: make sure that we bring into the help the-- the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need-- We have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It's crazy. The teachers are reca-- Now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have, make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four, and five year-olds go to school-- school, not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It's not that they don't wanna help, they don’t want-- they don't know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, the-- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phono… make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”
At this point, the questioner thanked Biden but he wasn’t done yet--if his comments weren't already baffling enough, he then plunged down a rabbit hole that left everyone scratching their heads:
"No, I'm going to go like the rest of them do, twice over, okay? Because here's the deal. The deal is that we've got this a little backwards. And by the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million to see to it those three countries, in fact, change their system so people don’t have to chance to leave. You're all acting like we just discovered this yesterday!"
All of this in answer to a question about the legacy of slavery. When Biden referred to "record player," a medium of decades past, he'd caught himself and appeared to be in the process of offering "phonograph" as a substitute before catching himself again.

On health care, Biden said, "the option I’m proposing is Medicare For All"  before catching and correcting himself and retreating to "Medicare For Choice." Biden rather viscerally opposes the progressives' Medicare For All proposal and had been attacking it using the same rhetoric as Donald Trump (something he has continued to do). Biden described his plan (which, if one is honest, isn't really a plan at all but just something slapped together to pretend as if there is one):
"If you want Medicare, if you lose the job from your insurance-- from your employer, you automatically can buy into this. You don't have-- no pre-existing condition can stop you from buying in. You get covered, period."
Minutes later, Julian Castro noted that his own plan doesn’t require a buy-in and contrasted this unfavorably with Biden's, at which point the former Vice President insisted the Biden plan, contrary to his own clear words only minutes earlier, didn't require a buy-in either. It led to a testy exchange in which Castro challenged, "Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?"

The allusion to Biden’s obviously impaired cognitive state brought gasps from the audience. Biden didn’t hear what Castro was saying and had to lean over and ask Bernie Sanders about it.

Nothing about any of this is unusual for Biden. It is, in fact, typical of his public appearances. He wasn't just having a bad night. This is what’s left of him now. When I wrote this article--weeks prior to that Houston debate--I described Biden as "a real mess--confused, forgetful, stumbling over words and slurring them like a drunk, displaying lots of arrogance and bluster but no command of basic facts, including those regarding 'his' proposals, which are clearly as much a mystery to him as to everyone else..." Biden's September debate performance would have immediately ended the campaign of any other candidate as dramatically as it would have completely.

This is why I've gone into it here:

CNN’s Chris Cillizza:
"Overall, Biden looked strong and presidential although it wasn't perfect… [A] good night for the vice president."

Dan Balz of the Washington Post:
"With all the leading Democratic candidates on the same stage for the first time this year, former vice president Joe Biden on Thursday delivered the kind of performance his supporters have been waiting for--combative when needed and in the thick of the action throughout.Biden did not dominate from start to finish and did not make it through the evening mistake-free. But on balance this was the kind of evening he needed..."

Doug Shoen of Fox News:
"[T]he first 30 minutes of the debate during the health care discussion were arguably Biden's best moments on the campaign trail to date. Though the former vice president's performance was not perfect, he exhibited a much-needed display of strength and preparedness. He was the night's big winner."

T.A. Frank in Vanity Fair:
"In Houston, Biden managed to be combative without being nasty, and he was one of the few candidates onstage who stayed in the realm of genuine argument rather than sloganeering... [O]verall he seemed alert and presidential..."

"Joe Biden was as good at Thursday night's debate as he’s been in the entire campaign and perhaps close to as good as he could be."

And so on. Such gaslighting wasn't universal across corporate media by any means but it was disturbingly common. Biden was widely declared the winner of the debate, his endless fumbles written off or barely even addressed. More to the point, Biden's painfully obvious cognitive decline was neither treated as an important story, nor, beyond a handful of small outlets, as any real story at all. It's as if it doesn’t exist. Perhaps worse still, Julian Castro, the only candidate who raised a question relating to it, was ubiquitously condemned for doing so--he got three days of bad press out of it. That isn't just covering over the problem; that's aggressively trying to discourage anyone from talking about it.

In the 2020 cycle, the corporate press simply refused to treat Biden's cognitive decline as any sort of story. Most of the most mind-melting things he'd say went almost entirely unreported in mainstream outlets, which would, on rare occasions, note some stray Biden "gaffe," as if it was just some perhaps-charming personal quirk but uniformly declined to treat the matter of cognitive impairment in any systematic way. The truth is that Biden was every bit as much a mess then as he is now. There are some differences between that primary debate and last night. One is the size of the stage--a presidential general election debate will draw a vastly larger audience than a Dem primary debate. Another is the debate format--besides the differences already covered, the impact Biden's stumbles should have produced back then was somewhat diluted by the multitude of candidates. But the biggest and most important one is the newfound (perhaps temporary?) unwillingness of press pundits and Dem elites to run cover for Biden--to, in effect, commit systematic fraud on the public on his behalf--by pretending as if nothing is wrong. After last night, they are, with nowhere left to run and no way to lie their way out of it, finally--finally--having to concede the conspicuous and sound the alarm.

That 2019 primary debate and the reaction to it is one step along the way--perhaps not even a standout one, as Biden, as a matter or routine, said and did things that would have instantly ended any prior candidate in any prior campaign--but it's a microcosm of how we got where we are now, suffering from a fundamentally broken system, a whole network of them, that, in an alleged liberal democracy, produced and continues to produce and impose on people outcomes no one wants. Americans have made clear, though not always putting it in these precise terms, that they're sick to death of the entire Clintonite right project; Biden's tired "nothing will fundamentally change" regime isn't what they either want or need. It was inevitable that his presidency would prove a dismal failure with them, as, indeed, it has; his approval numbers went into majority-disapprove only a few months into his administration and have stayed there. Supermajorities of Americans and even supermajorities of Biden's own party have, for years now, made crystal clear they didn't want him to run again, didn't want the Democratic party to renominate him, said he was "too old"--by which they mean cognitively impaired--to be president, but entirely heedless of all of this, Biden insisted on an incumbent's reelection campaign, which had the usual effect: the party apparatus circled the wagons around him, refused to allow any meaningful primary contest and Dems ended up stuck with him again.

None of this had to happen. With institutions that functioned properly, none of it would have happened.

What Biden has yet again proven, beyond any doubt, is that he shouldn't have been elected in the first place, shouldn't have been the Democratic nominee in 2020 and is unfit to serve as President of the United States. To note the obvious, that last is, one suspects, a conclusion many millions more now share than did just yesterday afternoon. Some more Obvious: Unless one is simply pulling for Trump, it's no longer possible to pretend as if throwing Biden against him is in any way advisable; if Trump must be defeated, that is, for the sane, off the table as an option; anyone still pushing for it just wants Trump to win (or has judgment more impaired than Biden's own). Obvious #3: Biden isn't going to get any younger with age. Obvious #4 is Trump, what he is and what he'll do, and the fact that he's been beating Biden in the head-to-heads since mid-Sept. of last year--before last night's debate. Why should Dems needlessly throw an easily winnable election and sacrifice the presidency--and perhaps a great deal more--to Joe Biden's vanity? While any remotely solid Dem contender would clean Trump's clock, the difficulties of launching a new nominee at this late date is Obvious #5 and make an early-as-possible Biden exit even more imperative. If those Dem elites care about America, they're going to be bringing immediate and major pressure on Biden to drop out. If Biden cares about America or believes any of his own rhetoric about democracy itself being on the line in the Fall, he'll finally do the right thing and step aside, but if he cared about any of that, he wouldn't have run in the first place, so the prospects of him suddenly growing a conscience that outpaces whatever ego remains in that hash of a brain he has left seem pretty minimal. We'll see, I suppose.

So buckle up, Americans! If it has taken you this long to discern it, you're about to find out exactly what you mean to Biden and the Dems!

--j.

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[1] Historians looking to get even more granular can even pinpoint the moment, only a few minutes into the debate.

[2] Though I am the one who wrote what was perhaps the only lengthy treatment of Biden's cognitive decline and the press treatment of it.