Suppose, in the immediate aftermath of January 6, 2021, you predicted the following events: Disgraced coup plotter Donald Trump would evade impeachment and then prison. He would not only regain control of the Republican Party but deepen his mastery over it, driving his skeptics within the party into retirement or terrified silence. He would win renomination without the slightest drama. The Supreme Court would rule that he is entitled to commit crimes in office. And then he would win a second term virtually unopposed.
Only the most addled QAnon cultist would have envisioned such a triumphal rise from ignominy to redemption. But now all but the last item on this list has come to pass, and that, too, is on course to transpire — with severe and possibly long-lasting repercussions for the legitimacy of the party that has taken on the task of preventing Trump’s return.
Here is the situation in all its surreality. Joe Biden is the only candidate standing (if we define the term loosely) between Trump and a far more powerful version of the office he previously occupied. Before his shambolic debate with Trump, Biden was already in deep trouble: dragged down by a sub-40 approval rating and trailing in several states he won four years ago, even with the benefit of a saturation-bombing ad campaign in swing states that Trump does not yet (but soon will) have the funding to reciprocate.
After the debate — again, using the term loosely, since it takes two to debate, and only one candidate actually joined the argument — matters look far more grim. Biden has lost his best, and perhaps only, high-profile forum to change the race’s contours. The voters have now seen, and cannot unsee, Biden in what appears to be the grips of advanced cognitive breakdown. Trump could have spent the entire 90 minutes with his pants at his ankles and he still would have won.
Election outcomes cannot be predicted with certainty. There’s always a chance that something happens to alter the race or that the polls are systematically underrating Biden. But there is no good reason to assume either of these is true and considerable reason to believe the opposite. Contrary to Biden’s claim that he was underestimated in 2020, the polls underrated Trump in both of his last two elections. (Republicans have underperformed in midterm and special elections when Trump was not on the ballot — he seems to draw out certain voters who don’t talk to pollsters and whose only loyalty is to him personally.) And the most obvious game-changing event that could occur is another incident exposing Biden’s frailty. Age-related decline is a one-way ratchet.
Biden has responded to the catastrophe in depressing but expected fashion. He has portrayed his fiasco as “one bad debate,” a phrase meant to obscure both the frequency with which similar episodes have popped up in other settings and the sheer level of dysfunction it revealed. He has leaned more heavily on the advice of family members, whose loyalty rests primarily with him rather than their party or country. And he has pressured Democrats to shut up and fall in line without taking any convincing steps to assuage their concerns.
This response is sadly consistent with the behavior of aging leaders who refuse to sacrifice their power for the greater good. Ruth Bader Ginsburg insisted on her own indispensability, as if the cause of liberalism would suffer by replacing her with a younger, non-cancer-stricken jurist. Dianne Feinstein denied her own cognitive decline to the point where she was too impaired to recognize her own impairment, surrounded by aides whose professional incentive was to sustain the illusion of competence.
This is the trajectory Biden’s campaign is following. If it continues, the presidency will probably fall into Trump’s lap as easily as Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat did.
Democrats have responded to this calamity in three ways. One faction, consisting mostly of moderates in Congress, has implied or stated directly that Biden should leave the race.
A second faction, heavily concentrated among his party’s left wing, has echoed Biden’s insistence that the decision has been made and the debate is over. “I have spoken with him extensively,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “He made clear then and he has made clear since that he is in this race. The matter is closed.” Never mind how debilitated he is or may become; to invert a phrase made famous by Trump, Biden wouldn’t lose their support if somebody shot him on Fifth Avenue.
The third faction of Democratic officials has publicly endorsed Biden, albeit with less enthusiasm, while some privately wax fatalistic. “We’re riding this horse at this point,” a House Democrat, who privately wishes Biden would withdraw, told the political website NOTUS. “And so I’m shifting gears. I’m gonna make my best case that we should pick the old guy against the crazy guy.” Another Democrat confessed to NBC, “I wish I was more brave.”
The strategy adopted by the hand-wringers is to hope the decision gets made for them. They have prodded Biden to open up his cloistered campaign to more interviews and freewheeling events — such as a rare press conference on July 11 at the NATO summit in Washington — which would theoretically either give him the opportunity to show he has the vigor and mental velocity to make the case against Trump or leave himself vulnerable to the risk of another meltdown, which would force the issue.
The trouble is that the latter possibility is exactly why Biden has refused to expose himself to more than a handful of unscripted appearances. The halfway measure of allowing Biden to keep the nomination while asking him to change his public style has the least chance of success. The threat of a total revolt is the only leverage discontented Democrats have. If they settle for vague promises of incremental change, their leverage dissipates, and Biden can just wait them out. The more time passes, the harder it will get for Democrats to organize a new nominee (or new nominating process), and the less incentive Biden will have to make unscripted appearances. More Democrats are starting to understand this, signaling before the NATO press conference that they were prepared to demand he step aside.
If Democrats suppose it is safe to quietly go along with a losing campaign rather than stick their necks out for a change with an uncertain result, they are not thinking dynamically enough about how their own voters would respond in the aftermath of defeat. Ezra Klein recently reported private conversations with elected Democrats who say, “I can live with Donald Trump winning.”
The party’s organizing basis since the first day Trump took office has been to treat him as a civic emergency. This is the basis for demanding donations, volunteering, and sacrifice. If they are not willing to endure the relatively modest discomfort of a contentious intraparty debate to minimize the chance of a second Trump term, they’ll have broken faith with their supporters.
In the meantime, the result of this paralysis is a crippled Biden dragging a mostly unwilling party to what it regards as certain defeat. Three and a half years ago, one could have imagined Trumpian authoritarianism returning to power in a blaze of violence. Instead, history may record that he took power again when his opposition essentially abdicated.
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