JOE 2.0

In a rational world, Joe Biden would easily be re-elected as President in 2024.

Both at home and abroad, he has brought America back from the brink.  

At home, the January 6 insurrectionists are being investigated and prosecuted and election deniers were routed in last November's midterms. Unemployment is at historic lows and the inflation caused by Covid's disruption of worldwide supply chains has been brought down.  

Abroad, NATO has been revived and fashioned a united and (so far) effective response to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine.  And though China in the person of its president, Xi Jinping, has decided to resurrect a sort of crypto-Maoism as its Communist Party thwarts the openness an otherwise neo-capitalist economy was making possible, Biden's pas de deux with Taiwan and his  Australian nuclear subs deal, along with Russia's failure in Ukraine, has at least made it cautious on the world stage.  Unlike Putin, Xi does not have to pretend he is strong and -- pace John Quincy Adams -- has no need to go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy".

So, as I said, in a rational world, a Biden second term would be a given.

We, however, do not live in a rational world.

We live in America.

Where reason often takes a holiday.

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, Jeb Bush said he would be a chaos president if he won. That was an understatement.  Trump, as it turned, out, was a crypto-fascist and had no qualms about taking down the republic either to advance his own interests or save his own skin. His false claim to have won the November 2020 election and two-month effort thereafter to force state and then federal officials to change the result and make him president, the latter of which culminated in a violent attack on Congress on January 6, 2021 as it counted electoral votes, was the capstone of that fascism. But he had been putting the building blocks in place for years.

As with all fascists, Trump succeeded by taking over an institution that he then used to obtain ultimate power.  In his case the institution was the contemporary Republican Party. Armed with a psychopathic narcissism, an allergy to truth, and an unerring eye for grievance, he convinced non-degreed, rural, white men that their precarious economic condition was the fault of illegal brown immigrants and college-educated city liberals, none of which was true, and then rode a series of narrow primary victories to the Republican presidential nomination.

Once nominated, he never thought he'd win.

But once elected, he thought -- as do all narcissists who get lucky -- the result ordained.

And so . . .

He governed as he had run.  

Lying, demonizing, breaking the law, embracing fellow-travelers.

His inaugural crowd was the largest. Covid was the flu. Bleach was medicine.  Attempted bribery was a "perfect call". Charlottesville's neo-Nazis were fine people. Robert Mueller's investigation was a witch-hunt. Nancy Pelosi was crazy. 

Obstruction of justice became a habit. 

The Supreme Court a disaster waiting to happen.

And Vladimir Putin . . .

An ally.

By January 20, 2021, the Capitol was on lock-down and we were all exhausted.

In 2020, Joe Biden's  biggest selling point was that he was not Donald Trump. 

And it still is. 

It is important, however, to understand why it still is and what that means.

First, the why.

Trump is not going away.  

I said above that fascists succeed by taking over institutions and that the institution Trump took over was the Republican Party.  That has not changed.  Trump still has the support of anywhere from 30% to 50% of Republican primary voters. In the latest polls, he is beating his closest GOP competitor by thirteen points and the others are barely registering. Republican primary voters do not think of January 6 as an insurrection and two-thirds of them think the only criminal indictment  against the former president so far is just a political hit job.  In February 2021, Senate Republicans could have rid the GOP of Trump by convicting him in his second impeachment trial.  But they refused. Even some who condemned him for January 6 refused.  

So, whether they like it or not, Trump still controls the party.

And that control matters.

Because . . .

Unlike Democratic Party primaries, Republican primaries generally award the winner all or most of the delegates at issue rather than that candidate's proportionate share.  In a multi-candidate field, this creates significant structural advantages for the front runner and even greater advantages for a front-runner candidate, like Trump, with a lock on 30-40% of the vote. 

Now the what.

In his first term, Trump was at least bridled.

In his second, however, he would be unleashed.

Trump is not stupid.  He thinks his presidency was hobbled by the absence of loyalists in his cabinet and the federal government's executive agencies and means to insure this is not the case in any second term.  There will not be any Bill Barrs (Attorney General)  or Jim Mattises (Defense) or Rex Tillersons (State) in a Trump II cabinet. Similarly, there will not be any White House chiefs of staff in the mold of John Kelly or H.R. McMaster.  There probably will not even be any White House counsels  like Don McGahn or Pat Cipollone, the former of whom ignored Trump's directive to obstruct justice during the Mueller investigation, the latter of whom demanded he call off the January 6 insurrectionists.  

Bottom line . . .

Trump will not appoint anyone in a second term with even a hint of independence.  

Instead, he will tap true believers. 

Think Stephen Miller or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz.   

They will not criticize him.

And they will not be able to stop him. 

Right now, many of the federal agencies are independent and manned by career civil servants.  Those employees have made careers implementing federal policy without regard to ideology or partisanship.  The FDA, for example, approved mifepristone and was not swayed one way or the other by the abortion debate.  The EPA has cleaned our air and water.  In a world getting smaller and more interdependent, the CDC detects and tracks diseases wherever they are in order to prevent them from coming here.

Trump, however, could change all that.  

Or the Supreme Court -- whose conservatives appear to be seriously considering a review of Chevron deference -- could do it for him.

Which gets us to . . .

The Court.

Whoever is the Republican nominee in 2024, he or she will be hamstrung by that party's extreme opposition to abortion.  In overturning Roe v. Wade last year, the Supreme Court did the GOP no favors. To the contrary, the decision was critical to the Democrats retaining control of the Senate and cutting their losses in the House.  

That dynamic will not change in 2024 and may get worse. Trump himself takes credit with the GOP base for putting Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Coney-Barrett on the Court and thus making it possible to kill Roe.  But he stops there.  (As with many of his commitments, this one was transactional; he needed to be anti-choice to win the GOP nomination in 2016; prior to running, he had been pro-choice.)  

The GOP base, however, does not.  

Some of them want to ban interstate travel for abortions. Others want to ban medical abortions -- which account for half the abortions and 90% of the early term abortions -- and the drugs that make them possible.  Still others want to make it more difficult for states to conduct referenda on abortion, having noticed what happened last year in Kansas when that erstwhile red electorate voted against a proposed constitutional amendment that would have made abortion illegal.

Stay tuned. 

The only real rap on Biden is that he is old.  He is now the oldest person to have served as president and would be 86 were he to complete a second term.  2024, however, is not your grandfather's twentieth century.  Medicine has improved and the aged are not categorically infirm.  While the Biden haters in the GOP and elsewhere pretend he is or may be "cognitively" impaired, there is no evidence at all for this.  And while the GOP talks ad nauseum about this president's age, they are mum when anyone mentions Republican Senator Grassley (who at 89 was reelected to the Senate last year), as they were in the past when anyone mentioned Strom Thurmond (who did not retire from the Senate until he was 99).

Nor do Republican voters seem all that willing to apply a disqualifying age test to their own candidates.

Of the currently mentioned and actual GOP presidential candidates,  the age line-up is as follows:  Pence (63), Tim Scott (57), Nikki Haley (51),Ron DeSantis (44), Trump (76).  Of that group, all but Trump are appreciably younger than Biden. Republican voters, however,  prefer Trump by a large margin. By November 2024, he will be 78 (the same age Biden was in November 2020) and thus no spring chicken. 

But they don't care.

Nor should we.

Joe Biden is not perfect.  He is, however, steady and engaged and always on the job.  

And he delivers.  

Unemployment is at an all-time low, inflation is coming down, wages are going up, domestic manufacturing is returning and the government is putting real money in the pockets of the middle classes with infrastructure spending, prescription drug relief, and expansions of Obamacare.

Biden deserves a second term.

And America cannot risk a second Trump.

I do not know if any other Democrat can beat Trump.

No one does.

I do, however, know that Biden can.

Because he has.

SHUT UP AND WAIT

Trump has been indicted.

None of us know specifically what is in that indictment.

We will presumably discover what is in it this coming Tuesday, when the former president will reportedly surrender to the authorities in New York City and be arraigned.  At that time, the indictment will become public

In the meantime, what should all of us do and how should all of us react?

Here's my answer in three words.

Shut up and wait.

No one, however, is following that advice.  

As far as I can tell, no one is even giving it.  

Instead, on the right, the left and in the center, everyone is sallying forth with their respective opinions on what is merely the latest piece of unique news to be attached to an American president who literally has raised the notion of uniqueness to an art form.  In truth, he has been so unique so outrageously and so often that we have lost count. He has exhausted our ability to attend to his acts, to notice them, to calmly evaluate them.

He has even exhausted our ability . . .

To wait.

Why is this?

Is it all about him?

Or is it about us?

For as long as I can remember, I have been confronted -- attacked really -- by the notion that perception is reality. 

I don't know whether it took root in my collegiate studies of philosophy, or in a now fifty-plus-years devotion to American politics, or in the complexities of interpersonal relationships that have both failed and succeeded.  

But it has always been thus.  

Efforts to embrace or argue from reality were subject to the rejoinder that people simply did not see it that way.  

The critics were astounded by my supposed naivete.

Perception is reality, they would say.

Reality is reality too, I'd retort.

Not in the real world, they'd reply.

This is the sort of conversation college kids (or at least the ones I hung with) have over late-night drinks in dark bars.  It is also the kind of conversations therapists have with patients.  The problem, I think, is that absent analytic rigor, accepting perception as reality or awarding it too much credence is very dangerous.  Perceptions can be wrong. They can also be manipulated. At worst, they can be lies.

For the past eight years, that sort of contest has been played out in the world of all things Trump. He creates his own reality and by doing so makes the perceptions he creates in others their reality.  People then act on those perceptions, often in ways that are unexpected and dangerous.  

The January 6 attack on the US Capitol was the worst example of this. 

Having created the false perception among millions that he had won an election he clearly lost, thousands who lived in that perceptual vacuum stormed the Capitol, stopped an electoral count, assaulted the police and threatened to kill the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

Trump's election in 2016 was another one.  

The economically depressed rural and ex-urban voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin who made Trump president in 2016, like the ones who made JD Vance Ohio's Senator last year, embraced the notion that they were the victims of woke elites and illegal immigrants while ignoring the reality of tax cuts for the rich, de-regulation, right to work anti-unionism and outsourced manufacturing, all of which are the real reasons they are struggling. 

Fast forward to today.

Trump and his acolytes are at it again.

Weeks before the indictment was even announced, the former president warned of "potential death and destruction" were he charged.  And once it was announced, right wing commentators and virtually every elected official from the Republican Party immediately condemned it as an un-American assault on the rule of law. Mark Levin called the indictment an act of "tyranny", a "grotesque, Stalinist, Maoist-type action".  Mike Pence called it "outrageous".  Kevin McCarthy said it was an "injustice" and "an unprecedented abuse of power". Governor DeSantis said he'd refuse to obey the law if he was asked to extradite Trump to New York, and Tucker Carlson suggested it might not be a good time for anyone to get rid of their AR-15s.

None of them have seen the indictment.

But all of them have condemned it.

The now announced case of People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump is going to be a long slog.  After the indictment is made public on Tuesday, it will take at least a year and a half for the case to conclude.  The former president is represented by competent counsel (full disclosure: one of his attorneys is my friend).  There will be motions to test the sufficiency of the indictment, a period of discovery in which the DA will be required to disclose all of his evidence (both the good and the bad for his case), jury selection, a trial at which Trump and his lawyers will get to cross examine the state's witnesses, jury deliberation, a verdict and possible appeals.  Between the beginning and the end, the case may change.  In fact, some or all of it may end long before any trial.  

Far from evidencing an assault on the rule of law, the whole process will be testimony to its continued existence.

The rest of us should stifle any advice to react on cue and let that happen.

In other words . . .

Shut up and wait.