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.