Tag Archives: #Trump

This election is a referendum on American democracy

This op-ed was published by The National on October 16, 2024

IIn a mere three weeks, the American constitutional system will face its greatest test since the Civil War. The depressions of the late 19th century and 1930s, the two world wars, and the Watergate scandal never put the constitutional order on the ballot. But on November 5, American voters are being asked for what amounts to a yes or no verdict on a democratic future.

What the Republican Party is offering under Donald Trump – but hardly restricted to him – effectively pits a party that remains committed to the constitutional system versus one whose leader is on record as planning to dispense with it. The once Grand Old Party has become so extreme it is promoting candidates far beyond what would ever have been considered remotely acceptable.

Mr Trump is the most obvious and threatening, because he stands a good chance of being reelected president. But he is not the man he was in 2016 or even 2020. He is showing marked signs of decline, increasingly resembling US President Joe Biden in lapsing into incoherence and senior moments. He recently spent almost 40 minutes at a rally swaying silently to golden oldies instead of continuing to answer questions.

In 2016, most voters regarded Mr Trump as a successful businessman (mainly because of his stint on the hit TV show The Apprentice) given to eccentric, politically incorrect outbursts many considered refreshing. In 2024, most voters know that Mr Trump’s presidency was a chaotic mess and that he is now promising the very kind of autocratic misrule the Constitution was designed to prevent.

He has spoken of “ending” crime, which is on the decline in most areas, by unleashing the police without any restrictions or restraints for “one rough hour”.

He is still vilifying migrants, claiming they are killers and “animals” who are “destroying” the country and is threatening an unprecedented mass deportation of millions that he admits will be “bloody.” Mr Trump justifies this with absurd fabrications such as legal Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs, and vows to therefore remove their protected status.

But, he says, these millions of murderous migrants are hardly the biggest problem. That would be “the enemy within,” which he identifies as “crazy leftists,” which he says should be dealt with “by the National Guard or even the military.” As an example of who he is talking about, he specifies the liberal California representative Adam Schiff and has vowed to prosecute, along others, members of the House select committee that held hearings into the January 6 riot that he instigated to try to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election.

Reports reveal that on January 6, when Mr Trump was told that his vice president, Mike Pence, was in mortal danger from a mob chanting that he should be hanged and had erected a gallows outside of Congress, the former president replied blandly: “So what?” He has repeatedly promised to pardon all those convicted of attacking Congress and police officers in that unprecedented insurrection.

His attitude towards elections is summed up in another recently revealed statement: “it doesn’t matter if you lose an election, you still have to fight like hell” presumably to stay in power. And he has been laying the groundwork to reject another election defeat.

Many Trump voters don’t take these threats seriously, and are more afraid of the “woke Democrats” than Mr Trump’s promised violent authoritarianism. But there is no reason to think that he’s playacting. After his 2016 victory, he did his best to live up to campaign promises, including a “Muslim travel ban,” restricting entry from a series of largely Muslim-majority countries. Of course he has promised to reinstate that policy immediately.

Voters also know that he is now a convicted felon, and civilly liable for sexual abuse, defamation and serial tax fraud. None of it seems to matter.

Republican extremism is hardly restricted to Mr Trump. Its worst example is the candidate for North Carolina governor, current Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson.

Mr. Robinson has been revealed – although he extremely unconvincingly denies this – of having made numerous bizarre and incendiary postings on a pornographic website. He described himself as “a black Nazi,” recommended Adolf Hitler’s memoir Mein Kampf as excellent reading material, and expressed a profound keenness for transgender pornography despite his bitterly homophobic and anti-trans pronouncements. He expressed strong support for the long-abolished American slavery system and the especially brutal transatlantic slave trade, lamented its passing, and expressed a keen desire to buy and own slaves in the present day.

Mr Trump lauded Mr Robinson, one of the most prominent black Republicans, as “Martin Luther King Jr on steroids”. He expressed astonishment at the nauseated look on Mr Robinson’s face. We now know that Mr Robinson regards the civil rights icon as “a commie” and derided him as “Martin Lucifer Coon,” the last being an incredibly offensive epithet for African Americans.

Mr Robinson was already on the record with a series of staggeringly vulgar extreme positions, including musing in a church sermon that “some folks just need killing.”

The Republican Party has stopped lauding Mr Robinson and Mr Trump failed to mention him at a recent North Carolina rally. But the party has done nothing to repudiate him. Apparently this iteration of the Republican Party is content to field such candidates if they stand a chance of possibly winning. Democrats do not tolerate anything analogous and they replaced the visibly aging Mr Biden.

Mr Robinson is the most extreme example, and Mr Trump is the most threatening, but around the country the Republican Party is being represented by candidates fully in tune with both of them. Meanwhile, traditional conservatives like former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney find themselves politically exiled by Mr Trump, while stalwarts like Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have endorsed the democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

Americans are being offered a chance to either reaffirm or repudiate the fundamental political ethos of the country. It is terrifying that so many of them are either supportive of Mr Trump’s overt promises of an experiment in American fascism or are so naively confident that he doesn’t mean what he says, or won’t be allowed by others to exercise his authority if he wins, that they will probably either return him to the White House or deliver him a narrow defeat.

Either way, the American system is facing its most severe threat since the Civil War. The Republican Party may never regain its constitutional or even fundamentally rational character. Win or lose in November, its shocking decline into extremism, with litmus tests of ritual dishonesty and the willingness to embrace the likes of a self-described “black Nazi,” could well mean the venerable Republican Party is in its final stages, at least as a respectable or even viable, American political institution.

Together Iran and Israel are destroying Biden’s Middle East policy

This op-ed was published by The National on October 3, 2024

U.S. policy regarding the crises in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, is hanging by a thread. Reckless actions by America’s closest partner, Israel, and primary adversary, Iran, are demolishing Washington’s goal of containing the conflict to Gaza. Tehran and Israel are both driving the region towards a multi-front conflict and war of missiles that could draw in the US. This is precisely what US President Joe Biden has been striving to avoid.

Last year, soon after October 7, the Biden administration concluded that US interests could probably withstand anything arising, strictly from the Gaza war. But they feared getting dragged into a conflict that would pose untold risks.

Therefore, Mr. Biden developed a policy of conflict containment. The virtual carte blanche Washington gave Israel regarding Gaza was intended to help him restrain Israel, particularly in Lebanon.

For many months, it appeared to be working. Despite the emergence of flashpoints in Syria and Iraq, and Red Sea piracy by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Israel was focused on Gaza rather than Lebanon and fighting wasn’t spreading disastrously.

Ironically, the principal threat to this US imperative has come from Israel rather than Iran. In the week following the October 7 attacks, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began pressing for a major offensive against Hezbollah. Mr. Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reject these demands and focus on Hamas. A similar scenario was repeated at least twice.

But Israel sought two imperatives that were unavailable in Gaza. Both Israel and Iran assessed that Tehran had pocketed strategic benefits at the expense of Israel, Hamas and, above all, the Palestinians. That equation couldn’t be altered in Gaza, which has no meaningful importance to Tehran, and especially since Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organization and an unreliable ally that broke with the “axis” completely over the Syrian war.

The Israeli state badly needed a “win” to recuperate national security institutions whose reputations were damaged by the breathtaking failures on October 7. Mr. Netanyahu needed an unequivocal “victory” to restore his own reputation in advance of any future investigation into those failures.

Neither goal was going to be absolutely achieved by fighting Hamas. Instead, taking the fight decisively to Hezbollah, the prototypical and most potent of Iran’s Arab militias, offered the potential for both. But until recent weeks, Israel was largely content with gradual escalation against Hezbollah that made Washington distinctly nervous but never threatened to force the regional war the US was seeking, at virtually all costs, to avoid, although there were obviously making such a disaster ever more plausible.

When Israel’s operation in Rafah marked the end of the primary war against Hamas and transformed the continued conflict in Gaza into an amorphous counter-insurgency rather than a conceptually-coherent campaign against clearly-identified targets, Israel’s attention began to shift back north.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah expressed genuine interest in a US-proposed compromise in which the Lebanese militia would agree to withdraw its fighters and heavy equipment seven or eight km north of the border. Israel was demanding at least 20km while Hezbollah was insisting on an elusive and implausible ceasefire in Gaza.

Instead, Israel steadily increased pressure against Hezbollah and Iranian assets in Syria, while Mr Netanyahu rebuffed the intensified US efforts to achieve a four-week ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel’s extraordinary penetration of Hezbollah’s interworkings was the key to a series of devastating assassinations of much of that organisation’s key leadership while thousands of its operatives and associates were killed or debilitated by booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing air campaign severely damaged Hezbollah’s infrastructure and equipment, including its all-important rocket launchers. These assets are crucial to Iran, serving as the primary deterrent against any attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

The remarkably successful campaign culminated in the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his key deputies. But it was followed by precisely what Washington had, for a year, focused on preventing: an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.

While it is being marketed as “limited” and “targeted,” – and therefore implicitly not supposed to be the beginning of a new, open-ended Israeli occupation of parts of southern Lebanon as a “security buffer zone” – Washington understands from its own bitter experiences that such adventures are easy to launch but difficult to end or even contain.

After months of perceived passivity, Tehran finally intervened with a large-scale rocket and missile attack against civilian targets deep into Israel and the headquarters of its intelligence services. While the attack has been deemed unsuccessful by Washington, it’s unlikely that Israel will accept Mr. Biden‘s renewed calls for restraint any more than it has so many other such calls over the past few months.

The Israelis knows that the weeks before a presidential election are a time of maximum impunity from US pressure, and they are taking full and cynical advantage of this. Washington’s reticence was on full display when Mr. Biden bizarrely stated he “would not object” if Israel ended its invasion and eased its bombardment.

Israel seems unlikely to react with restraint. And the Biden administration is divided, with some senior figures privately encouraging Israel’s battering of Hezbollah and humiliation of Iran, while others increasingly fear that Mr. Netanyahu is trying to drag the US into a military confrontation with Tehran and at last secure his long-sought goal of maneuvering Washington into intervening on Israel’s behalf and bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. The US has the firepower to potentially set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back a decade or more, while Israel probably doesn’t.

But Mr. Biden has little to work with. He’s clearly unwilling to exercise the kind of US leverage that could keep Israel in check. He must now hope that Iran and Hezbollah will seek an understanding with Israel to remove militia forces from the border area, even though Israel may no longer be in any mood to compromise.

If the Israelis persist, and Iran and Hezbollah won’t employ “strategic patience” and back down, the nightmare of a multi-front regional war that could force Washington’s hand in defence of Israel – particularly in the month before a crucial election – may become a reality. This is a profound threat to US interests and goals, and would constitute the complete meltdown of Mr. Biden’s entire approach to the crises started by Hamas a year ago.

US Democrats will regard an Israeli invasion of Lebanon as election interference

This op-ed was published by The National on September 26, 2024

Just six weeks before a highly consequential election, Washington is scrambling to avoid a full-scale war in the Middle East that could be triggered by an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. US President Joe Biden’s domestic policy and legislative achievements have been remarkable, but his handling of the Gaza war has been woeful. Now US policy faces a meltdown, not at the hands of adversaries like Hezbollah and Iran, but Israel.

The Biden administration adopted a focused policy of conflict containment of the war to Gaza, hoping to manage the strategic fallout from anything deemed plausible inside Gaza. This reflected deep anxiety about the war spreading, particularly into Lebanon, which might spiral into a regional conflict potentially drawing in the US and Iran, and even setting them directly against each other.

Some in the Biden administration have long harbored suspicions that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might hope to manoeuvre tensions over Lebanon to eventually, and at long last, secure the direct US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities that he has been demanding, without success, for almost two decades.

The Biden administration’s de facto carte blanche for Israel, particularly in the first few months of that savage war of vengeance against the entire Palestinian society in Gaza, was developed for numerous reasons. But an important factor was the belief that by supporting Israel strongly in Gaza, the Biden administration effectively positioned itself to block any Israeli impulse to unnecessarily spread the war into Lebanon.

That calculation appeared to play out precisely on several key occasions.

As early as October 12, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and other hawks began pressing for an immediate and massive strike against Hezbollah. One of the key factors thwarting this effort was a forceful intervention by Mr. Biden telling Mr. Netanyahu and others that such an attack was unnecessary, unwise and would not be supported by Washington. Similar scenarios played out on at least two other occasions in the subsequent months in which Mr. Biden was able to restrain Israel.

However, if things pan out over the subsequent days and weeks, an invasion of Lebanon could expand the Gaza war not just to Israel’s north but also potentially into an uncontrolled regional conflagration. Yet, at the time of writing, neither Israel nor Hezbollah had indicated any interest – at least in public – in a three-week pause in cross-border attacks that was being proposed by Washington and other regional and international governments.

The current standoff goes back to the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, when Hamas demanded that Hezbollah and other militias in the Iranian-managed “axis of resistance” intervene with full force against Israel. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, disappeared into virtual hiding, and when he emerged after two weeks, he clarified that while the organization would be intensifying its military activities, they would be directed at the Lebanon-Israel border area and, supposedly, in the interests of liberating two Lebanese towns still occupied by Israel.

The answer to Hamas was no, but Hezbollah did feel the need to ramp up cross-border attacks so as not to appear completely docile. But since that opening salvo, Israel has been able to establish escalation dominance, because even cautious Israeli leaders can see potential benefits from taking on Hezbollah under current circumstances.

In particular, they hope to inflict significant costs to Iran and its Arab regional militia network, which they believe have benefited virtually cost-free from the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. They would also be hoping to restore the domestic credibility and legitimacy of Israel’s national security institutions that were badly tarnished by the military meltdown on October 7.

Neither Iran nor Hezbollah see any point in a major war with Israel under current circumstances. Hezbollah’s main regional role has been to protect Iran from Israeli or American attacks on its homeland, and particularly its nuclear facilities. Tehran and Hezbollah have had no interest in a war over a place, Gaza, which has little strategic, historical or religious significance to them, or to rescue an organization, Hamas, which has proven to be an unreliable ally of the “axis of resistance” in the past (Hamas broke it over the Syrian war between 2012-2019).

The main American point to Israel all along has been that this war is unnecessary and avoidable because the other side does not want to fight one.

Israeli ambivalence appeared to decisively dissipate after the pager and walkie-talkie sabotage detonations last week. Reports suggest that Israel wanted to use those explosions in the earliest stages of a potential ground attack on Lebanon, but growing suspicions about the malfunctioning or badly performing devices prompted a “use it or lose it” analysis in Israel. Therefore, if these reports are true, the explosives were detonated independent of a specific policy goal or broader strategy.

Yet predictably enough, a cycle of escalation immediately followed.

What Israel seeks from a ground invasion is not clear, but it potentially ranges from the establishment of a new occupied “security barrier” in southern Lebanon to an all-out effort to smash the infrastructure of Hezbollah similar to that conducted in Gaza against Hamas. Either way, Lebanon has once again been dragged into a conflict that has absolutely no connection to any Lebanese national interest. Yet Israel’s escalations may help obscure that, instead restoring Hezbollah’s popularity and the perceived legitimacy of its resistance.

For the Biden administration, an Israeli ground operation in Lebanon constitutes the ultimate failure of its Gaza war policy. The conflict will have spread despite Washington’s best efforts and because of Israel’s bellicosity rather than that of Hezbollah or Iran.

Mere weeks before a US election is hardly the time any administration is going to get tough on Israel. The Israelis know this, and they are taking full and cynical advantage of the Biden administration’s priority of securing the victory of Vice President Kamala Harris over former president Donald Trump.

Indeed, a ground offensive, if it were to happen, with no urgent need and just six weeks before the US presidential election, will be regarded by many Democrats as shocking and intolerable election interference on behalf of Mr. Trump. Relations between Mr. Netanyahu and Democrats may never recover.

It could also accelerate the advent of a deeper schism between the US, or at least Democrats, and Israel in general. That’s been a long time in the making, and Mr Netanyahu appears determined to make such a bitter reckoning inevitable, and perhaps imminent.

Meanwhile, his policies could leave Israel fighting ongoing insurgencies against renewed or intensified occupations to the south in Gaza, to the north in Lebanon, and quite possibly to the east in the West Bank. Israel’s only calm border would be the Mediterranean Sea. If that’s a formula for security, it’s hard to imagine what dangerous insecurity might look like.

Harris is impressing audiences, while Trump’s views remain fringe

This op-ed was published by The National on September 24, 2024

It’s raining cats and dogs of conspiracy theories and paranoia in the U.S. election campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris has opened a small but significant lead in the latest polls, ranging from one to six points nationally and in a number of key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and even the prize of prizes: Pennsylvania. Former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, are responding with an intensification of wild allegations devoid of fact and racist fabrications.

This week the specter of political violence once again raised its ugly head, as Mr. Trump survived an apparent second assassination attempt. Another deranged gunman was apparently hoping to kill him at his golf course in Florida, but he was thwarted and captured by the Secret Service. No shots were fired at Mr. Trump.

The former president was quick to blame Democrats, once again claiming that “they” were trying to kill him. The suspect appears to be another deranged individual with a largely right-wing political history, plus some donations to Democrats. There is no evidence that either would-be assassin was inspired by warnings from Democrats that Mr. Trump is a threat to US democracy and constitutional rule (which, given his actions and statements, is an unavoidable fear).

On social media, Mr. Trump posted: “Because of this communist left rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse.” In addition to yet again smearing Ms. Harris and other Democrats as communists, there is an obvious thinly veiled threat at the end of that sentence.

The assassination attempts don’t seem to be helping Mr. Trump much in the polls, for an obvious reason: it is he, and not the Democrats, who has consistently deployed the rhetoric of political violence – and its reality on January 6, 2021 – in the American political scene.

Democrats reacted to the latest assassination attempt impeccably, by denouncing political violence absolutely, expressing relief that Mr. Trump is safe, and calling for an investigation of how the threat emerged and urging greater Secret Service protection for the former president. Mr. Trump and his sons, by contrast, continue to mock and make light of the hammer attack on the 80-year-old husband of former House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi, and have specialized in violent rhetoric unheard-of at this political level in the modern US.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance also continue to harp on the fabrication that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, despite the insistence of the mayor, police and governor that there is no evidence of this ever happening. In a recent interview, Mr. Vance, who could not identify any victimized pet owner, admitted the story may be fabricated, but said: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually has to pay attention to the suffering of American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

The result has been devastating to Springfield, which has been inundated with violent threats that have resulted in the evacuations of hospitals, schools and threats to the safety of the family of the mayor. Yet Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance continue to insist that the legal Haitian immigrants in that city are stealing and consuming pets.

This sort of anti-immigrant rhetoric isn’t new. Exactly these charges were made against Vietnamese immigrants in the 1980s. But horror stories about food and pets, the essence of American domesticity, get repeated because they’re effective. Another new target is pop superstar Taylor Swift, who endorsed Ms. Harris, prompting thousands of new voter registrations. Mr. Trump responded by posting in all caps: “I hate Taylor Swift.” It is, to say the least, unusual conduct from a former US president.

Mr. Trump is now carefully and ominously laying the groundwork for a repetition of his refusal to accept his defeat in 2020. He’s once again denouncing the “terrible” US election system.

In his 16th interview with a particularly loopy conspiracy theorist called Wayne Allyn Root, Mr. Trump insisted that the recent presidential debate (which he claims to have won, although it was a fiasco for him) was “rigged”, and that even the US Postal Service is “rigged” against him. He’s back to insisting that postal voting is inherently rife with fraud, a fixation for which there is no evidence whatsoever.

Mr. Trump’s lurch to the extreme fringe of the US political spectrum is personified by his latest close adviser, the hatemonger and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. She is an intolerant, homophobic and Islamophobic extremist who has called, for instance, Islam “a cancer”, while insisting that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were a US government “inside job”.

Her closer-than-ever association with Mr. Trump began with her accompanying him to the recent debate. This so alarmed some of his most right-wing allies in Congress that Thom Tillis, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lindsey Graham issued a joint statement denouncing her influence on Mr. Trump. She responded by describing all of them as his enemies and making scurrilous claims, subsequently removed, about Mr. Graham’s supposed preference for the company of men.

Yet Mr. Trump continues to back her, saying she is a “free spirit” entitled to say anything she wants. But she has quite clearly emerged as his chief enforcer.

Mr. Trump’s paid adverts are making the politically normal case that Ms. Harris is responsible for a surge in border crossings and inflation that has bedeviled the Joe Biden administration. That could win him many votes. But in “earned media” appearances, Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance appear uninterested or incapable of moving beyond the “cat-eating” level of highly dangerous racist and anti-immigrant calumny. It’s off-the-wall but on-brand and, unfortunately, not ineffective in creating its intended fear and hatred and keeping immigration – and themselves – in the spotlight.

All this prompted the influential and apolitical magazine Scientific American to endorse Ms. Harris, pointing out that the election now pits reality-based policies against the politics of fabrications, phantasms and flimflam.

Mr. Trump’s pivot to the most extreme conspiratorial fringe may remind many key swing voters what bothered them enough about him that they elected Mr. Biden in 2020. Between that and her outstanding debate performance last week, it’s no wonder that Ms. Harris appears to be slowly but surely moving ever closer to the presidency.

Harris shines in the debate, but Trump remains a potent candidate

This op-ed was published by The National on September 11, 2024

The presidential debate performance on Tuesday night by US Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t perfect, but the glitches were rare and unimportant, as she executed a well-crafted, relentless attack on her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump. He could certainly still win the election. But he was constantly, and most unusually, on the defensive.

Ms. Harris is now bolstered by a crushing victory that accomplished virtually every goal – many in complex tension with each other – that the occasion demanded. The campaigns are battling for a few remaining persuadable voters in six or seven swing states. It’s unlikely many switched to Mr. Trump after his dismal performance.

Ms. Harris faced especially daunting challenges. She had to demonstrate “presidential” mettle by standing up to him, yet avoid seeming snippy, obnoxious or unpleasant. This is especially challenging for women, who are typically judged harshly for assertiveness often considered admirable from men.

She rattled him immediately, confidently marching into his stage space and forcing a handshake that he evidently neither expected nor enjoyed. It was a subtle exercise in the physical dominance Mr. Trump well understands. She initially overdid her incredulous facial expressions at his rhetorical excesses. But even these became increasingly effective, almost seeming concerned for him, in stark contrast to his scowls and smirks.

 

TV debates are often best evaluated on mute. Ms. Harris appeared relaxed and confident, while Mr. Trump looked alternately irritated, infuriated or uncomfortable, a stereotypical grumpy old man. She smiled broadly as he fell into trap after trap. Her attacks were so effective that she essentially transformed him into the incumbent, and herself into an upstart challenger, even though she’s in the White House and he isn’t.

She launched stinging salvos against his criminal convictions, dependence on lies, and key vulnerabilities such as reproductive rights. She consistently baited him, so successfully that he sometimes appeared to lose his temper, barking “quiet!” at her and several times being reduced to shouting.

Ms. Harris was clearly well prepared, continuously pivoting to directly address voters, explaining what she would do for “you”, while insisting that Mr. Trump has nothing to offer “you”. He seemed unprepared, although when she lured him into relitigating the 2020 election, he apparently suddenly recalled that was a mistake, quickly affirming the past is unimportant. It was an unconvincing correction.

The debate was predictably short on substance, but Ms. Harris made the only serious efforts to talk about policy ideas, and several times appealed for a discussion about their proposals. Mr. Trump variously claimed she has no plans, that she intends to “destroy” the country, and even, mystifyingly, that she has now embraced his governing philosophy. The incompatibility of the three appeared lost on him.

Mr. Trump returned almost compulsively to his signature issue, immigration. But he handled it clumsily, relying on outlandish hyperbole and even regurgitating a racist urban legend about Haitian migrants eating other people’s pet cats. When moderators noted that officials in Springfield, Ohio – the purported site of this mythical feasting – flatly deny the fabrication, he responded that he had seen it on TV. He thereby botched a potentially potent issue.

Ms. Harris, by contrast, gave an artful response regarding Palestinians and Israel, a dangerously divisive issue among Democrats. She denounced the Hamas attack of October 7 and pledged to defend Israel against Iran or its proxies. But she bemoaned the suffering of Palestinians and strongly endorsed a two-state solution, insisting Palestinians must enjoy “self-determination, freedom and the dignity they so rightly deserve”. That gave as much to each side as plausible. Mr. Trump’s response – claiming that she hates Israel but also hates Arabs – was incoherent, ad hominem and hostile.

Mr. Trump tried to corner Ms. Harris on the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he ended up defending his own record of dealing with the Taliban. He refused to say that he wants Ukraine to defeat the Russian invasion. And he repeatedly praised and cited the “strongman” Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban.

Ms. Harris repeated her convention pledge to maintain the US military as “the most lethal” in the world, hawkish phraseology atypical of Democrats but appealing to many independents.

She hammered him on issue after issue, didn’t “lose” a single exchange and carried most of them decisively. He appeared particularly irked when she questioned the size and enthusiasm of his rally crowds, once again demonstrating his predictability. Indeed, one of her strongest selling points is that she offers something new and different, an opportunity to turn the page on a political environment defined by Mr. Trump, US President Joe Biden and their generation.

Stylistically, despite her determination to demonstrate “strength” by being assertive and even combative, she managed to be forward-looking, offering voters a new era in US politics. A glowering Mr. Trump, by contrast, was unrelentingly negative. Swing voters may prefer her optimism and the opportunity to move away from ongoing divisions, although economic discontent could prevent that.

She was especially effective in her response to his attacks on her mixed ethnic heritage, urging Americans to put racial and other divisions aside and unite as a single people. This is something Mr. Trump has never even hinted at in his political career, which has been based almost entirely on dividing the country.

The closing arguments summarized the evening: Ms. Harris appealed to Americans for unity and optimism for a new future, while Mr. Trump bitterly denounced his opponent, her administration and the supposedly “failing” and wretched state of the country.

Mr. Trump suffered a devastating defeat, and he knows it. He’s claiming he prevailed despite it being “three on one”, suggesting that the moderators were biased for occasionally correcting some of his falsehoods. When someone is complaining about the moderators, they know they’ve lost.

Mr. Biden’s meltdown on June 27 demonstrated that debates can reshape elections. If Ms. Harris wins in November, this debate may be recalled as a key inflection point moving late-breaking voters into her camp.

She clearly won the debate. That doesn’t mean she’ll win the election. But her chances seem better than ever.

If nothing else, Ms. Harris has just executed one of the finest and most effective debate performances in US political history.

Trump’s flip-flop on a woman’s right to choose is an electoral liability for him

This op-ed was published by The National on September 6, 2024

In US presidential elections, early September initiates a typically combative, fluctuating last two months. Vice President Kamala Harris has a small lead over former president Donald Trump, but the race remains a toss-up, ripe for daily intensification.

This campaign stage typically features accusations of flip-flopping, interrogating how and why candidates have altered their previous positions.

Ms. Harris has clear exposure but also some protective padding. Most of her independent positions predate becoming President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020. She has shifted on several important issues, such as petroleum extraction through fracking (which she now supports), single-payer public health care (now opposes), and immigration (now much tougher).

Ms. Harris and the Democratic Party in general have shifted significantly to the center. On immigration, in particular, it was stunning to watch her convention pledge to sign the “Langford bill” – a virtual wish list for Republicans on border issues – greeted with thunderous cheers by a Democratic crowd. And she is using Mr. Trump’s cynical opposition to the bill as a powerful rebuttal on border-related criticism.

Confronted with such so-called flip-flops in a recent interview, she acknowledged some of her views have changed, but insisted her values haven’t. She suggested that she’s learnt a great deal after almost four years in the White House, and developed a keener appreciation of the need to “build consensus”, a clear nod to lessons from Mr. Biden who has championed bipartisanship. Spending the past four years perforce supporting Mr Biden’s positions allows her to insist that his popular policies will continue but his unpopular ones won’t.

Mr. Trump’s relationship with political, or other, consistency is far more tenuous. Despite decades as a public gadfly in New York and almost 10 years in national politics, it’s much easier to list the few issues on which he’s held firm: opposition to immigration and free trade, plus a long track record of racist and misogynistic words and deeds.

But on most policy issues, he’s highly flexible. He began as a liberal Democrat (except on racial matters), dabbled with libertarian and independent platforms, and is now a conservative Republican. But the public and the media have largely given him a pass on his pre-2015 stances.

It’s pointless to look for such consistency because Mr. Trump doesn’t “do policy”. He does politics, and he appears mainly guided by how he thinks his base will react to developments in a 12-hour news cycle. In 2020, the Republican Party dispensed with issuing a platform altogether, simply affirming support for any of his positions – apparently because they couldn’t anticipate what he might come to favor.

This free-form flip-flopping is virtually priced into his political persona. For instance, few voters are likely to learn or care that he now supports decriminalization of marijuana in his home state of Florida, though he was a hardline anti-drug president.

Nonetheless, he’s having extreme difficulty with the policy surely most associated with his presidency: prohibiting abortion.

Evangelical and other conservative Christians were initially skeptical, but in 2016 he persuaded them that he was serious about appointing Supreme Court justices who would prioritize ending almost 50 years of constitutionally protected access to early-term abortions. They eventually became the rock-solid cornerstone of his adoring base.

Through good fortune and cynical Senate chicanery, he appointed three of the nine current justices, and in 2022 that court indeed overturned the constitutional right to choice for American women. Mr. Trump then spent years boasting that he was personally, if not single-handedly, responsible.

But in 2024, that’s all become a liability.

The court ruling, and widespread pushback against abortion access (and other vital women’s healthcare provisions) in conservative states is so unpopular that, ever since, in every competitive election in which reproductive health care has been a major issue, liberals have won (even in hyper-conservative states such as Alabama). Yet the new Republican party platform suggests that embryos do, or should, have unspecified constitutional rights, signaling a nationwide total abortion ban.

Mr. Trump is clearly nervous, and with good reason.

Eyebrows were raised when he insisted that another Trump term would be “great for women and their reproductive rights”. But his implication that he might vote for a referendum in Florida overturning the state’s highly restrictive six-week limit (when women often have no idea that they’ve become pregnant) made many of his anti-abortion supporters livid.

Inundated with criticism, he “clarified” that he would vote no, falsely claiming that the referendum would allow abortions through the ninth month. Such hyperbole is nothing new, since he has been wrongly insisting for years that Democrats support and allow for “after-birth abortions”, which is murder and unlawful everywhere.

Just as Mr. Trump has failed to develop an effective counter to Ms. Harris – his latest nickname for her, “Comrade Kamala”, unsurprisingly isn’t catching on – he hasn’t found a stance that accommodates his existing and possibly epoch-shaping anti-abortion policies while attenuating the price at the ballot box.

His main strategy in recent weeks has been to advocate leaving the matter to each state. That hasn’t appeased anyone, and it’s annoyed many on his side.

He even recently suggested universal coverage for in vitro fertilization, which is considered murderous by much of his base. But it’s likely to prove one of his offhanded trial balloons, like his recent suggestion that graduating international students at US universities be given green cards, that end up on history’s cutting room floor.

The Harris campaign is so invested in reproductive rights that it’s highlighting them through a 50-stop national bus tour, beginning near Mr. Trump’s home in Florida.

The candidates are bound to vigorously confront each other at the upcoming debate. Mr. Trump would be wise not to again accuse Ms. Harris of flip-flopping on her mixed racial identity by suddenly “turning black”. And she’s best advised to foreground women’s health care and force Mr. Trump to either stand by or backtrack further from his strong restrictionist track record. His instincts for throwing red meat to his strongest supporters could help her task, although he’s likely to stick to his “leave it to each state” formula.

Flip-flopping accusations are largely ineffective political cliches. But Mr. Trump’s close association with one of the most unpopular socio-political upheavals in recent history is almost certainly the biggest liability facing either candidate this year.

Facing the prospect of losing the election, Trump seems lost

This op-ed was published by The National on August 29, 2024

With less than 70 days to go for the US presidential election, Republican candidate, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump is struggling in the polls. He has yet to find an effective messaging strategy against his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. And he’s persisting with an ongoing series of highly damaging unforced errors.

The initial data to emerge since the end of the recent Democratic National Convention shows Ms. Harris opening a four-point national lead. That’s not quite large enough to calm Democrats, because their voters are “inefficiently” clustered in high-population areas like cities and coastal states, whereas Republican voters are more “efficiently” spread out across rural states and districts. While it now seems certain that Mr. Trump will yet again lose the popular vote, if the percentage difference is three or less, he could still eke out a narrow electoral college victory.

However, Ms. Harris enjoys four of the most important presidential campaign advantages: momentum, vibes, likeability and enthusiasm.

Her momentum is obvious. She inherited a six-point deficit against Mr. Trump from President Joe Biden. She has regained it all and established a significant lead that might well soon expand.

Atmospherics are more important than policies. Much of the electorate are “low information voters”, who may know which policies they prefer, but aren’t clear what the two parties advocate. They typically vote based on campaign imagery and vibes, and on that score, Ms. Harris is strongly prevailing.

Her atmospherics radiate joy, optimism and upbeat humor, plus a relatable, down-to-earth, common touch, bolstered by her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Moreover, the unity and intense patriotism seen at the Democratic convention, and surge into the political center – Ms. Harris’s crowd even cheered a very conservative immigration bill – should effectively counteract Mr. Trump’s efforts to label her ultra-left and even a “communist”.

Along with Mr. Walz, she has created a slightly offbeat, goofy, jovial campaign that seems relatable and likable. Mr. Trump’s efforts to “other” her, by falsely claiming that she spent her career presenting herself as Indian until she suddenly “turned black”, appear to have failed miserably.

It contrasts dramatically with the angry, grim and catastrophizing atmosphere surrounding Mr. Trump and his shockingly inept running mate, Senator JD Vance. Asked “what makes you happy”, Mr. Vance snapped: “I smile at a lot of things including bogus questions from the media.” He then reiterated how angry he is.

Mr. Trump’s flat-footed attempt at kitchen table populism backfired when he held a news conference on the price of groceries that largely ignored the topic and was bizarrely held at one of his membership hotels that costs $500,000 to join.

Ms. Harris even has the most coveted campaign advantage of all: enthusiasm. Republicans, like their dear leader, appear wrongfooted by the sudden rise of Ms Harris. Mr. Trump and many Republicans seem dejected by the reversal of fortunes, whereas Democrats evince enthusiasm bordering on elation. Their biggest problem isn’t enthusiasm but overconfidence in a race that will inevitably be very close. Yet this belongs squarely in the “problems you want to have” category.

Mr. Trump faces a daunting uphill struggle, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do next.

His latest gambit, staging a campaign event at Arlington National Cemetery, the premier burial ground for US veterans, appears to have only made matters worse. Mr. Trump apparently intended to embarrass the Biden administration by focusing on a Taliban suicide bomb attack that killed 13 US troops on August 26, 2021. But such campaign events are strictly prohibited there.

A long-serving cemetery staff member sought to enforce these rules on Mr. Trump’s photographers seeking a campaign photo op. She was reportedly berated and shoved aside by Trump staff, who ignored her warnings about the rules and then violated them.

Mr. Trump’s spokesman accused her of having “a mental health episode”, and campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita defamed her as “a despicable individual”.

This blunder reopened longstanding concerns that Mr. Trump, despite his jingoism, does not understand a military that he avoided serving in during the Vietnam War due to a dubious diagnosis of bone spurs. He has reportedly described fallen US soldiers as “suckers and losers”, and once marveled, when visiting a US military cemetery, that: “I just don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

Yet the US news media persists in allowing Mr. Trump impunity to make public comments, especially on social media, that would be treated as alarming and newsworthy outbursts if they were made by other career politicians, including Mr. Biden or Ms. Harris.

On Wednesday alone, on his bespoke social media platform, Mr. Trump unleashed a series of re-posts that ought to raise serious concerns about his intentions and stability.

He repeatedly threatened to prosecute and “lock up” numerous perceived enemies, including many Democrats, several Republicans, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and top epidemiologist Anthony Fauci. He reiterated his groundless claim that then president Barack Obama wiretapped his phones during the 2016 election campaign.

There was more besides, but nary a peep from major American news organizations. They have created a “new normal” that grants Mr. Trump alone a virtual carte blanche to blast such outrageous plans and accusations into the cultural-political ether without raising the obvious and appropriate concerns about his mental or emotional condition.

Reporters and editors might claim such misbehavior is “priced in” to Mr. Trump’s political persona. But, if so, that’s largely because the media, and not the public, is bored with reporting his endless eccentricities and daily excesses. It amounts to journalistic malpractice.

The coming weeks include Mr. Trump’s sentencing on the adult film actress hush money case, in which he could get some jail time, and a scheduled debate with Ms. Harris on September 10, which might be his last chance of significantly shifting the race again before it’s too late. It could also finish his election chances off decisively.

With just eight weeks to go, Mr. Trump needs to find some way of changing the current trajectory. If not, he faces not just another electoral defeat, this time to a mixed-race woman, but also the great likelihood of significant prison sentences at pending trials. No wonder he appears so dejected, low-energy and lost.

It’s becoming clear how much Trump misses Biden

This op-ed was published by The National on August 14,2024

Former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump‘s mounting panic, at times bordering on hysteria, is hardly surprising. It is not just his sudden and complete reversal of fortunes in the election campaign. Mr. Trump isn’t merely running to get back into the White House. He is running to stay out of prison.

Less than a month ago, he was presiding like a Roman emperor over his coronation at the Republican National Convention, sitting in his sky box receiving lines of ring-kissing high-ranking supplicants. He had just barely survived an assassination attempt and appeared on a glide path to re-election against an evidently declining President Joe Biden.

Suddenly, he is instead facing the dynamic and heretofore underrated Vice President Kamala Harris who in no time has opened a significant lead in national and key swing state polls. More importantly, she has captured the cultural momentum by fostering an optimism and joy unwitnessed in US politics for decades.

Her sudden dominance and Mr. Trump’s inability to regain control over the pop cultural register he is used to effortlessly dominating is clearly profoundly disturbing. He’s facing the terrifying twin specters of losing to a black woman and going to prison.

He faces sentencing over his adult film star hush money convictions, and, if he loses the election, trials over pilfered top-secret government documents and extensive efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In the documents case, in particular, he has virtually no defence and could face a significant prison term.

He has moved quickly to begin establishing a narrative to challenge the validity and legality of a potential defeat. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed, for example, that it was “unconstitutional” and “a coup” – and of course deeply “unfair“ to himself – for Ms. Harris to replace Mr. Biden as the Democrats’ nominee, which is all laughable. But his campaign manager, Chris LaCivita – a notorious practitioner of the political dark arts– ominously insisted that: “It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day”.

Given Mr. Trump’s myriad efforts to overturn the 2020 election, highlighting the interregnum between voting and inauguration is deeply ominous, especially since over 70 election-denying activists now occupy state-level positions of election-related authority.

Mr. Trump may be tempted to go further this time, given the much higher stakes, but his options will probably be limited to sowing chaos and doubt, and ultimately attempting to get either courts or the House of Representatives to supersede the voters.

But most of Mr. Trump’s responses to his unexpected political crisis have been visceral and instinctive. He has been mystifyingly denouncing popular Republican governors, reportedly lashing out at his aides and referring to his opponent in sexist and derogatory terms, and publicly questioning her ethnicity and intelligence. But he still lacks any effective counterattack.

Mr. Trump and Mr. LaCivita are attempting to repurpose successful tactics from earlier contests. By absurdly claiming that Ms. Harris always presented herself as Indian until she suddenly “turned Black”, Mr. Trump is reprising his effective attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” because of her questionable claims of Native American ancestry. “Here’s another phoney”, he’s implying, but with no apparent success.

Worse, his running mate, Senator JD Vance, is leading a despicable effort to replay the mudslinging or “swift boating” attacks – orchestrated by Mr. LaCivita – denouncing Senator John Kerry in his 2004 election loss to then-president George W Bush. That barrage of defamation tarnished Mr. Kerry’s record as a Vietnam war hero through unfounded accusations ranging from cowardice to dishonesty.

This tactic has been revived against Ms. Harris’s running mate, Governor Tim Walz, claiming that he showed cowardice and disloyalty by retiring after 24 years in the military because his former unit was subsequently deployed to Iraq.

The biggest danger of such political ordure is not that it will stick – it almost certainly won’t – but rather that it could make military service a liability for potential candidates. It dishonestly disincentivizes National Service, even after no less than 24 years of honorable soldiering. Mr. Vance himself served only four years, largely writing articles for the military. And Mr. Trump received a highly dubious medical deferment for alleged bone spurs that, if they existed at all, were so insignificant he can’t remember on which foot.

But mostly Mr. Trump has been pining for the good old days of a few weeks ago, and his much-missed former opponent, Mr. Biden. At a recent rally, he attacked Mr. Biden almost as much as Ms. Harris. “Why did I debate him?” he plaintively lamented, though he is now demanding three additional debates with his new opponent (an unmistakable sign of political alarm).

He’s even conjured a bizarre scenario, floated in speeches and social media, in which Mr. Biden bursts into the upcoming Democratic national convention and reclaims the nomination. This very public pipe dream has even some sympathizers wondering if the aging Mr. Trump is beginning to lose touch with reality.

Such concerns were further stoked by his promotion of an incredible conspiracy theory that Ms. Harris is using artificial intelligence to generate fake crowds around the country, based on a supposed reflection in a photograph of her parked aircraft. He has long been obsessed with crowd size, but questioning the reality of her numerous large rallies – a claim even more ridiculous than, for instance, fantasies of the moon landing having been faked – could well be more reflective of emotional deterioration than any form of political calculation.

Mr Biden unquestionably showed serious mental decline, and media scrutiny of that was entirely appropriate. Yet the US press has remained largely silent on Mr Trump‘s own strikingly decreased acuity.

Even an actual “stable genius”, as Mr Trump has famously described himself, at a crossroads between the White House and “the big house” – with only an election determining which it will be and suddenly staring at an unexpected potential defeat and hard time – might be hard-pressed to maintain psychic equilibrium.

It’s high time the country’s media, after an inexcusable eight years of self-imposed silence, finally interrogates Mr Trump’s emotional stability, grasp on reality and mental acuity. Anything less is tantamount to deceiving the public by implying there’s nothing to warrant such concerns even though the evidence suggesting that Mr. Trump may have serious “issues” has become overwhelming.

With Trump riding new momentum, Biden will need to move quickly

This op-ed was published by The National on July 16, 2024

The only good news for the Democrats is that this year’s presidential election is being held in November and not tomorrow. US President Joe Biden is stubbornly pressing forward with his candidacy despite continuing doubts about his acuity and vigour. Meanwhile, the presumptive Republican nominee, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump, has pocketed a set of shocking and largely unanticipated victories.

The US Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to all precedent, the plain language of the Constitution and stated intentions of its framers, plus simple common sense, both current and former presidents are broadly shielded from criminal prosecution, or even investigation, for any act that falls within the “outer perimeters” of their official duties. That’s not everything, but it’s awfully close.

The appalling ruling jeopardises much, though not all, of the federal case regarding Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result. But it seems more designed to free his hand in a potential second term.

No president before Mr. Trump, with the exception of Richard Nixon, required or sought extensive executive criminal immunity, because they didn’t commit egregious, self-serving crimes. This ruling seems designed to protect an exceptionally lawless president because it anticipates the return of just such a figure from their own Republican partisan camp.

If effectively freeing Mr. Trump from the rule of law in preparation for a second term wasn’t bad enough, Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon invalidated the entire case wherein he has no plausible defence for having purloined hundreds of top-secret government documents, refused to return them, and hid them from the FBI and even his own lawyers.

She ruled that special prosecutor Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed, a baffling claim already essentially rejected by many courts, including the Supreme Court. She will almost certainly be yet again roundly and derisively overturned by appellate courts, but long after the election. If Mr Trump wins, the case goes away. If not, she will probably be overruled and replaced on the grounds of palpable bias and gross incompetence.

Mr Trump even narrowly survived an appalling assassination attempt, which left him slightly bloodied but also framed one of the most potent political photographs in US history.

It depicts him bleeding for his people and cause, punching his fist into the air in defiance. Amid an array of red, white and blue, waving US flags, and security officials, he effectively signalled bravery, power and authority. It is his core appeal to his supporters concentrated with astonishing graphic precision in a single arresting image.

That photo alone won’t return him to power. But Mr. Trump isn’t just incredibly lucky to have survived the heinous attack. Instead of being badly wounded or killed, he emerged as the central figure in one of the most potentially inspiring and impressive images in recent memory.

Mr. Biden by contrast continues to struggle in the polls, in which Mr. Trump seems to have developed a small national lead that’s more pronounced in some key swing states. Many Democrats fear it’s going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for Mr. Biden to demonstrate his own vigor and valor, avoid further senior meltdowns as during last month’s debate, and eventually win.

All this has left the Democrats petrified of the next shoe to drop. Mr. Trump is getting unexpected and largely unearned great news from all directions, although being shot by a crazed assassin is surely a horrible experience.

Even the most cynical legal observers thought the two recent rulings beyond implausible. And as Mr Trump boasts about divine intervention, and seems even more messianic to the faithful now gathered at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, many Democrats see little hope and are bracing for the next brutal blow.

Mr. Trump has selected Ohio Senator JD Vance as his running mate. This decision could prove a mistake, as it doubles down on the Trump-inflected extremism that Mr. Vance used to denounce and ridicule but now passionately promotes.

Mr Trump might have better strengthened his hand by choosing a woman or a more traditional Republican such as Florida Senator Marco Rubio. But he can rest assured that Mr Vance, unlike former vice president Mike Pence, would have tried to use non-existent vice-presidential powers on January 6, 2021 to try to overturn the election results – because Mr Vance has repeatedly said so.

With several months to go, the Democrats still have time to reverse the momentum, especially since polling still shows a close race.

But they have little to work with. They’re more anxious about another pronounced senior moment from Mr Biden than excited by him. He must do something highly significant to change the emerging equation – or allow Vice President Kamala Harris to inherit the nomination. Theoretically, he could do this any time before the election, citing ill health. But the longer it takes, the riskier that gambit becomes.

After the shooting, both candidates called for calm and unity.

But Mr Trump, in particular, is already back on the extreme rhetorical warpath. He can benefit from surviving the attack with defiance, but risks being further associated with violence and chaos.

Mr Biden will seek to reinforce his 2020 election pitch that he is the voice of calm, regular order, non-violent and centrist politics, and the antidote to polarisation and extremism.

He can cite an extensive record of bipartisan legislative achievements, greatly overshadowing Mr Trump’s legislation, which was mainly a huge tax cut for the wealthy. But the President faces accusations that he failed to unite or calm anyone and even contributed to the polarisation that led to the shooting.

Last week, Mr Biden started emphasising an aggressively populist economic agenda. The contrast is potentially powerful: he wants to tax the rich, Mr Trump wants to tax the poor; he wants to create more jobs, Mr Trump wants more tariffs; he wants to invest more in society and human capital, Mr Trump wants to cut social services and public investments.

The Democrats planned to ensure that the election is effectively a referendum on Mr Trump’s felonious character. It still can be.

Indeed, the news cycle is all about him. But it’s almost all good news for the former president and terrible for the paralyzed, bewildered and rudderless Democrats. They urgently need something dramatic to revive their faith and hope, and change the emerging election narrative and momentum before it’s too late.

Post debate, Biden’s Democrats don’t look quite so different from Trump’s Republicans

This op-ed was published by The National on July 1, 2024

My reaction to the appalling debate between US President Joe Biden and former president and convicted felon Donald Trump on Thursday was primarily anger. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says he wept. Many reported feeling panic or despair.

But on the night, and even more since, I remain profoundly angry at, and disappointed by, a Democratic Party that has proven itself far more like the Trump-era Republicans than I imagined.

The differences remain staggering. The Republicans are morphing into a virtual personality cult that is openly and aggressively hostile to democracy and the US constitutional order. It is shot through with racism, extreme personal and unheard-of institutional corruption, and both real and feigned radical Christian fundamentalism.

The Republicans still pose a range of dangers that the Democrats simply don’t. One of the worst Trump-dominated Republican characteristics is their reliance on gaslighting. They appear to have made an art form of lying, insisting that obvious facts are not true and telling Americans to believe them.

Denying verifiable reality and sowing mistrust of knowledge and perceptions is routine for Republicans both for political expediency and to protect the interests and feelings of their leader, Mr. Trump. It has been a degrading spectacle, and one in which Democrats, for all their faults, did not appear to be replicating.

The debate, however, revealed that Americans have been systematically hoodwinked by Mr Biden’s inner circle who insisted that, despite “senior moments”, Mr. Biden remained sharp and mentally agile. It’s likely that Mr. Biden does not realize the extent of his deterioration. But his most important enablers, especially his wife, Dr Jill Biden, have apparently not only failed to inform most of the party and public about his actual condition, but don’t seem to have told him the truth either.

Now the party has rallied around Mr. Biden, ensuring he will remain its candidate. But now we know why he has given so few interviews and press conferences, and has been shielded, to an unprecedented extent from unscripted public events. Mr. Biden huddled with his family on Sunday and was reportedly unanimously urged to stay the course.

Most major party leaders and donors have waved away his public mental implosion as “a bad night”. Former president Barack Obama assured the public every candidate has such stumbles. But this was manifestly not an ordinary “off day”, or the consequence of an illness or other circumstance likely to improve or not be repeated. Mr. Biden lacks the ability to roll back the hands of time.

It makes raw political sense for the Democrats to stick with him. Trying to replace him now risks a collapse into infighting by the interest and identity groups that make up the coalition, and take numerous ballots at the convention to decide a nominee. That candidate might be hobbled by resulting recriminations.

But such a candidate might inspire and electrify the party and public. Voters are clear they don’t like either candidate and are keen on a younger, new face. The Democrats have many plausible such candidates, most notably Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

But the party obviously doesn’t want to take that risk and has made no effort to convince Mr. Biden to voluntarily step aside, free his delegates and decline to endorse anyone, which is what would set up the high-risk but high-reward gamble of a highly charged and very quick open process to find an alternative.

It’s obvious why Democrats want to stick with Mr. Biden. Replacing him might constitute political malpractice if all you care about is winning. And it can be plausibly argued that defeating Mr. Trump, given his authoritarian tendencies and adjudicated corruption, is all-important. Changing candidates is probably a much bigger risk than sticking with a tried-and-true president who enjoys the advantage of incumbency and several other invaluable qualities that an alternative would lack.

Many Democrats persuasively argue that the fundamentals will eventually favor Mr. Biden, current opinion polls notwithstanding. They would indeed be toying with those fundamentals if they charge off in search of someone else, assuming there’s no repeated public meltdown.

So, political expediency, the probability of victory, the need to preserve the existing Biden coalition, and a reluctance to hurt the feelings of their own leader, even without a cultic devotion to him, all explain this wagon-circling. Yet this also means that Americans must recognize that Democrats share some of the very worst qualities critics of the Trump-era Republican Party have most deplored. By waving the debate performance away as merely “a bad night”, a typical campaign “setback”, or, most preposterously, the result of “a cold”, Democratic bigwigs are gaslighting the public.

They are urging us to pretend we didn’t see what we saw, that it doesn’t mean what we know it means, or that it somehow doesn’t matter. For the party, maybe it is and must be only about winning. But even the imperative of defeating Mr. Trump, which remains crucial, does not excuse a shoddy exercise in deception that urges people to ignore an obvious and devastating reality they witnessed in real time.

Closing an election sale is certainly vital, but sober and patriotic political marketers should also care a little about the nature of the product. Democrats are probably right to stick with Mr. Biden if all they care about is beating Mr. Trump and taking no wild gambles. But even given the risks, it might be important to field a fully cognisant and competent candidate who doesn’t regularly have “bad days”, and who will surely have increasing numbers of them in private and public.

Above all, asking voters to ignore what they saw – rather than stressing the need to defeat Mr. Trump, or insisting that Mr. Biden will be a capable chief executive surrounded by strong lieutenants – is unforgivable.

The bottom line is that the Democrats are not nearly as different from the Republicans as many of us thought and hoped. That even implies that they might be almost as bad if they had their own version of Mr. Trump, which is, thank goodness, a remote prospect.

Democrats are still dramatically preferable to Republicans. But Americans and people around the world are discovering the contrast is not nearly as stark as previously imagined.