Suppose that, immediately after January 6, 2021, you had predicted the following developments: Disgraced coup plotter Donald Trump would avoid impeachment and then prison. He would not only regain control of the Republican Party, but would deepen his hold on it, driving his skeptics within the party into retreat or terrified silence. He would win reelection without the slightest drama. The Supreme Court would rule that he has the right to commit crimes in office. And then he would win a second term virtually unopposed.
Only the craziest of QAnon followers would have imagined such a triumphant rise from ignominy to redemption. But now all but the last item on this list has come to pass, and that, too, is on track to happen, with serious and possibly long-lasting repercussions for the legitimacy of the party that has taken on the task of preventing Trump’s return.
Here’s the situation in all its surreality. Joe Biden is the only candidate standing (if we define the term broadly) between Trump and a far more powerful version of the office he previously held. Before his chaotic debate with Trump, Biden was already in serious trouble: dragged down by a sub-40% approval rating and trailing in several states he won four years ago, even with the benefit of a saturation-blitz advertising campaign in key states that Trump doesn’t yet have (but soon will have) the funds to reciprocate.
After the debate (and, again, using the term loosely, since it takes two to debate and only one candidate joined the discussion), things look much bleaker. Biden has lost his best, and perhaps only, high-profile forum to change the contours of the race. Voters have now seen, and can’t unsee, Biden in what appears to be the grip of an advanced cognitive breakdown. Trump could have spent the entire 90 minutes with his pants around his ankles and still would have won.
Election results cannot be predicted with certainty. There is always the possibility that something will happen to alter the race or that the polls will systematically underestimate Biden. But there is no good reason to assume that either of these things is true and there is considerable reason to believe the opposite. Contrary to Biden’s claim that he was underestimated in 2020, the polls did underestimate Biden. Triumph in their last two elections. (Republicans have underperformed in midterms and special elections when Trump was No (On the ballot, he seems to attract certain voters who don’t talk to pollsters and whose only loyalty is to him personally.) And the most obvious event that could change the game is another incident that exposes Biden’s fragility. Age-related decline is a one-way mechanism.
Biden has reacted to the catastrophe in a depressing but expected way. He has portrayed his fiasco as “a bad debate,” a phrase meant to obscure both the frequency with which similar episodes have arisen in other settings and the sheer level of dysfunction they revealed. He has leaned more heavily on the advice of family members, whose loyalty lies primarily with him rather than his party or country. And he has pressured Democrats to shut up and fall in line without taking any convincing steps to assuage their concerns.
This response is sadly consistent with the behavior of aging leaders who refuse to sacrifice their power for the common good. Ruth Bader Ginsburg insisted on her own indispensability, as if the cause of liberalism would suffer if she were replaced by a younger, cancer-free jurist. Dianne Feinstein denied her own cognitive decline to the point of being too incapacitated to acknowledge her own incapacity, surrounded by aides whose professional incentive was to maintain the illusion of competence.
This is the trajectory that the Biden campaign is following. If it continues, the presidency will likely fall to Trump as easily as the Supreme Court seat fell to Ginsburg.
Democrats have responded to this calamity in three ways. One faction, made up mostly of moderates in Congress, has hinted or stated outright that Biden should drop out of the race.
A second faction, heavily concentrated on the left wing of his party, has echoed Biden’s insistence that the decision has been made and the debate is over. “I’ve talked to him at length,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “He made it clear then and he’s made it clear since that he’s in this race. The deal is closed.” No matter how weakened he is or might become — to invert a phrase Trump made famous — Biden wouldn’t lose their support if someone shot him on Fifth Avenue.
The third faction of Democratic officials has publicly backed Biden, albeit less enthusiastically, while some are privately fatalistic. “We’re riding this horse right now,” one House Democrat, who privately wants Biden to retire, told the political website NOTUS. “And so I’m changing course. I’m going to make my best argument that we should elect the old man versus the crazy man.” Another Democrat told NBC: “I wish I was braver.”
The strategy adopted by the lamenters is to hope that the decision will be made for them. They have pressed Biden to open up his cloistered campaign to more interviews and spontaneous events (such as a rare July 11 press conference at the NATO summit in Washington), which would theoretically give him the opportunity to show that he has the stamina and mental speed to make the case against Trump or leave him vulnerable to the risk of another meltdown, forcing the issue.
The problem is that this last possibility is exactly why Biden has refused to expose himself to more than a handful of impromptu appearances. The middle course of allowing Biden to keep the nomination and asking him to change his public style is the one with the least chance of success. The threat of a full-blown revolt is the only leverage disaffected Democrats have. If they settle for vague promises of gradual change, their influence dissipates and Biden can simply wait. The more time passes, the harder it will be for Democrats to organize a new nominee (or a new nomination process), and the less incentive Biden will have to make impromptu appearances. More Democrats are beginning to understand this, and before the NATO press conference they gave signals that they were willing to demand that he step aside.
If Democrats think it’s safe to quietly join a losing campaign rather than risk a change with an uncertain outcome, they aren’t thinking aggressively enough about how their own voters would respond to a loss. Ezra Klein recently reported on private conversations with elected Democrats who say, “I can live with the possibility of Donald Trump winning.”
The party’s organizing foundation from the first day Trump took office has been to treat it as a civic emergency. This is the basis for demanding donations, volunteer work, and sacrifice. If they are not willing to endure the relatively modest discomfort of a contentious internal debate to downplay the possibility of a second Trump term, they will have betrayed their supporters.
Meanwhile, the result of this paralysis is a paralyzed Biden dragging a largely reluctant party into what he sees as certain defeat. Three and a half years ago, one might have imagined that Trumpian authoritarianism would return to power amid a wave of violence. Instead, history may record that he seized power again when his opposition essentially abdicated.
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