Savior Complexes | Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books

Fintan O’Toole

The final weeks of Joe Biden’s campaign were most dismaying for the ways he mirrored Trump.

August 15, 2024 issue

Read time: 19 minutes

This Issue. August 15, 2024

On July 13, after Thomas Matthew Crooks fired multiple shots at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the world saw the difference between presence of mind and absence of mind. Trump, who was shot in the right ear, gave an extraordinary demonstration of the first of these qualities. He flinched as he felt the bullet. According to his subsequent post on Truth Social, he “heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin. Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.” He dropped to the ground. Yet as Secret Service agents lifted him to his feet to hustle him out of danger, he had the self-awareness to pan out of the chaos and see himself as he wished to be seen, not just by those present but by voters in November’s presidential election. “Wait, wait, wait,” he instructed the agents. He steadied himself, threw his fist up in the air, and either mouthed or shouted the words “Fight! Fight! Fight!” He created for the Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci an image that can rightly be called iconic. The red stripes of blood on his face, the white of his miraculously unsullied shirt, and the blue of the sky that fills most of the frame echo the red, white, and blue of the Stars and Stripes floating over him, just in line with the top of his defiant fist.

Almost exactly two hours after Trump was shot, President Joe Biden spoke to the nation from Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. Unlike Trump, he was not in shock, and he had the advantage of time to consider his response to the events in Pennsylvania. Yet what he managed to say at this critical moment was utterly baffling: “The idea—the idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.” Coming from anyone with any awareness of political history, this would have been extraordinary. Coming from Biden, it was incomprehensible. A very prominent dimension of his political persona has always been his sense of being linked to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Robert Kennedy in 1968. In his campaign speeches he evoked the image of himself and his sister, Valerie, weeping openly as Robert Kennedy’s funeral train passed by.

Valerie recalled in her memoir, Growing Up Biden, that her brother, from the start of his political career, would say of the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King Jr. that “these events catalyzed him to run for public office.”

With this legacy imprinted on his DNA, how could Biden possibly have found himself saying that such things are “just unheard of”? He cannot really have forgotten all this history from his own youth—but he made it seem as though he had. While Trump had just managed in terrible circumstances to stage a potent drama of alertness and mental control, Biden created an impression of haziness about both the present and the past.

The contrast was magnified, of course, because just over a fortnight earlier, on June 27, Trump dominated Biden in a televised debate in which the incumbent was so confused and incoherent as to seem at times barely aware of what he was hearing or saying. Four days later the US Supreme Court effectively eliminated one of the most basic principles of the Enlightenment—equality before the law—in granting to American presidents very wide immunity from prosecution for their actions in office. The court signaled to Trump that if he wins the election in November he can do pretty much as he pleases, regardless of the laws that bind other citizens. The path to autocracy was cleared, and even before the effects of Trump’s survival of the attempted assassination began to be felt, it was obvious that Biden was not capable of blocking it. Yet those who would defend American democracy have dithered between alarm and indecision. They struggle to act because Trump is no longer a merely external enemy. He has become also the enemy within. He has increasingly remade his opponents in his own image.

Those who define themselves by the thing they are not eventually find themselves more and more like their imagined opposite. To be someone’s antithesis is also to be their alter ego. Watching the disintegration of Joe Biden in the debate with Trump, I was reminded of Hans Christian Andersen’s chilling story “The Shadow,” in which a man’s shade comes to life, gradually infiltrates his existence, takes over his entire persona, and kills him off. Biden’s shadow is Trump, and we got to watch in real time as it inhabited and displaced him.

This happened at a point in the debate when Biden had already alarmed viewers with his weak, raspy voice, his looks of stricken confusion, his fragmentary or unintelligible answers, his claim that “We created 15,000 new jobs” (he meant 15 million), and his boast, which Trump pounced on with relish, that “We finally beat Medicare.” The horrifying feeling of watching a president in free fall had been firmly established when the co-moderator Dana Bash raised the obvious concern that both men would be well into their eighties at the end of a second term. Biden, a man capable of dignity and even of grace, morphed before our eyes into a bargain-basement Trump. The contest for the future of the American republic became two crabby old men in the clubhouse shouting, “My swing is bigger than yours.”

Trump boasted that he had won two golf championships. He could “hit the ball a long way,” whereas Biden “can’t hit a ball fifty yards.” To any opponent who was fully present, this pitiful bragging would have been manna from heaven. Trump was inviting the one thing he cannot withstand: mockery. He had left himself wide open to a quip of the kind that would have shown Biden to have his wits about him: “Did you win those championships at your own clubs? How do we know they weren’t rigged?”

Instead, Biden shanked his response out of bounds, way beyond the outer limits of intelligent political debate, into the mire of idiocy:

I’d be happy to have a driving contest with him. I got my handicap, which, when I was vice president, down to a six. And by the way, I told you before I’m happy to play golf if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?

That’s a ball that will never be found again. It will always be out there, lodged in some dark hollow of American history—the final proof that Biden really has lost it.

Not only did the debate come down to this level of mutual fatuity; Trump, rather than Biden, was the first to realize that it was all too embarrassing to be endured. It was the man whose shamelessness knows no limits who grasped how mortifying it was that the past and future leaders of the free world were uttering lines like “I’ve seen your swing, I know your swing.” Trump moved to end it: “Let’s not act like children.” Even then Biden was too slow to grasp what was happening, to understand that Trump had just established himself as the adult in the room. Biden continued in playground mode: “You are a child.” It seems he thought that he was winning, that this puerile comeback was somehow a point scored for democracy.

As in some gothic movie, the two men were switching identities. Trump had enough self-awareness to put on a little show of restraint, to demonstrate to viewers that he understood how pathetic this episode of reality TV was becoming. He may have sensed, too, that he had already delivered a knockout blow by luring Biden into his own swamp of malicious triviality and spiteful juvenility. For that crucial minute, Trump seemed vaguely presidential—and Biden, as he blundered on with the insults, seemed more than vaguely Trumpian. He needed to remember the old adage: “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.” Biden surely knew that debating with Trump is pig wrestling. The job is to make sure that the pig is not allowed to enjoy it and that you don’t get too soiled. Trump clearly liked it, and Biden got the mud of a debased and infantile politics all over himself.

This contamination was a matter of substance as well as style. Biden’s task was to differentiate himself as radically as possible from Trump. Yet he failed to stake out the clear dividing lines on crucial policy questions. On immigration, he largely capitulated to Trump’s characterization of migrants as a threat to be kept out of the US. On women’s reproductive rights—arguably the issue most likely to help the Democrats win November’s elections—he was muddled to the point of incoherence. He actually framed a vital reality (that women who have been raped by family members are being denied abortions in some states) within Trump’s talking point about alleged rapes by immigrants:

Look, there’s so many young women who have been—including a young woman who just was murdered and he [Trump] went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by—by—by an immigrant coming in and (inaudible) talk about that.

This in turn allowed Trump to shift back from the area in which he is most uncomfortable (reproductive rights) to the vile trope he has been using since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015: dark-skinned immigrants as rapists. Even on a question as fundamental as the consequences of rape, Biden could not make his own case without reinforcing Trump’s. By focusing so exclusively on presenting himself as not Trump, he placed himself in a position where all he could do was react (in most cases inadequately) to his opponent’s lurid narratives. Trump was the actor, Biden the audience member heckling in ineffectual exasperation from the stalls. In such situations, the actor always wins.

Ever since Biden announced that he was running again, it was always clear that this decision would allow Trump to set the terms for the election. At a campaign event in Boston last December, Biden admitted, “If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running.” It is not that Biden does not have a story of his own to tell. The successes of his administration are real: reflating a devastated economy, making the first serious attempt in the US to address the climate crisis, improving access to medicine and childcare, reversing the long-term neglect of America’s infrastructure. It is that Biden does not have the vigor, articulateness, or charisma to embody that story.

Political campaigns are embodied narratives—the medium for the message is the candidate’s physical and linguistic presence. Like it or not, Trump’s looming, swaggering, domineering mien personifies his insistence that America needs a giant to stand between it and the forces that are about to destroy it. He must surely be the first presidential candidate to draw specific attention to his own body in a formal debate: “I think I’m in very good shape. I feel that I’m in as good a shape as I was twenty-five, thirty years ago.” The corporeal Trump, in his telling, is almost ageless. He has arrested the ravages of time on his own body—just as he will stop the decline and decay of the American body politic.

Biden can’t do this. His political story is not one of time arrested but of time renewed. He wants (and needs) to evoke a sense of future possibility, a rebirth of social and racial justice and a bold adaptation of the economy to meet the climate crisis. Yet his body is not in sync with this message. Unable to exemplify an idea of progress, he is forced to play Trump’s game by pretending to have stopped his own physical decline. The little running motions, the aviator sunglasses, the protesting-too-much displays of youthful energy are failed efforts to do what Trump is so good at: appearing ageless. But time will not play along. It is all too easy to look at a photograph of Biden in 2020 and compare it with his present, more withered self.

Thus, even in this most obvious physical sense, it is Trump who has set the terms and Biden who has allowed himself to be sucked into accepting them. In 2020 the pandemic saved Biden from the consequences of this mistake. It wiped out Trump’s advantage in physical presence. Trump held in-person rallies, but this may have worked against him by sending to unaligned voters messages of recklessness. (One subsequent study suggested that Trump’s rallies led to seven hundred additional deaths from Covid-19.) Biden at first campaigned virtually, losing the excitement of a physical campaign but sending a reassuring signal of safety and responsibility. When he did start holding rallies, they were either small-scale affairs or “drive-in” events, with supporters staying in their cars, creating a peculiarly disembodied experience that made the physical contrast between him and Trump less relevant. Biden’s actual demeanor did not matter nearly as much as it does now.

All of this helped Biden to establish himself as the anti-Trump. This was what he needed to be in 2020. Trump was the incumbent. The US had experienced almost four years of his chaos, his incompetence, his relentless egoism. Biden’s personal sorrow was consonant with the grief-stricken mood of the pandemic, and his weariness matched that of the majority in a nation weary of death, weary of disruption, weary of Trump. Biden’s personal appeal was not that of a savior. It was that of a survivor—he had been through so much and was still standing. It was possible to hope that the same might then be true of the country.

The great problem, and the one that now threatens to engulf American democracy, is that Biden began to think of himself as indeed a savior figure. There was, of course, a certain immediate and literal truth to this: Biden not only saved the US from a second Trump term but also saw off an attempted coup. Yet Biden’s mindset is also deeply religious, and specifically Christian. In his inaugural address, delivered just two weeks after the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, he offered to stake both his earthly body and his immortal soul on the defense of democracy. He repeated Abraham Lincoln’s words at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863: “My whole soul is in it.” Biden echoed this commitment: “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this.” This is not rhetoric for Biden—it is prayer.

What, though, was the “this” to which he committed his immortal essence, the part of him that is beyond the ravages of time and age? It was “Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.” This may be a gallant ambition. It is also an impossible one. Biden was completely sincere in his belief that reuniting a fractured nation is more than a political program—it is a sacred duty. But it was a duty he could not possibly fulfill. America has no interest in being brought together. It is not Biden’s fault that what had been sundered could not be made whole, but it is a reality that grates on his own nature as a politician steeped in ideas of comity and consensus.

From the wreckage of this aspiration, Biden’s sense of divine mission was rescued by Trump’s reemergence, not just as the Republican candidate-in-waiting but as the defining figure of American politics. When Biden gave his inaugural address it might have seemed reasonable to assume that Trump was over, that the grotesque efforts to overturn the results of the election had made it impossible for him ever to return to power. But Trump was undead, and his malign potency again established him as the major predator in the American political jungle.

This in turn gave Biden a second chance at achieving something worthy of his eternal soul. He had saved America from Trump once—now he could do it again. He could banish Trump, and Trumpism, not for now but forever. If thoughts of eternity gather around the aging Catholic believer, this is Biden’s political equivalent of an undying achievement. In his inaugural address, he evoked the struggle of light against darkness. He sees the delivery of a final, fatal blow to Trump as the ultimate vanquishing of the American darkness.

This is noble. The difficulty is that it also endorses a kind of personal exceptionalism. Biden, because he has suffered so much pain, is deeply inclined toward the Christian message that suffering is redeemed by a self-sacrificing savior. This is where being the counterpart in the world of light to Trump’s presence in the world of darkness takes on that eerie sense of transference. For Trump, too, presents himself as a savior. He conjures the vision of an American apocalypse. In the debate he ranted about immigrants: “People are coming in and they’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen.” He used the word “killing” eleven times. The fascistic vision of eternal ethnic war is now fully integrated into Trump’s rhetoric. And its point is the same as it has always been: only an exceptional man can save the real Americans from the carnage that otherwise awaits them.

This is Trump’s most visceral appeal. As he put it in his speech accepting the Republican nomination in 2016, “I alone can fix it.” At the heart of authoritarianism is this notion of indispensability. The leader is unique, unparalleled, irreplaceable. God has chosen him to rescue and revive the nation. That is why he cannot be constrained by laws or even by the ordinary calculations of rationality. Only in his infallible instincts and indomitable will does salvation lie.

Trump’s survival of the attempted assassination gives dramatic immediacy to this notion of him as a divinely ordained agent of American deliverance. His fortunate escape will be seen by his devotees as a miracle—further proof that their leader is much more than a mere politician. The photographs that seem to show the trajectory of a bullet toward Trump’s head give apparently vivid evidence of inevitable death being brushed aside by the hand of God. It is not just Trump who believes himself to be indispensable—the Creator has endorsed this message.

Biden’s tragedy is that he has come to take on this same conviction, to feel that he alone can save America. In mirroring his archenemy, he has created an equal and opposite belief in his own indispensability. On a rational level, he knows that this does not make sense. In December he responded off the cuff to a reporter’s question about whether he thought another Democrat could defeat Trump: “Probably fifty of them.” Yet he has also boasted in a social media video that “I’m still the only person that ever beat Donald Trump.” Even after the debacle of the debate, Senator Chris Coons, the Biden campaign’s cochair, insisted that “the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump” is Biden. This has always been a circular argument: no one but Biden can beat Trump because no one but Biden can be allowed to stand against him because no one but Biden can beat Trump…

On July 5, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos for ABC designed to prove his mental acuity, Biden again sounded remarkably like Trump. It is not just that he started bragging about his unprecedented ability to draw crowds to his rallies. (“How many—how many people draw crowds like I did today?”) It is not even that he made far-fetched claims like “I…was the guy who put together a peace plan for the Middle East that may be comin’ to fruition,” which must have come as news to everyone in Gaza, Israel, and beyond. What was most eerie was Biden’s adoption of one of Trump’s signature rhetorical tics: “They said it couldn’t be done, and we got it done.” Biden repeatedly made this kind of claim, sometimes in relation to alleged achievements that are simply baffling: “I’m the guy that put NATO together, the future. No one thought I could expand it. I’m the guy that shut Putin down. No one thought [that] could happen.” Biden claimed that he had flown to South Korea (in May 2022) for a summit to discuss, among other things, getting Korean firms to invest in computer chip manufacturing in the US, “against the advice of everybody.”

But Biden didn’t expand NATO—Finland and Sweden joined the alliance in direct response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The meaning of his contention that he “shut Putin down” will have been lost on those who are still being killed in that war. And it is impossible to find any evidence that anybody—let alone everybody—warned Biden against urging the Korean companies to invest in the US. This mixture of wild exaggerations, sweeping declarations unsupported by evidence, and grandiose boasts is very Trumpian. Even more so is the message implicit in the notion that all of these great things were done in the face of opposition from everybody else: I am an exceptional leader with unique insight unavailable to others.

In that interview, moreover, Biden came close to making the same ultimate claim that Trump’s supporters make for their idol: that he is doing the work of God. The sense of undertaking a sacred duty that gave grandeur to Biden’s inaugural speech in 2021 has morphed into an implicit suggestion that he is indeed on a divinely sanctioned mission. He informed Stephanopoulos of the sole condition under which he would stand down as a candidate for a second term: “Look. I mean, if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get outta the race,’ I’d get outta the race. The Lord Almighty’s not comin’ down.” Biden believes he has the Mandate of Heaven, and only Heaven can withdraw that celestial endorsement.

In this religious mindset, martyrdom is always an attractive option. The martyr wins even as he loses—indeed he wins more gloriously the more terribly he loses. The willingness to endure any suffering rather than deny the faith becomes all the more heroic as the pain gets worse. Biden is in a world of pain, his old age still beset by sorrows in the trials of his beloved son Hunter. The meltdown in the debate is another terrible affliction, an experience of humiliation that must be almost impossible to bear for a man who has been filled since his youth with a sense of destiny. But this makes the point of the election less about victory over Trump and more about victory over his own private torments. That victory would be very much sweeter if he wins in November, but it does not require him to actually defeat Trump. It requires him to keep the faith, to do everything in his power to show—as much to himself as to the world—that he is undaunted by disaster.

This is in essence what Biden said when Stephanopoulos asked him how he would feel “if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you’re warning about comes to pass.” His reply was, in effect, that he would feel fine about this catastrophe so long as he had demonstrated his personal grace under pressure: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.” Beneath the garbled language (it is impossible to tell whether he said “good as” or “goodest”) there is an absolute clarity to this statement. It is not just a definition of the election in terms every bit as solipsistic as Trump’s crusade for personal vindication. It is the martyr’s cry as he is burned at the stake: I have triumphed because I have saved my soul. In this invitation to embrace the pleasures of heroic failure, saving America comes second to that more important act of self-salvation.

Biden’s motivations are infinitely more benign than Trump’s, but he has ended up in the same place: with the great delusion of “I alone.” This is a face-off that Trump will always win. His supporters really do believe in his exceptionality—as the miserable performance of Ron DeSantis in the Republican primaries showed, they do not care for Trumpism without Trump. And for them events in Pennsylvania have provided incontrovertible evidence that their belief is justified. Few of Biden’s supporters think likewise about their candidate. The valorization of the lone savior suits reactionary politics—it is not a good fit for democracy. It is the ultimate case of the anti-Trump forces operating on Trump’s terms.

The Democrats cannot defeat Trump by trying to play on a course he already owns—and he now has definitive possession of the savior persona. If they continue to deceive themselves and the public about Biden’s fitness, they will be bad liars pitting themselves against the master of lies. If they subordinate the future of the American republic to the ego of their leader, they will be pale imitators of the Republican Party’s transformation of itself into a slavish personality cult. Those who want to stick with Biden whatever happens are engaged not in rational politics but in magical thinking, the belief that Biden’s victory in 2020 has imbued him with powers that only he can wield. But this fantasy is becoming a horror story in which the dark shadow of America’s democracy threatens to usurp its life. There will be no divine hand to swat away the bullet that is headed for the heart of the republic.

—July 18, 2024