The Populist Mantle Is Harris’s for the Taking. The Atlantic - Politics by Tyler Austin Harper

Aug 19, 2024 at 10:22 PM//keep unread//hide

In the weeks since Kamala Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee for president, she has run a deft campaign: confident, upbeat, and social-media-savvy. An often toothless Democratic Party has found its incisors. The policy rollout, however, has been slow. Some polls earlier this year suggested that a “generic Democrat” could beat Donald Trump, and more than a few critics and supporters feel like the Harris campaign has taken this too literally.

On Friday, she announced a set of economic plans with populist flair, a sign that she is beginning to define her policy commitments more clearly. As she continues to do this, she faces a conundrum. Harris is made from the mold of perhaps the most beloved Democrat in America: Like former President Barack Obama, she is a multiracial-child-of-immigrants technocrat. But even as Obama remains a deeply popular celebrity figure in this country, the political and economic worldview he stood for—a continuation of Clinton-era corporate-friendly governance—has fallen into disrepute. In 2016, both the Sanders surge and the Trump ascendancy were in no small part a rebuke of Obama and his smartest-guy-in-the-room sheen, and when a Democrat regained the White House in 2020, Obama’s own vice president largely cast off Obamanomics.

Therein lies the rub: Harris’s politics, style, and coterie of confidants seem to align with Obama’s. But as Joe Biden’s VP, she was second-in-command in an administration that aspired to shepherd the country toward a post-neoliberal consensus defined by trust busting, innovative industrial policy, and a reinvigorated labor movement. And with Tim Walz at her side, she can mount a serious attempt to create a multiracial, cross-class coalition that could expand the left-liberal tent, claw back the rightward list of non-college-educated voters, and usher in a fairer economy for American workers. This is the kind of hope Obama traded on in 2008, and the kind of change he failed to deliver over his two terms. The populist mantle is hers for the taking, if she wants it. The puzzle is: Does she? Or will Harris and her campaign follow Obama and double down on corporate technocracy?

Centrists have predictably encouraged Harris to eschew the populist impulses of the current commander in chief and to moderate: New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait insists that a return to “Obamaism” can “save” the Democrats and help deliver Harris to the White House. But this advice ignores the fact that the public, on both sides of the aisle, has spent nearly 10 years pushing for a populist remake of American politics. If voters have become annoyed with the excesses of left-wing cultural politics, they have continued to embrace a left-wing economic posture. Bernie Sanders may have lost his battles for the Democratic nomination, but in some sense he won the broader ideological war. Even the right now pays lip service to fighting corporations and economic “elites.”

Whether Harris will attempt to counter the emergent pseudo-populism on the right with the genuine article remains to be seen; so far, the signals are mixed. On the one hand, reports suggest that the move from Biden to Harris was greeted with enthusiasm by the Wall Street set, who see the vice president as both more malleable and more corporate-friendly than Biden. Indeed, she is already under significant pressure from donors to axe Lina Khan, Biden’s 35-years-young chair of the Federal Trade Commission who has made a name for herself by bringing monopolists to heel. Harris also has substantial connections to the Silicon Valley donor class, raising concerns that she might be a little too cozy with Big Tech, not unlike Obama.

On the other hand, the recently concluded veepstakes suggest that perhaps Harris does intend to embrace the populist route. Although the choice between Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was often framed by commentators as a battle between the moderate and leftward factions of the Democratic Party, this was largely a mirage. Both candidates are left of center: Shapiro has a record of challenging corporate power as an attorney general, while Walz has a long list of progressive policy wins as governor, including free school lunches for kids and new taxes on multinational companies. And although Harris has dithered, taking her time to outline her governing agenda, on Friday she announced that during her first 100 days in office she intends to focus on big tax credits for new parents, tackling grocery price-gouging and keeping insulin affordable, and providing significant down-payment help for first-time homebuyers.

Harris should seize the opportunity to fully embrace left-wing populism because—despite all the punditry’s moaning about the need to “moderate”—populist policies are actually popular: 65 percent of Americans (including 40 percent of Republicans) say the federal government has a responsibility to make sure that all Americans have health care, 63 percent say that attending public colleges should be free, and another 63 percent (including 51 percent of Republicans) say that banks need to be more heavily regulated. In a country defined by spiraling cultural polarization, these are views—views that would have once been tarred as “far left”—that many of us can agree on.

And despite the feel-good vibes that have enlivened the Democratic base for the past month, the party is still beset by a long-term problem: A meaningful segment of working-class Black and Latino Americans seem to be inching toward the GOP, on top of the well-documented rightward drift of the white working class. Between 2012, when Obama ran for his second term, and the election of Joe Biden in 2020, Democrats lost nearly 20 points in support from the nonwhite working class. For the past year, polling has suggested that Trump stands to gain a heartier share of the Black vote this election—driven largely, but not exclusively, by working-class Black men—while Hispanic and Latino voters have begun outright flocking to the GOP. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early July, before Biden dropped off the ticket, the current and former president were drawing dead even: 36 percent of Latino voters supported Trump, 36 percent supported Biden, and a startling 24 percent said they would support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

These working-class defectors from the Democratic Party seem to be motivated, at least in part, by concern about immigration, which itself seems to be a proxy for more general economic anxieties, particularly among non-college-educated workers who feel that they are competing with new arrivals for jobs. The Democrats’ problem with the working class is exacerbated by a union vote that becomes more Republican by the year. The appearance of the Teamsters president at the Republican National Convention was something of a shot across the bow, spurring both anger and panic that unions may start openly courting the GOP. Although the economic “populism” on offer by the Trump-Vance ticket mostly oscillates between symbolic and shambolic, and although conservative policies remain far friendlier for Big Business than for workers, the GOP is making a deliberate and straightforward case, at least rhetorically, that it is the true home of the working class. Democrats can argue that all this Republican railing against “the elites” is disingenuous, and they’d mostly be right, but for now, a significant and multicultural share of the working class seems to be taking the GOP at its word.

Over the next three months, as Harris campaigns in earnest, the path she has chosen will become clearer: to follow Obama or Biden, to embrace nostalgia for the dreamy bubble of a multiracial technocracy—burst by Trump’s election—or set down the new road laid out by the current administration.

Since the 2016 election, Democrats and liberal pundits have favored a just-so story about the GOP’s far-right makeover: Donald Trump rode the wave of a racially motivated recoil against the first Black president. In this account, the white working class grew disgusted by the success of minorities who are taking over “their” country, symbolized by Obama. But this theory fails to offer a convincing explanation of why the white working class voted overwhelmingly for Trump after Obama made significant inroads with this demographic in 2008, or why minority working-class voters also began moving away from the Democratic Party.

The idea that these voters spontaneously developed racism, and were primarily driven by “whitelash” against a president many of them cast a ballot for, has always been preposterous. Obama bailed out the banks, did little to challenge the massive expansion of tech monopolies that occurred during his eight years in office, and failed to address the opioid epidemic while a drug peddled by Big Pharma burned through the deindustrialized parts of America—the same places that had already been kicked in the teeth thanks to the catastrophic trade policies of the previous Democratic president. It is a testament to Obama’s singular political talent that he remains a popular cultural figure. Perhaps what his working-class voters ultimately rejected was not the multiracial America he represented, but the corporate managerialism he ended up embodying.

Already, it appears that Harris has a chance to bring some of the lost voters back into the fold: Recent polling found that she has gained 11 points among non-college-educated white voters in key swing states—outperforming “Scranton Joe” with those voters—and gained an identical 11 points among Black voters. If she wants to shore up these gains among the non-college-educated, Harris will need to rekindle the populist promise that Obama once parlayed into an electoral victory, and pursue the populist policies that Biden has put into action. If she does, she could not just win an election, but also begin the long process of winning back the American working class.

Pennsylvania is slipping from Donald Trump’s grasp. By Edward Luce

Edward Luce in Allentown, Pennsylvania

The Financial Times, Aug. 18th

Read time: 6 minutes

Asked why he had robbed a bank, William Sutton, one of the FBI’s most wanted postwar criminals, replied, “because that’s where the money is”. If Sutton had been running for president in 2024 he would have plotted a raid on Pennsylvania’s Hispanic vote.

The path to the White House runs through Pennsylvania — America’s largest must-win swing state. Yet Donald Trump’s campaign is so far making no discernible effort to woo its fastest-growing demographic.

Numbering roughly 600,000 adults in a state that was settled by margins of less than 100,000 votes in the past two elections, Pennsylvania’s Hispanics are where the votes are.

“We seem to be committing an unforced error,” said Albert Eisenberg, a Philadelphia-based Republican consultant. “Hispanics could be the deciding factor.”

Joe Biden’s campaign started early and in earnest, running Spanish-language commercials in Pennsylvania in March, eight months before November’s presidential election. Kamala Harris, who replaced him in July, this week booked a new round of ads.

“I have never seen a campaign start as early as Biden — usually it would be in September,” said Victor Martinez, owner of Pennsylvania’s largest Spanish-language radio network and the anchor of his own morning show from Allentown, the state’s third-largest city.

“What confuses me is why the Trump campaign is not even trying to reach Spanish speakers. As a businessman, I would go bankrupt if I ignored my fastest-growing audience.” Harris has also done a phone-in interview with Martinez in English.

Victor Martinez, creator and broadcaster of the El Relajo de la Mañana morning show, poses at his radio studio in Allentown, Pennsylvania

Victor Martinez: ‘As a businessman, I would go bankrupt if I ignored my fastest-growing audience’ © Jennifer Huxta/FT

The Trump campaign’s apparent indifference may partly stem from complacency. Until Biden stepped down in late July, Trump was regularly leading the Pennsylvania polls without offering so much as a buenos dias.

His narrow escape last month from assassination in Butler, a city north of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania’s west, also appeared to give the Republican candidate more polling momentum.

But since Harris replaced Biden almost a month ago, the energy in Pennsylvania has shifted dramatically.

“A few weeks before he stepped down I attended a Biden campaign event and maybe five people showed up, including me and a Trump opposition researcher,” said Lindsay Weber, political reporter for The Morning Call, Allentown’s local paper. “When the Harris campaign rebranded the campaign office, it was packed with new volunteers.”

The latest sampling by the Cook Political Report, a veteran forecasting outfit, puts Harris, who will be officially confirmed as the Democratic party’s nominee next week in Chicago, five points ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania.

In contrast to Florida’s Republicans, who had no choice but to embrace Spanish given the state’s non-Anglo character, Pennsylvania’s habits die harder.

“Some party officials say to me: ‘America is an English-speaking country. Why would we talk to voters in Spanish?,’” said one frustrated Republican. “I reply, ‘Because we want to win?’”

The Trump campaign’s complacency may also owe something to the fact that most of the state’s Hispanics are Puerto Rican, which makes them US citizens. Unlike the big central American communities in northern Virginia and Maryland, or undocumented Venezuelans in the US’s border states and Florida, Puerto Ricans are not directly menaced by Trump’s vow to carry out sweeping deportations of illegal immigrants. This makes them more open to his economic message, which blames Biden for inflation and unaffordable housing.

Yet Trump is having trouble sticking to the script. His campaign regularly vows that he is about to pivot to policy; their nominee keeps making headlines with personal attacks on Harris.

“The party that will win in November is the one that avoids doing and saying outrageous things,” said Maria Montero, a Republican lawyer based in Allentown and Spanish speaker. “For Latino voters it boils down to the economy.”

Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown, right, talks to a resident of the town

Matt Tuerk, the mayor of Allentown, right, talks to a resident. He is trying to set up a direct flight between San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital and Allentown © Jennifer Huxta/FT

In 2000, Hispanics — a term used for Spanish-speakers, while “Latino” includes those with a heritage in all Latin American countries — accounted for less than a quarter of Allentown’s population. Now the city is majority Hispanic, chiefly Puerto Rican and Dominican. With similar alacrity, the nearby city of Reading turned 70 per cent Hispanic.

On a walk through a heavily Puerto Rican neighbourhood, Matt Tuerk, Allentown’s mayor, was greeted every few yards by residents lounging on the stoops of neighbourhood bodegas. Tuerk, a bicycling mayor who speaks fluent Spanish, is trying to set up a direct flight between San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, and Allentown. He and Susan Wild, the Democratic congresswoman for the area, recently slept on the floor of San Juan’s airport.

“Hispanics won’t automatically vote for either party — and many won’t vote at all,” Tuerk said. “But you won’t get anywhere unless you meet them halfway.”

The Harris campaign has 15 campaign offices across the state. Trump has just one, in northern Philadelphia.

“Trump doesn’t seem to be making a serious effort,” said Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman who until 2018 represented the district that includes Allentown. “The focus is still all about Maga [Make America Great Again]. But I’m sceptical that the Maga base will be large enough to win.” Dent adds that Trump is on his own version of “a Grateful Dead tour” — replaying his big hits from the glory years.

Trump may also be drawing confidence from his victory in Pennsylvania in 2016 after a campaign in which he routinely denigrated Hispanic people. He defeated Hillary Clinton in the state by 45,000 votes — a margin of just 0.72 per cent.

The eight years since then have seen rapid population change. Large numbers of Hispanics have arrived to work in the booming logistics hub of the Lehigh Valley, which is close enough to East Coast metropolises like New York and Philadelphia to put 100mn Amazon and Walmart customers one truck shift away. Many affluent New Yorkers, who tend to be Democrats, also relocated to the area during the pandemic.

With its German and Czech-Moravian settler roots, the Lehigh Valley county of Northampton was once described by an eminent historian as the most conservative region in America. Now it is a mosaic. Trump was the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since George HW Bush in 1988. In historic terms, his win may have been a fluke.

Could Trump pull off another shock? Only in spite of himself, said Christopher Borick, a pollster at Allentown’s Muhlenberg College. Borick concedes that polling has not fully caught up with anecdotal evidence of Harris’s lightning switch in momentum. A month ago, polls showed Biden also losing Wisconsin and Michigan, the other two must-win swing states. The surge in enthusiasm for Harris has brought new states, including North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia back into play.

A registered independent, Borick lives in Nazareth, a few miles from Allentown, and one of the most hotly contested townships in America. A reminder of the region’s bible-suffused early days, Nazareth is 10 miles down the road from Bethlehem, a former steel hub. In 2020, Biden won Borick’s ward, with its population of 1,000, by just three votes. This time he and his neighbours have been bombarded by Democratic door-knocking and campaign mail. “The Trump campaign is so far missing in action,” said Borick.

By the conventional calendar, Trump has 80 days to make up for lost ground in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But in practice, early voting starts in mid-September. Roughly a third of Pennsylvanians are expected to vote by mail. If the 2022 midterm elections are any guide, these will veer strongly Democratic.

Here again, Trump is trampling on his campaign’s priorities. Republicans are trying to educate their voters about the benefits of the mail-in ballot. On the stump, however, Trump often repeats his claim that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election via mail-in fraud. In the next 30 days Republicans must somehow enthuse their foot soldiers to vote early without contradicting their leader’s stolen election theory — and his warning that 2024 will also be rigged.

For true believers, this requires semantic acrobatics. Traditional Republicans can put it more bluntly. “That’s malarkey,” Montero, the lawyer based in Allentown, tells conservative voters when they express suspicion of postal votes. “We can only win by voting.”

‘We Just Build Roads, and We Build Schools’. The Atlantic - Politics by Claire Potter

Aug 18, 2024 at 10:03 PM//keep unread//hide

The word people keep using to describe Tim Walz—whether they mean it as insult or praise—is progressive. Since Kamala Harris chose him as her running mate, he’s been called “a true progressive”; “a far-left progressive”; “extremely progressive.”

But this isn’t right. Walz was a Blue Dog Democrat through his many years in Congress. In his six years as governor of Minnesota, he has sometimes opposed progressive legislation that businesses warned would cost jobs, and has developed a reputation for pragmatism, respect for the individual, and state-funded civic investment. So why not call him a liberal?

One reason is that the word liberal has fallen out of fashion. Liberalism’s great achievements—the welfare state, infrastructure investment, civil rights, and taxpayer-funded investments in health, education, and social welfare—never became universal, as they did in other countries. Then, despite their pronounced commitments to social movements, liberals were too slow to deliver change, and left too many behind. By the 1990s, neoliberalism—a philosophy of free-market deregulation—undid, or weakened, many of the Democratic Party’s postwar liberal achievements. Rightly or wrongly, activists in the social-justice, labor, feminist, and LGBTQ movements began to reclaim those principles, labeling them with a new term associated with 20th-century left-wing reform and a commitment to identity politics: progressive.

The word liberal is still widely used to describe political places west of conservative and east of radical, but it has been emptied of meaning. Walz’s record, however, is a good primer on what liberalism stands for: the belief that the government can improve lives by strengthening institutions and guaranteeing individual freedoms. As Harris and Walz move to unite the party’s factions at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, they should take the opportunity to name this ethic for what it is: liberalism.

As governor, Walz signed a $93 million bill to improve mental-health care. His administration guaranteed universal free breakfast and lunch in school, and access to free menstrual products. He signed three bills that banned conversion therapy for children, improved access to gender-affirming health care, and protected access to abortion. This year, Walz delivered his State of the State address in a brand-new high school built by public and private funds, and spoke of Minnesota’s investments in children, including a $5.5 billion education bill.

These policies fit squarely within the Democratic Party’s tradition of liberalism that was born in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, consolidated in Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, and flowered in Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. The same liberal spirit animated Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Walz’s link to this tradition is real: He got his start in politics with Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL), a liberal New Deal–era alliance of rural and urban voters, traditional Democrats, and prairie populists.

Somewhere in the hereafter, Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the first Minnesotan to be elevated to a national ticket, grins as he looks down on a white Minnesotan barnstorming the country with a Black woman. Known as the “Boy Mayor” because he entered office at a youthful-looking 34, Humphrey led the effort to fuse the state’s weak Democratic Party with the Farmer-Labor Party; he then expelled Communists from the coalition after they sought to turn it to their own purposes.

Humphrey had a clear vision for liberal governance, one forged in the effort to unite his state’s moderate farmers, small-town businessmen, and industrial workers. In 1948 he gave a speech at the DNC calling on the party to adopt, for the first time, a civil-rights plank in its platform. He was virtually unknown outside the state at the time, but when the plank passed, it boosted him into the Senate, where he pushed for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As Johnson’s vice president, he was instrumental in passing the 1965 Voting Rights Act too.

Humphrey was implicated in some of liberalism’s great mistakes, including the failure to adequately address poverty and racial violence, and the escalation of war in Vietnam. But he always believed that liberalism could connect the state to its citizens by guaranteeing their well-being. The “moral test” of a government, he told his colleagues, was how it cared for citizens at every stage of life, and embraced the most vulnerable.

Humphrey’s DFL heirs have repeatedly brought liberalism’s commitments back to the national stage. “Humphrey begat Walter Mondale, who begat Paul Wellstone, who begat Amy Klobuchar and Walz,” James Traub, a Humphrey biographer, told me. “That genetic code fuses the prairie-populist belief in the little guy, the farmer and worker; FDR’s faith in the activist state; and Truman and JFK’s internationalism.”

Liberalism is also a political style, one that seeks to resolve disputes—a contrast to a Republican Party in a perpetual rage, whether about what books are in the library or who is in the adjoining bathroom stall. “These guys are just weird,” Walz said—now famously—in an MSNBC interview. He talked instead about “decency” and Democrats’ “positive future for America,” about bringing back manufacturing jobs and investing in infrastructure: policies brought about through “collective effort.” Republicans’ criticism of such initiatives was, he argued, hysterical. “They scream socialism,” Walz said. “We just build roads, and we build schools, and we build prosperity.”

Progressives have good reasons to embrace Walz, but he does not belong to their wing of the party. Democrats should refer to him proudly as what he is: a liberal. Progressivism may signal a meaningful identity, but liberalism is a philosophy of governance, and Democrats will need it to create a united front against Trumpism. Choosing Tim Walz as her vice-presidential nominee is an important sign that Harris is committed to this vision, and that Democrats can make the compromises necessary to win. Liberalism, after all, isn’t the absence of conflict: It’s how Americans work across differences to advance human welfare.

Trump Has Turned Over an Old Leaf. The Atlantic - Politics by David A. Graham

Trump revamps campaign amid Harris surge

Aug 18, 2024 at 10:03 PM//keep unread//hide

By the time Donald Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president, the idea of a “new Trump” had become a running gag, taken seriously only by the most credulous reporters and most desperately optimistic Republican officeholders.

Then something funny happened: Trump seemed to pull off a reset. Yes, Trump was still the same candidate he’d always been—undisciplined, authoritarian, and capricious—but for the first time he had surrounded himself with a polished, professional campaign operation. The brain trust of Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita would never be able to control Trump, but they had figured out how to manage everything else about the campaign. The candidate wasn’t out in public as much, to his benefit, and the campaign didn’t try to make everything about him, instead focusing on all the things voters didn’t like about President Joe Biden, who was running for reelection.

And it was working. By June, Trump seemed to be in control of the presidential race and on a path back to the White House. Wiles and LaCivita took a victory lap in conversation with my colleague Tim Alberta.

Then came one of the strangest sequences of events in modern American political history: Biden’s complete debate collapse, a failed assassination attempt against Trump, the selection of J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, and the rapid replacement of Biden atop the Democratic ticket with Kamala Harris. Harris started taking the lead in some national polls.

In response, Trump is turning over an old leaf. Infuriated that people are responding positively to Harris and that her campaign is drawing huge rallies, he’s back to trying to make everything about him. He’s returning to the lengthy campaign news conferences he held in 2016, including two in roughly the past week. He’s planning to restart big open-air rallies, despite the assassination scare. It’s starting to look a lot like 2016 again.

Even the people are the same: Aides from campaigns past are creeping back in. Yesterday Trump announced that Corey Lewandowski would join the campaign as a senior adviser. Lewandowski managed Trump’s 2016 campaign before being fired during that year’s Republican primary. In 2021, he was fired as the head of a pro-Trump super PAC after allegations arose that he made sexual advances toward a donor’s wife. “He will no longer be associated with Trump World,” the Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich said at the time. In a fun twist, Budowich—a Trump 2020 veteran—also just joined the 2024 campaign, along with the 2020 press aide Tim Murtaugh.

Roger Stone, a political operative with the survival skills and personal appeal of a cockroach, has also somehow maintained ties to the Trump campaign. Stone recently told The Washington Post that his email account was compromised, allowing a hack of the campaign. Stone was convicted of several crimes stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but Trump pardoned him, and he later became a key player in attempts to steal the 2020 election.

Trump previously tried to bring back Stone’s old business partner Paul Manafort, who replaced Lewandowski in 2016, though public blowback apparently scuttled the plan. Manafort was fired later in the 2016 campaign. He, too, was convicted of several crimes during the Trump administration, but Trump also pardoned him in gratitude for loyalty.

These men are members of the “let Trump be Trump” crew, who encourage him to indulge his instincts. Meanwhile, rumors have begun to circulate that Wiles and LaCivita are in the hot seat. Such whispers are probably best understood less as an imminent threat to the pair—Trump is usually slow to fire anyone and prefers to just work around them—than as a sign of his discontentment with their strategy.

One can see why Trump would want to go back to what he feels worked in 2016, but he faces two big challenges. First, he just can’t pull off what he did then. The shtick is no longer fresh; remembering why these events were so riveting back then can be hard. He’s also eight years older, and sometimes that is very apparent. His news conference yesterday began with a tedious stretch of him reading economic statistics from a page. Trump showed some energy only when fulminating against Harris. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence.”

Second, most people don’t like him, and they never have. Trump’s success in 2016 was less about his campaign than about the fact that many voters also didn’t like Hillary Clinton. (Even so, more voted for her than for him.) In 2020, running against a well-liked Biden, Trump lost. He was polling ahead in 2024 largely because Biden was no longer popular, but now that he’s been replaced with the more appealing Harris, Trump faces the problem of America’s durable anti-MAGA majority. “All we have to do is define our opponent as a Communist or a Socialist or someone who’s going to destroy the country,” he said yesterday. Easily said, not so easily done—Trump can’t even seem to pin a decent nickname on Harris.

This is a kind of reset, but not the change to a kinder, gentler Trump that Republicans promised after the assassination attempt. Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump.

‘Oldboy’ Is Still Shocking - The Atlantic. By David Sims

Read time: 4 minutes

Twenty years on, Park Chan-wook’s unusually intense action film has lost none of its ability to jar viewers.

August 21, 2023, 3:37 PM ET

This article contains spoilers for the ending of Oldboy.

Many movies with notorious twist endings—such as The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects—face a steep challenge on rewatch. The impact of the finale evaporates, or is at least blunted, by the viewer’s knowledge of what’s coming. A second viewing is largely an exercise in detecting the breadcrumbs leading to the big surprise. When a rerelease of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy was announced for this summer, I wondered if it would suffer from the same limitations. Oldboy has one of the nastiest gut-punch cinematic conclusions I’ve ever seen. Twenty years on, would that be sustainable?

Back in the early aughts, when word of Oldboy first started to spread among American cineastes, Korean cinema was a few years into a flourishing renaissance led partly by Park, Bong Joon-ho, and Kim Ki-duk. Still, few projects had genuinely crossed over to the United States—Park’s prior film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance played on a grand total of six screens in North America. Oldboy gained a little more steam, partly because of its success at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, where a jury headed by Quentin Tarantino gave it the Grand Prix (the runner-up prize) and critics breathlessly noted its unusual intensity.

For young buffs like myself, Oldboy was best known as the movie where a man eats a live octopus on screen, or maybe the one where a man fights a hallway full of people armed only with a hammer. Its supposed extremity was the draw, a true jolt of excitement given that 2000s Hollywood was already starting to lean away from more challenging material as the superhero-franchise revival was beginning to take root. Indeed, all of Oldboy’s gnarliest moments feel just as visceral now. But if shock value was the only thing propelling this movie, it wouldn’t be a widely heralded masterpiece rolling out in cinemas nationwide 20 years after its release.

Oldboy follows the businessman Oh Dae-su (played by Choi Min-sik), a drunken sot who is mysteriously kidnapped one day and held captive in a hotel room for 15 years, a psychological torture chamber where he learns he’s been framed for the murder of his wife. Just as mysteriously, he is suddenly released back into the real world, where he quickly embarks on a vengeful journey to find his captors and discover the reason for his imprisonment. He learns that his daughter was given up for adoption, and he forms an alliance with a chef named Mi-do (Kang Hye-jung), who seems almost inexplicably drawn to his wildness; they eventually become intimate, and together find the source of Dae-su’s woes: the wealthy and insane Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae).

The film’s plot often feels neither here nor there—Dae-su, sporting a tangle of wiry hair and a permanent thousand-yard stare, is such a compelling and bizarre character that it barely matters who he’s after. Oldboy is mostly absorbing because of the intense anguish radiating off the screen at all times; Park’s ability to effectively communicate obsession, and put the audience in the head of someone who has almost entirely lost touch with his sense of self, feels unparalleled to this day. Oldboy was the middle entry in a loose Vengeance Trilogy, bookended by 2002’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and 2005’s Lady Vengeance, but the only element all three share is the sense of total discombobulation that accompanies a revenge quest, and the crooked line these paths always follow.

Much of Park’s early career saw him playing the role of provocateur. The Vengeance Trilogy is steeped in extreme violence, often breaching taboos avoided by U.S. and European cinema (in his movies, children are frequently in peril). Park’s breakout film, Joint Security Area, about a forbidden friendship between North and South Korean soldiers at the country’s border, dared to depict its North Korean characters with humanity; his 2009 vampire drama, Thirst, was the first mainstream Korean film to feature male full-frontal nudity. Of late, his work has blended provocation with more baroque storytelling and design elements; the period drama The Handmaiden and the cop thriller Decision to Leave both drew wide critical plaudits.

I love both of those recent films, but rewatching Oldboy in a theater is a good reminder of just how bluntly distressing Park’s movies used to be. So many of the “extreme” works of that era—the Saw films, Eli Roth’s Hostel—feel dated on rewatch. But there’s a core element of emotional realism that accentuates Park’s brutal narrative beats, leaving us to ponder something more than a bloody body. Part of Oldboy’s resonance is due to the movie’s final, most devastating twist: the late revelation that Mi-do is Dae-su’s daughter, and that Woo-jin arranged their meeting and affair as revenge for Dae-su inadvertently exposing Woo-jin’s incestuous attachment to his own sister when they were in school together long ago.

It’s a laborious but somehow believable bit of Greek tragedy, a piece of information so mind-rending that Dae-su essentially begs for death upon learning it. It also makes the rewatch feel a thousand times more tragic, once the viewer knows how cursed Dae-su and Mi-do’s journey is from the start. The knowledge transforms an exciting if ruthless odyssey into something cruelly terrifying. Very few current movies can offer an experience like that, and it gives the rerelease a real power that’s worth tracking down in theaters.

Harris’s Plan Is Economically Dumb but Politically Smart. by Josh Barro

Harris proposes housing initiatives

•The Atlantic - Politics / by Josh Barro / Aug 17, 2024 at 2:39 AM

Until recently, the Kamala Harris campaign seemed allergic to setting a policy agenda. Finally, the campaign is starting to roll out its economic platform, and the substance likely won’t appeal to many people who actually know about economics. But it’s hard for me to argue with the politics. As someone who has often said Democrats need to compromise their ideals to win, I don’t exclude my own ideals from that. And I see that when Harris rejects my economic preferences, she’s doing it in a way that will help her win.

The first example is Harris’s proposal to fight inflation through a new federal law on price gouging. My guess is such a law would be designed in such a way that it would have little effect on the market. But if it did have effects on the market, they would tend to be negative, as with President Richard Nixon’s price and wage controls in the 1970s.

According to the Econ 101 model of prices and supply, when a product is in shortage, its price goes up to bring quantity demanded in line with quantity supplied. This price increase sends a signal to producers to make more stuff. If you cap prices, you get shortages. That’s because there isn’t enough of the demanded good to go around, and producers don’t have sufficient incentive to start making more of the good to meet demand in the future.

[Read: The one big policy that Kamala Harris needs]

I agree with this model. “Price gouging,” anyway, is kind of an incoherent concept; there’s no fundamental reason of “fairness” that shortages shouldn’t be managed with price hikes. Yes, periods of shortage drive up profit margins. Higher profits are part of what brings new producers into constrained industries. And in a robustly competitive market, those profit margins get forced down as supply expands. Price controls inhibit that process and are a bad idea.

All of that said, Harris is trying to win a presidential election, and to win elections, you run on popular ideas. And the voters, in their infinite wisdom, strongly favor laws against “price gouging.” Evan Ross Smith, a pollster for the center-left Democratic research initiative Blueprint, shared a survey on X showing voters’ opinions on various proposals to fight inflation. The two most popular ideas for disinflation—lower interest rates and lower taxes—are in fact inflationary. The third most popular idea, and the most popular idea that wouldn’t tend to push prices up, is to “prosecute companies for price-gouging and price-fixing,” which Harris has said she will do if she assumes office.

The public demands action against “price gouging,” my objections to such laws are a political loser, and I should make peace with the fact that I won’t get my way on this issue. That is how democracy works.

Another proposal I’m gritting my teeth and putting up with is Harris’s echo of Donald Trump’s call to exempt tip income from taxes. This, again, is anathema to economists and substantively a dumb idea: A waiter or bartender shouldn’t enjoy a lower tax rate than a salesperson or child-care worker or laborer who earns the same amount of income just because that income happens to come as tips instead of wages. A special tax break for only some kinds of workers creates economic distortions, is unfair, and grows the already-too-large federal budget deficit. Yes, Harris’s campaign has said she would add guardrails to Trump’s original idea, and those guardrails make the idea less dumb. Her team told the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that there would be an income limit and other provisions designed to ensure that this benefit goes only to ordinarily tipped employees in leisure, hospitality, and gaming. Still, a less bad policy is not a good policy.

[Read: Trump has somehow stumbled into a very likable policy idea]

That said, again, I can’t argue with the politics. Harris’s shameless glomming-on to Trump’s pandering to hospitality workers in the swing state of Nevada should be seen in the context of her shameless abandonment of the loser leftist positions she took in the 2020 presidential primary, such as banning fracking and imposing single-payer health care. Harris intends to fight Trump hard on the cost-of-living issue—as Axios describes, she is trying to break with Joe Biden’s inflation record and position herself as a different kind of Democrat. And if that means making the tax code modestly less efficient, so be it. Better this shamelessness than the Biden campaign’s complete flat-footedness on the cost-of-living issue that was on track to cost the president the election.

Relatedly, Harris’s choice to pair the no-tax-on-tips idea with a federal-minimum-wage increase—another popular and populist economic-policy idea—is politically smart too. And although minimum-wage policies can be criticized in the same Econ 101 terms as price controls, in practice, I find it hard to spot negative economic impacts from minimum wages set in the typical range from the past few decades.

[Read: The one policy idea uniting Trump and Harris]

If Harris really wants to get popular on the cost-of-living issue, she could also pander harder on energy. Blueprint’s sixth-best-polling policy on inflation—“increase energy production of all types”—happens to be one of the anti-inflation policies that would actually work. And Harris has made an important move in this direction by rescinding (via spokesperson) her opposition to fracking. But a more full-throated endorsement from Harris of an all-of-the-above energy strategy—similar to the kind of rhetoric we used to hear from Barack Obama during his 2012 campaign—would help fight one of Democrats’ biggest weaknesses on cost-of-living issues: that they are seen as the party that wants to make fuel more expensive. There is currently a compromise bill on permitting reform in the Senate that would make both fossil-fuel and renewable-energy projects easier to build, increasing overall energy supply. Harris could endorse it, and make that endorsement part of her pitch about how she really will fight to lower the cost of living, in a way that is different from Biden and other Democrats.

Of course, if Harris does this, she will take flak from left-wing climate activists, a group that is noisier and more feared within the Democratic Party than the economists who hate the ideas of price regulation and tip tax breaks. But she’s already shown a willingness to break with those activists by changing her fracking position. And taking attacks from the flanks is how you show voters you’ve really moved to the center.

When Trump took criticism from anti-abortion activists for pushing the removal of a national-abortion-ban proposal from the Republican Party platform, the criticism was helpful to him politically. The Democratic Party would benefit from understanding that this dynamic works in the opposite direction too: When they disappoint and annoy the purveyors of unpopular and extreme ideas on their side, that helps show persuadable voters that they are reasonable and normal. And the climate activists would do well to remember that in a democracy, we can’t always get what we want—just as I am currently reminding myself.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

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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