The longest week
An assassination attempt, a running mate pick and the two parties' radically different approaches to problematic candidates
Last Saturday, as everyone knows, there was an assassination attempt against Trump. One rally attendee was killed along with the shooter. It’s not clear what the shooter’s motive was. From what information has been found out about him, he was a registered Republican, a resident of the area and some friends described him as conservative while others described him as non-political. He was not some kind of left-wing stereotype and there is no evidence yet that he had any kind of support.
It’s too early to conclude anything, but there may never be any smoking gun evidence pointing to why he did what he did. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was lonely and had very few friends. He may have just been looking for some way to get attention and become famous. He had pictures of Trump, Biden, Merrick Garland and Chris Wray, the FBI director, on his phone. It could be that he was willing to shoot any of them, but Trump just happened to be in his vicinity.
While it may seem odd that someone would try to assassinate a president/presidential candidate based on something other than politics, it’s not unheard of. The last president to be shot was Reagan and the shooter did it because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster. There are people out there who are just messed up.
Needless to say, I unequivocally condemn what happened. There is no excuse or justification for violence, period. People should be able to go to rallies for their preferred candidates and not have to worry about violence, no ifs, ands or buts. I would be lying if I said I’m not worried about future violence against candidates and elected officials. I’m not predicting it will happen and sure as hell hope it doesn’t, but this is a volatile time and in the age of social media, crazy ideas can spread easily and rile people up very fast.
I am glad to see everyone in Democratic Party circles from Biden to The Squad forcefully condemn what happened. The way to deal with candidates you don’t like is by voting against them and that’s it. There is no other way and god help us if that changes. I just wish everyone in Republican Party circles was equally forceful in condemning violence when it’s done against people they don’t like.
None of what happened changes anything about Trump. There is no contradiction between condemning the attempt on his life while pointing out that he is a danger to democracy and the rule of law. What happened last week doesn’t change the fact that he tried to overturn an election and incited a mob to storm the Capitol. It doesn’t change the fact that he has promised to use the force of the federal government against people he doesn’t like. It doesn’t change the fact that he won’t accept election results that don’t go his way. I could go on forever with this, but I think you get the point.
It’s the height of chutzpah for Trump supporters to be telling everyone else to tone it down and demanding that they condemn violence. There is nobody in American politics today who has done nearly as much to condone and encourage violence as Trump. A comprehensive chronicling of his violent rhetoric and making excuses for those who engaged in violence can be found here.
The most obvious example of his culpability in condoning and encouraging violence is January 6, which he watched live on TV and enjoyed it, but there are many other examples. When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked, he promoted a conspiracy theory about it and later made fun of him. When multiple people were arrested for plotting to kidnap and kill Gretchen Whitmer (several of whom are in jail now) he mocked her and said the plot was a hoax perpetrated by the FBI. He has pledged to pardon everyone currently in jail for their role in January 6 and has called them “hostages.”
For a few days there was a belief that maybe, just maybe, the attempt on his life would change him. The new Trump lasted for less than half-an-hour. In his 90+ minute long speech on Thursday, he spent over an hour going through his usual greatest hits, airing grievances and railing against his enemies. All the reporters and commentators who said we would get a new Trump need to report to the principal’s office.
JD Vance
On Monday, Trump made his running mate selection. It wasn’t a surprise at all. He picked JD Vance, Ohio’s junior senator and a former critic turned die hard cheerleader. His biggest claim to fame is being the author of the book Hillbilly Elegy, which was published in 2016. I read it soon after it came out and it was and still is a good book. It gives some very good insights into the world he came from, especially to someone like me who comes from a totally different world and could never put myself in someone like that’s shoes.
The Vance who wrote Hillbilly Elegy was a thoughtful and good person. At the time, he was on the right, but wasn’t a Trump supporter and called him an opiate. As the old saying goes, power corrupts. Since Trump won and it became clear that to go anywhere in Republican circles meant you had to be MAGA, that is what he did. Like all good MAGA devotees, he’s an election denier and has said Mike Pence was wrong to certify the election results.
The worldview he articulates now is downright authoritarian. He has some unconventional views on the role of government and his rhetoric is lightyears away from how Republicans talked pre-Trump, but it’s clear that his priority is not to help working-class people. It’s to use the force of government to go after people and things he doesn’t like. He has been a speaker at the annual National Conservatism conference, which is effectively a forum for all advocates of a right-wing dictatorship to meet and discuss authoritarian ideas and fantasy solutions to real and imagined problems.
Some in Republican business circles are upset over him being picked, but they shouldn’t be. For all the populist rhetoric Republicans have adopted and their abandonment of entitlement reform, at their core they are the party of tax cuts. When it comes to legislation, that is literally all they know how to do. A second Trump Administration will push to make permanent the tax cuts passed in 2017. Paul Ryan isn’t in Congress anymore, but plenty of his ideas still are and donors still are in charge. Vance won’t change that.
Vance is an extremely online culture warrior. I would say he’s maybe 20% a senator and 80% an online troll. I have seen him hurl plenty of insults at people on X and make inflammatory statements, like blaming Biden for the attempt on Trump’s life. He has railed against wokeness non-stop. I can’t help but note a bit of irony in his hatred of wokeness.
On the surface, the worldviews expressed by Vance and wokeness couldn’t be less alike. At their core, though, both have at least one broad similarity. They both are centered around victimhood. In the case of wokeness, it’s all about race, gender or sexual orientation and being oppressed by white supremacy. In Vance’s case, it’s all about coastal elites, professors, secularism, China, trade and immigrants oppressing white Christian working-class people. Both worldviews deny agency to those they claim are victims and both point to abstract monsters as the cause of all their problems.
It’s common to hear people (rightfully) criticize the left for obsessing over identity politics. It’s false, however, to suggest that identity politics is only a left-wing phenomenon. People like Vance do it, too, just for different groups. White Christian working-class is an identity and efforts to appeal to people based on that label are a form of identity politics.
Like so many right-wing authoritarians, Vance is very well-educated. The same institutions he claims to hate helped make him who he is. He went to law school at Yale. Later, he worked for Peter Thiel in San Francisco where he made his money and first became famous. Had he not been seeking elected office, he probably would have stayed there, made plenty of money and lived a happy life as a completely different person. It’s hard to say whether he’s a true believing MAGA adherent or an opportunistic fraud, but my guess is the latter. Either way, it’s bad and he shouldn’t be in a position of power.
With respect to foreign policy, he fully embraces MAGA. He is hostile towards Ukraine and has opposed aiding them from the start, even going so far as to say he doesn’t care what happens there. He voted against the aid package passed earlier this year. The worldview he espouses is much more in line with pre-Eisenhower isolationism than it is with Reagan-Bush internationalism.
He claims to want to focus on China, but that’s not something Trump cares about and neither will he. Like NATO, Trump views US support for Taiwan as a protection racket. He recently all but said he wouldn’t defend Taiwan against China and says they need to pay the US for support. There is a reason why Taiwan is so supportive of aiding Ukraine. If Ukraine is allowed to fall, China will be emboldened as it will vindicate the idea that the US doesn’t have the stomach to fight back. Vance either doesn’t get that or just doesn’t care.
As far as foreign leaders go, he is an admirer of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s de facto dictator. Orban has become a favorite leader for those on the right over the last few years. Other admirers of his include Tucker Carlson, who is also good buddies with Vance.
Obviously, I can’t talk about the VP selection without talking about the electoral implications of it. Most political writers seem to think Vance is both a weak pick electorally and that it won’t really matter. I agree with that. Contrary to what many think, VP nominees have almost no electoral impact. To the extent they do, it’s in their home state and Ohio isn’t a swing state this go around. Even if they come from a swing state, they aren’t guaranteed to deliver it, i.e., Ryan didn’t deliver Wisconsin to Romney.
Vance’s own electoral track record is just a single senate race in 2022. He was a very weak candidate in the primary and general election. In the primary, he was going nowhere until Trump endorsed him. Even after getting Trump’s endorsement, he only won the nomination with one-third of the vote.
In the general election, Vance won 53-47. Given Ohio’s political leanings and the national environment, that was pathetic. All other Republicans running for statewide office there won by vastly bigger margins. His opponent ran a good race, but the real story is Vance didn’t even run a campaign. He didn’t raise much money and didn’t do many campaign events until the end.
Republican outside groups were forced to spend tens of millions of dollars boosting him. That shouldn’t have happened. Republicans should have won that race without having to break a sweat. Vance inadvertently helped Democrats in other key races. By not bothering to lift a finger for most of the campaign, he forced Republicans to spend money helping him out, which meant they couldn’t spend that money elsewhere.
None of that is likely to matter this year. More than anything else, his selection as VP gives us an idea of where the party is headed. Trump has fundamentally altered the Republican Party’s DNA. MAGA is not going away when he leaves the scene. Vance may not be the future of the party, but whoever is will be like him.
Where Democrats are
The calls for Biden to drop out are growing louder as well they should. Nancy Pelosi has made it clear he needs to drop out as has Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Each day, more members of Congress are calling on him to drop out and that will only increase. Pelosi, Schumer and Jeffries all conveyed those messages to him privately, but have since leaked it. If he doesn’t drop out soon, I suspect they will go public with it.
It’s a bad situation, but, believe it or not, it’s why I am proud to be a Democrat. Unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party is not a cult. If it was like the Republican Party, every Democrat would be saying Biden crushed it in the debate and is the most charismatic speaker of all time.
It’s important to remember that while Biden has been struggling, Trump is not thriving. He still is a very unpopular figure. A healthy Republican Party would never have renominated him, especially after how badly he screwed them over in the midterms.
Democrats want to win. They recognize that Biden is not able to make the case against Trump and is a liability. Only a fraction of elected Democrats have publicly said Biden needs to drop out, but the vast majority feel that way and they will go public with it if they must.
The Republican Party is nothing more than a largescale version of Jonestown. Trump is a liability and has been a curse on the party ever since he first won. A healthy party would have panicked if a potential nominee of theirs got indicted and done everything possible to stop them. Because they’re a cult, they worshipped him even more.
The Democratic Party has many flaws and problems, but there is no cult around Biden or anyone else. My guess is Biden will drop out, but I certainly have no inside information on that. It’s clear that he’s lost almost everyone in his party’s confidence in his ability to campaign and win. If he refuses to drop out, it will put Democrats in competitive races in a horrible position. They will either have to throw him under the bus or they will have to lie and act like everything is great and he’s perfectly functional.
I understand the anger Biden feels towards many in his own party. He deserves way more respect and appreciation than he’s gotten. He didn’t just beat Trump, he fulfilled his promise to restore bipartisanship. Despite the many problems this country has, Biden has shown that our political system remains capable of acting and is not hopelessly broken. That alone makes him a very good president.
Campaigns, however, are about the future and on that front, Biden can’t credibly argue for much of anything. I believe he’s capable of doing the job through January, but not for another term. His decline is not dementia, but it is real and fairly recent, i.e., within the last few months. Having the most stressful and consequential job on earth has almost certainly accelerated his aging.
Age eventually comes for all of us and it has come for Biden. It’s not his fault, but it is his problem and it’s not something he can fix. He won’t get any younger or sharper.
As I mentioned in my last piece, I don’t know whether nominating Kamala Harris or having some kind of mini-primary would be better, but I don’t care at this point. What I do care about is having a new nominee. The problem Democrats are facing is serious, but fixable if the right choices are made. Democratic leaders are making the right choices now and are showing they are a party that cares about winning and not worshipping a cult leader. I want Biden to make the right decision and to do it without the rest of the party having to publicly break with him.
If he makes the right decision, history will look very kindly on him, no matter what happens in November. He’s done his part and now it’s up to everyone else in the party to continue the fight. Whoever the new nominee is, it will be someone who can campaign vigorously and go on TV and make the case against Trump. That’s what is needed the most and is something Biden can no longer do.
Trump is highly vulnerable and hardly a juggernaut. He’s not someone anyone outside of his avid supporters is enthusiastic about. With a new nominee, the age issue instantly becomes Trump’s liability. True, a new nominee would have downsides, but they would also have upsides. Biden’s upsides are almost non-existent now while his downsides remain very high. That has to change.
I have become a lot more comfortable with Harris as the nominee in recent weeks. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking or motivated reasoning on my part, but there is a good case to be made for her. She is a career prosecutor and if that version showed up she could formidable. At a minimum, it would be impossible not to notice the contrast of a career prosecutor running against a felon.
I think she would most likely be the nominee even if there was some kind of mini-primary. I doubt people like Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro would be willing to jump in this late, but I could be wrong. One encouraging thing I’ve seen with Harris is her campaigning with Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina. He has been mentioned as a possible VP pick if she is nominated. If so, her political instincts are much better than I’ve given her credit for. It shows she recognizes the need to moderate and she has learned from the errors she made in going leftward in 2019.
For now, that’s all still speculative because Biden hasn’t bowed out yet. There is time to do it and, like I said, I think he will. It may take a little more time, but I believe he’s going to come around. He’s aware of the stakes and cares about his legacy and what he is remembered for. It will be painful and it’s asking a lot of a president, but it will be putting his country and party first.