Commentator

Excuse me, everything we have to do with....look....if we finally beat Medicare...

I’ve already posted a hot-take on the debate for

Persuasion

(together with

Quico Toro

), and I don’t have much of substance to add to that, but, honestly, I haven’t been this depressed about politics in almost exactly eight years and the only thing that might remotely help is to write and to try to think things through.

1.Biden has to step aside. That’s obvious enough. He can’t win — or, to be more precise, he brings no positive value whatsoever to the Democratic ticket. In sabermetrics terms, he offers no Wins Above Replacement — virtually any replacement. If he steps aside, the Democrats go into a brokered convention. It’s messy, and nobody exactly remembers how to do this, but the rules are all in place for it, and it’s the way it was done for over a century. There could be some inexhaustible number of ballots, but at the end of the convention the Democrats would walk out with a candidate and that candidate would not be Joe Biden. There would be still be enough time — there really would be — between August and November for that candidate to establish themselves before the American people and to offer a compelling alternative to Trump, who, let’s remember, has an unfavorability rating of around 54%.

2.The question is whether Biden has the self-awareness to realize how devastating his debate performance was and to step aside. My guess is that he’s not even close to it. My heart sank yet again when I saw a clip of him thanking supporters immediately after the debate, and he was gracious and optimistic — exactly as if he hadn’t just spent the previous hour-and-a-half struggling to get to the end of his sentences in full view of 100 million Americans. The only hope is for the people who have any possible influence over him — let’s say Barack and Michelle Obama, Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, maybe the Clintons — to sit down with him in the Oval Office and break the hard news to him. They can wait for the next round of polling to come out — if there’s a swing of five or even ten points against Biden, as there may well be, there’s a chance that that can get through to Biden. For the sake of the country, I hope it’s ten points — whatever it takes to get the message across. And it does have to happen very, very soon. The point is that the Democrats have a losing hand right now. There is no other shoe that will drop between now and November — Trump is not going to go prison or drop dead, Biden will not magically rejuvenate. The only thing to do is to reshuffle the deck, but it will take Biden to do that and Biden won’t do it unless he is very firmly pushed.

3.I don’t think there is any point in trying to game this out until the convention. The convention is a perfectly reputable way of picking a candidate. It’s not the most democratic system, but, whatever. The Democrats can absorb that attack point when they get to it. There’s plenty of strength within the Democratic Party, and, even as much as Trump commandingly won the June debate, his vulnerabilities also came through. He’s living in his own bubble. His answers on abortion and January 6 were almost dizzyingly weak. Any normal Democratic candidate could hammer away at him from August until November. But, with Biden, Trump’s current lead is insurmountable.

4.We should give credit where it’s due. Trump put in an impressive, professional performance. He seemed like the adult in the room, which is saying something. He was sharp, he was sometimes witty, he had a rhythmic, sort of hypnotic, speaking style, and he mostly retained control over his bullying tendencies. He reminded me of a boxer who prefers to let his opponent stay standing and to win on points as opposed to trying for a knockout. And, with a second Trump term coming agonizingly close, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves what that means. It doesn’t — let’s not go crazy — mean the overnight collapse of American government or some turn towards American Nazism. When Trump was first elected, I thought he might just lose interest in the presidency and not bother with it, but he did, in his own way, try and mostly stayed within his elected mandate. However, a second Trump term would be catastrophic in almost unimaginable ways. It would mean, first off, virtually the end of independent Ukraine — the US pulling its funding nearly immediately and Ukraine reduced either to a rump state or gradually overrun. Then, even if Trump doesn’t entirely pull out of NATO, he will forego the US’ leadership role in the organization. The period of the US as the leader of the Western world will come to an end. And, even if you regard the current international order as unjust, the US’ relative absence will be seized upon by Russia, China, Iran. Maybe even more concerningly, the atrophy of the federal government that began after 2016 will continue. By the end of Trump’s first term, the US government was losing the ability to properly collect taxes or to respond to an emergency. That can only continue under Trump II — and with the question now being whether the US can continue to service its sky-high debt. Meanwhile, we pick up right where we left off on January 6 in terms of political polarization. I don’t think Trump is actually going to start lining up journalists against walls, but he’s kind of thinking about it, and the civic order that frayed terribly in 2016-2020 may well snap.

5.Biden himself, as well as age, are primarily to be blamed for his poor showing as a candidate, but the debate fiasco was the culmination of years of willful blindness on the part of the media and the Democratic establishment. Biden had always been a weak candidate. He was weak when he ran in 2008. He was lucky to win in 2020 in an anomalous election. The time to step aside and to prepare for a successor was right after the 2022 midterms. Instead, not only did the Democratic establishment fall into a narrative that all was well and that Biden could carry them forward through the next cycle, but the Bidens played political hardball, squashing the Democrats who were ready for a primary challenge. Throughout all of 2023, “the conversation” occurred in quiet — with the media declining even to write openly about Biden’s obvious cognitive decline (doing so was supposed to be ‘ageist’ or just disloyal). In the wake of bad poll numbers in February, a crop of pundits finally started to speak sense and urge Biden to step aside, but the power of denial was too hard to break, and after the State of the Union “the conversation” once again disappeared. It’s beyond obvious now that the fantasies Democrats indulged in — of Trump’s legal troubles catching up to him, of the party apparatus closing ranks behind Biden and pushing him across the goal line — just cannot work given how far gone Biden’s memory problems are. The cat’s out of the bag now. Spin can’t save the situation and neither can closing ranks. (It was painful to watch Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom trying to talk past what had just happened.) We had all known — however much we were unwilling to admit it to ourselves — that Biden’s day had passed. But a certain cognitive dissonance has been a hallmark of this whole period. Journalists and party figures prized soldierly loyalty over common sense and plain truth. There was some belief that the legal circus or disciplined messaging could bring down Trump, and with that came an unwillingness to see what the entire American public on Thursday plainly saw.

There’s no point in trying to sugarcoat anything at this point. What happened on Thursday was a catastrophe, and it may well result in the collapse of the American republic as we know it. At this point, the only ones who can stop the slide are Biden himself and those close enough to talk some sense into him.