Commentator

The Week of the Four Timelines

It seems I picked the wrong week to quit the Internet. I was offline for, like, a few hours at a stretch at different points in the last week and in that time….everything seems to have happened.

If we were, I don’t know, some Westeros chronicler, we might call this the Week of the Four Timelines — with most of the possibilities that emerged already lost to the realm of the hypothetical.

Timeline #1 is, of course, that Donald Trump doesn’t turn his head to look at his chart at the moment Thomas Crooks fires at him. It’s interesting — this may well turn out to be one of the great contrafactuals in American history, and I’m living through the time it happened in, and I have no idea, actually, what the consequences would have been.

I don’t actually think the country would have broken up into civil war, but there would almost certainly have been an irruption of political violence somewhere or other. Much of MAGA would have found itself permanently estranged from the US body politic, and the assumption of everybody on the Republican side of the aisle would have been that Biden or the ‘deep state’ was somehow behind the assassination. In the immediate term, though, things might have been, all things considered, surprisingly sedate. The Republican leadership, not being particularly sentimental people, likely would have just proceeded with the presidential race and after, let’s say a delay of a few weeks, with the RNC convention. They would have had the problem of a successor — since Trump at that point had not selected Vance, and none of Trump’s primary rivals, DeSantis, Haley, etc, had accrued any real support. The MAGA movement, which was a one-man operation anyway, would have found itself suddenly leaderless, and the Republicans would have faced the challenges of a brokered convention. Biden, I imagine, would still have had to step down — not least because of relentless scrutiny into the Secret Service’s abundant failures in Butler, PA — and the presidential race between Harris and, I don’t know, let’s say Rubio, would have been one of the stranger, more divisive events in American history.

Timeline #2 was where we seemed to find ourselves for the last month — everybody in the world knowing that Biden had to step down….except for Biden and the handful of people he was talking to. There was a real fifth-act-of-a-Shakespeare-play flavor to the last month — the Thane of Wilmington chatting only to a few loyal retainers, everybody else running out the back door of Dunsinane the second that Biden’s back was turned, Hunter Biden using the occasion for maybe a bit of belated father-son bonding. What was striking about this period was the passivity of the Democrats — the Biden campaign moving forward on autopilot, Democratic lawmakers privately telling journalists that they had resigned themselves to a thrashing in November, and the Biden team in an astonishing piece of chutzpah trying to preempt the convention and get Biden nominated by a “virtual rollcall.” What was completely missing in the Dems’ response was any of the apocalyptic rhetoric that they usually reserve for Trump. He had seemed, astonishingly enough, like a unity figure after the debate and the assassination — and the Dems appeared ready to accept a Trump landslide, in the way that a Nixon landslide in ’72 or Reagan landslide in ’84 came also to seem like an inevitability.

In retrospect, though, the quiet of the last month was connected more to the sure, careful tread of conspirators. If the most recent reporting is to be believed, a group of leading Democrats, really headed by Nancy Pelosi, was ready to push out Biden this week. “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” one Democratic source told Politico. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.” That meant a more public, united front in calling for Biden to step aside, as well as the disclosure of the campaign’s recent, grievous internal polling. The Dems’ apparent apathy was, in this telling, really an attempt to give Biden a chance to come to the inevitable on his own terms.

Timeline #3 and timeline #4 closely followed on one another. In timeline #3, Biden’s dignified-if-less-than-stirring tweet (was the single greatest achievement of his presidency really in lowering prescription drug costs for seniors?) left open the question of who would succeed him. Other Democrats would have seized the opening to announce their candidacy and we would have had a thrilling, brokered convention. It would have been “the hottest ticket in American politics in decades,” Mona Charen wrote in Politico. This is what I’ve been advocating for for months. The heat of airtime and attention would have focused in on the Democrats — something that’s been sorely missing throughout this election cycle — and the party would have had a vital opportunity to rebuild itself after years of gerontocracy, inertia, and insider-dealing.

But it seems like that ship has already sailed, and we are in timeline #4 — which was the likeliest timeline all along. Biden immediately followed up his open-season tweet with his tweet endorsing Harris and the pieces were all in place for a rapid succession, with Harris immediately picking up Biden’s $96 million war chest and no leading Democrats jumping into the ring. The speed with which everything occurred calls into question the latest raft of reporting. It seems more likely that Biden was less in denial of the need to withdraw than it seemed, and Harris less of a faithfully silent ally. By running down the clock and keeping the news of his withdrawal as secretive as possible, Biden closed off the window for a challenger to emerge — and Harris was, immediately, ready to pounce.

So, it’s Harris v. Trump, with the convention likely to be a coronation. The clock is now, really, reset to zero. Trump has tremendous headwinds behind him, but there’s every structural reason to think that the Democrats can overtake him. He remains widely unpopular and is an erratic, polarizing candidate. The Democrats have the advantage now of treating him more or less as the incumbent, of running against him and his high negatives. The trick is to just have one message and stick to it. For now, it should be January 6th — and the fact that, in the last glimpse of Trump in office, he dispatched a mob to attack Congress and his own Vice President. More than anything about the economy, immigration, abortion, etc, that has to be the point — that Trump is, at the end of the day, a threat to democracy and to America’s place in the world. It’ll be a mud fight, and the more that Trump can be goaded into inflammatory statements the more that will drive up his negatives with independents.

The question, of course, is whether Harris is really up to this. The underlying problem is that everything about her comes off as insincere. She speaks in the same alphabet soup jargon and stentorian tone that were such liabilities for Hillary. It’s encouraging, to be honest, that Harris has shown herself to be a capable in-fighter in terms of sliding into position as Biden’s successor. I have seen no sign so far of on-the-campaign-trail talent — and she’s probably too much of a placid centrist to draw away any of Robert Kennedy’s support, which would seem to be the low-hanging fruit in swinging the election. She’ll have to run as the candidate of sanity and centrality, and maybe even — making full use of her prosecutor background — as the candidate of law-and-order. But the poll numbers have been encouraging enough to indicate that anyone can beat Trump — that even Biden, non compos mentis-ish as he was, still had a chance. If she runs a moderately-capable campaign, that may be enough. The last few weeks have served to mainstream-if-not-sanctify Trump, but it’s vital to not forget who he is. He’s a huckster with a long history of financial scandals — the kind of person who would rip off his father on his deathbed and see a movie rather than say goodbye to his dying brother. He has no interest in the actual work of governing and a second term would be a body blow to the underlying structure of American government. Keep hitting his negatives as aggressively and forcefully as possible, and a comeback is still possible for the Dems.