Things that matter

We have had two weeks plus of the media orgy of navel gazing about Joe Biden’s age.

And then a shooting.

We have had interminable days of Democrats playing Hamlet and agonizing over a bad debate.

And then an attempted assassination of a former president who wants to be president again.

Let’s stipulate: Both men are too old. One is inarticulate but able. The other is a communicator who communicates either nonsense or rage.

And rage never resolves. It just explodes.

Joe Biden is really terrible at running for president. A high school debate team captain could make a better case for his record. 

He is good at being president.

After each of the following events he acted like a president:

– After the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, which was disreputable and impossible to justify constitutionally, he said: This must not stand. It is un-American. In this land, we are all equal before the law.

– After his son was convicted, he said: We must respect the rule of law, and the courts, period. And, I am also a Dad who loves his son.

– During, and after, the NATO summit he said: Free people stand together for free peoples. We do not bow to tyrants.

– After Donald Trump was shot, Mr. Biden embodied the office, like Ronald Reagan, and spoke for us all – a compassionate America, mature and decent.

This is a president.

Donald Trump is really good at running for president.

He was God-awful at being president.

He is now trapped in a persona he created for himself. He simply cannot do the classy, generous, or selfless thing. I suspect that, inside, he may  be a better man than this persona. But he is trapped in the persona now, and cannot be a fundamentally unifying and conciliating voice.

Will the attempted assassination “change everything”? 

It will change almost nothing.

Liberals and Democrats think the election of Donald Trump would fundamentally compromise American democracy. Indeed, Republican constitutionalists, like Judge J. Michael Luttig, think that.

Trump supporters think that America is already nearly ruined. And this is our last chance.

Both candidates feel they must win.

Both sides feel they must win. 

And that is why little will change. 

We learned in the 1960s: Extremism leads to division and zealotry, which leads, inevitably, to organized hate and violence.

Donald Trump is the candidate of extremism, and that will not change with a speech or two on unity, or a move toward the center. 

But Trump did not invent political violence. Remember Steve Scalise, Gabby Giffords, the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, mass shootings in churches and synagogues and January 6. Remember the sixties, again, and their footnote – the 1970s. The killings of John and Bobby Kennedy, and of Dr. King. The riots in the cities. The shootings at Kent State. The attempted assassination and crippling of George Wallace. Violence is woven into our history; our national DNA. Remember the civil war. We don’t attack our neighbor nations, like Europeans. We kill each other. 

No, unity will not come of this.

The most we can hope for is a modulation – a slight lowering of voices and softening of rhetoric.

Trump will run as a nearly martyred fascist father; Biden as a caring and wise grandfather.

Trump now commands the race.

And that is even more reason why scrutiny of Donald Trump and his personal and political melodramas ought not to be suspended – the rants that include as many or more gaffs than Biden’s speeches; the vitriol and hate toward President Biden and Vice President Harris; the proud ignorance (as with NATO); the unglued associations about sharks, electricity, airports, and always, always the rants about murderous immigrants coming to get us.

And that’s just the current campaign. The campaign, oddly, obscures a failed presidency marked by two impeachments. It obscures policy. Like the 2025 plan – the plan to re-“revolutionize” American society and government toward autocracy.

Autocracy – the strong man without legal restraints – is the core issue in 2024.

Mr. Trump’s proposed alignment with the dictators of the world, and the selling out of Ukraine, would be a total break with American political and presidential tradition.

Autocracy is not who we are.

At least not who we have tried to be for 250 years. 

Liberals are fair game too: Can you accept that the election of Trump might not be the automatic end of the republic? That we shall survive? 

Can you promise to recognize his legitimacy as president if he is elected?

You didn’t last time.

What I hope has changed is that Democrats and the media can no longer afford parlor games: The media playing “gotcha” with Old Uncle Joe and the Democratic Party dithering and self-dividing.

We need to wake up and grow up.

We have real problems. Deep problems. Problems far more profound than age. Like political violence; like 20-year-old kids armed with weapons of war; like intolerance, ignorance, culture wars and ideology.

We have a media that can no longer, truly and generally, function as a free press.

And a public too distracted and angry to think.

This election is about more than men.

This election is about liberty and law.

It is about who we are: The republic of Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and King? Or of J.D. Vance and Tucker Carlson?

We do not yet fully understand the stakes – democracy, or a sort of crazed autocracy, including a brand of economic autocracy that will destroy what little is left of the working and middle class.

This election is about choices that will make many of us less free and more poor.

It will turn on things that matter, whether we engage with them or not.