Donald Trump has grown increasingly fixated on tariffs, which he seems to think, contrary to the consensus among economists, are borne by foreigners. Trump understands at some level that economists and most business owners disagree with him, but rather than paper over their dispute, he insists — his insistence being an indicator of the depths of his conviction — upon trying to win them over to his side.
In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Trump made a remarkable, error-strewn diatribe in favor of tariffs:
In under a minute, Trump claimed, first, that when it relied on tariffs for revenue, the United States (by which he means the government) had more wealth (by which he means revenue) than at any other time in its history. “We had so much money,” he said, “all from tariffs; there was no income tax.”
The truth is the opposite. Before the creation of the income tax, the United States did rely on tariffs as a major funding source. But the government collectedfar less revenue:
Illustration: Tax Foundation/A graph of Federal Government Receipts and Expenditures
Trump proceeded to tell his audience that, contrary to popular belief that the U.S. imposed a tariff that worsened the Depression, in fact tariffs only came into use in 1932.
That is also false. The Smoot-Hawley tariff was implemented in 1930. One of its major effects was to set off retaliatory tariffs by trading partners, thus hurting American manufacturers as well as consumers. The economic contraction was underway when the tariff was implemented, but economic conditions grew much worse after it was put in place.
Illustration: Press-Telegram
Furthermore, Franklin D. Roosevelt liberalized trade after taking office in 1933. Tariff rates plunged as the economy recovered from the Depression. To be sure, tariffs are not even close to the main reason the economy recovered, but Trump’s belief that they were hiked only beginning in 1932 is the reverse of what occurred.
Trump, in some ways, is obsessed with an economic agenda of which his understanding is so rudimentary he gets the most important historical facts about it backward.
Many Republican elites believe that Trump either doesn’t mean it when he presents tariffs as an economic cure-all or that they can talk him out of it after the election. But Trump would have unilateral power to impose tariffs through executive action; he does not need Congress. And the idea that a lifelong megalomaniac who lacks a basic understanding of government will somehow become amenable to reason is, at best, optimistic.
Conservatives don’t worry about Trump’s undisguised authoritarian ambitions because they think he’s going to use his powers for policies they believe in. In part, that is true. But Trump is also determined to implement a tariff agenda most conservative elites understand would have disastrous ramifications. Maybe the authoritarianism, criminality, and racism aren’t worth it?
This week, more than 100 Republican elected officials or national security advisers endorsed Kamala Harris. The argument that united these figures, many of whom worked directly for Donald Trump, is simple: Trump is a maniac. More specifically, Trump worships dictators, a fact with disturbing implications for his foreign policy, and even more disturbing implications for his use of domestic power (Trump has attempted a coup, promises to free the criminals who joined his coup attempt, and threatens regularly to imprison the media and opposition if he wins). In the face of the extraordinary threat to the system posed by a second Trump term, normal political disagreements over budgets, social policy, and the like simply don’t register.
Oddly, this logic has not won over two of the most prominent conservative columnists at the New York Times, whom you might expect would have an easier time supporting a Democrat than would, say, Dick Cheney.
Both Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens have written columns explaining why the choice between nakedly authoritarian, paranoid racist criminal Donald Trump and regular Democrat Kamala Harris leaves them flummoxed and, for now, undecided. I am not a conservative, so for me the choice is extremely obvious. Even granting that conservatives have different priorities and preferences, however, the case for indecision strikes me as feeble.
Stephens’s column begins with a series of specific policy questions he wishes Harris would answer. These are all perfectly valid questions, of course, but there’s something comical about demanding this level of specificity from one candidate — “Are there any regulations she’d like to get rid of in her initiative to build 3 million new homes in the next four years? What role, if any, does she see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans? If there were another pandemic similar to COVID-19, what might her administration do differently?” etc. — when the other candidate’s platform ranges from incoherent blather to promises or threats so outlandish his own party is reduced to hoping he is simply lying. Stephens sounds like a parent who is unsure about whether he should hire a serial killer to babysit his children because the only other candidate hasn’t supplied enough references.
After listing his questions that Harris must answer (and that Trump, of course, not only hasn’t answered but is mentally incapable of answering), Stephens addresses the obvious objection about the alternative:
“Yet Trump victory or no, the Republican Party isn’t likely to revert to its former ideological leanings. And the argument that Trump is our Mussolini, scheming with ever-greater malevolence and cunning to end the Republic, is getting a little long in the tooth.
Trump may be much the worse sinner, but Democrats aren’t blameless when it comes to weaponizing the instruments of state power to interfere with the will of the voters. Otherwise, what does it mean to try to kick a candidate off a state ballot, or use a nakedly politicized prosecution to turn an opponent into a convicted felon, or have powerful insiders anoint a presidential candidate without the benefit of a single primary vote?”
Begin with the second paragraph. Stephens is trying to equate Trump’s naked authoritarianism with various actions by “Democrats.” Two of those, the Manhattan prosecution (which I think is shaky) and a lawsuit to disqualify him in California, have nothing to do with either Harris or the national party. The third, the party’s quick coalescing around Harris rather than jury-rig a speed primary, is both an understandable response to an emergency and one that is perfectly normal party behavior. There are no rules in place for how a party responds to a medical emergency by its nominee. Speed elections aren’t realistic. In any case, parties used to anoint their candidates without voting at all. To even compare quibbles about the nominating process with Trump’s belief he is entitled to prevail whatever the voters say, and that all opposition to him is inherently criminal, is an insult to democracy.
I think the weakness of this argument is explained by the paragraph preceding it, in which Stephens laments that the old Republican Party is not returning, and that complaints about Trump’s unfitness are getting old. Obviously, the passage of time does not make concerns about an authoritarian president less compelling, especially when his authoritarianism is growing more blatant, while his party’s willingness to check it is faltering. But what does weaken with time is political willpower. Stephens’s thought process is laid bare by his fretting that the old party is not returning. His period of brief exile, which he first imagined would last months until Trump was defeated, and then four years until the party returned to sanity, is now stretching out indefinitely. And that is why his implied threshold of acceptability for Trump is now getting lower and lower.
Douthat’s argument for indecision is somewhat more frustrating. He argues that the Democratic Party lurched leftward during the Trump era. Douthat concedes that it has been chastened, both on substantive grounds (inflation rose surprisingly fast) and political grounds (the public turned out to be much less progressive than the Twitter-influenced bubble of 2019–2020 implied). Yet his complaint is that Democrats have failed to acknowledge and apologize for their leftward lurch:
“The ‘ask’ is to ratify a record of substantial policy failure and conspicuous ideological fanaticism, dressed up for the moment in a thin promise that we won’t make those mistakes again …
Then the bill comes due, the elites backpedal and obfuscate and conveniently forget (What do you mean, Kamala Harris endorsed publicly funded gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens? Sounds like Fox News nonsense!), and the unhappy swing voter is informed that no real price can be exacted for any of this folly, because the populist alternative isn’t fit for power.”
It isn’t enough for Douthat that Harris has renounced nearly all her progressive stances from 2019 and is running a campaign far more centrist than the one Joe Biden ran in 2020. He demands a price be paid for the progressivism. An apology? A truth and reconciliation commission for the unjustly canceled? One can understand his impulse to desire these things without being able to fathom how they could amount to a rationale for electing Trump, the very lunatic who helped set off the excesses that he’s still so angry about.
Yes, the public-health experts overshot their certainty — but that was both more tempting for them to do, and easier for them to get away with, when the president was spinning absurd lies that the virus would go away on its own in a few days or could be cured with Ivermectin. Yes, the Robin DiAngelo / Ibram Kendi fad was embarrassing and even harmful, but racism sure seems like a more serious problem when the president of the United States says racist things constantly.
Douthat, like Stephens, manages to identify his own emotional processes without diagnosing them fully. For Douthat, it’s the lack of an option — he cannot take out his frustration on the Democrats “because the populist alternative isn’t fit for power.”
It’s frustrating. I get it. If the Republicans were still in the hands of Bush-Romney types, and the Democratic Party fell into the thrall of, say, a Hugo Chavez, I would have to vote Republican. The give-and-take of normal policy disagreement can only proceed under a relatively healthy democracy. If the only party that could be trusted with democracy was only taking, and not giving, my policy priorities, I would feel growing frustration. The system is unfair. The elites must pay a price.
But it is not the system that has brought us to this unfortunate point. It is the Republican Party. I would very much like to have a world in which we had two parties to choose from that could be trusted not to destroy democracy. But until we do, small-d Democrats have only one choice. That their alternative is unsuitable for power is not the Democrats’ fault.
After Donald Trump’s surprising win in 2016, the Democratic Party was panicked into abandoning the Obama model as a failure. Earlier this month, I examined Kamala Harris’s political challenge through the lens of Obamaism. Could Harris rediscover a winning formula her party had discarded? The convention gives us a clear answer:
Yes. She. Can.
The Obama recipe has several key components, all of which were vividly present in Chicago. The most obvious may be novelty. Obama promised to turn the page, leaving behind frustrating and tiresome debates of the past, rather than overpowering the Democrats’ adversaries.
The convention, accordingly, presented Harris to the country as if she was an outsider. Speaker after speaker hammered this theme. Michelle Obama told Democrats she saw a “feeling that’s been buried for far too long. It’s the contagious power of hope … Hope made a comeback.” Colin Allred, the Texas Senate nominee, promised that “we will turn the page and write a new chapter for this country.” Tim Walz urged Americans to “turn the page on Donald Trump.” Yusef Salaam, New York City Council candidate and exonerated former target of one of Trump’s earliest racist fearmongering campaigns, told Democrats, “When they see us, we will finally say good-bye to that hateful man.”
Harris herself has employed the slogan “A New Way Forward” and the chant “We’re not going back!” because, presumably, “No Country for Old Men” was rejected as too subtle.
This assumption that Donald Trump is the sitting president of the United States managed to simultaneously infuriate both Trump and the actual incumbent president. Biden’s loyalists have grumbled at the disrespect implied by her messaging, and they are not wrong to detect an insult.
In a literal sense, it is a feat of propaganda to turn public discontent with the status quo into an argument for a member of the administration and against his challenger. But as much as it may invert the current power arrangement in Washington, it feels true. Biden has never managed to grasp public attention, and this year his presence has shrunk to the point of near invisibility. Trump’s presence on the national stage has grown. His sycophants even address him as “Mr. President.” Trump’s plan was to use that appearance of strength versus weakness to overpower his presumed opponent. Harris has used it against him like jujitsu. Trump has been the loudest voice in the room for eight years. Making him go away, she promises, will give a greater sensation of change than switching party control of the executive branch.
One gauge of success is the apoplectic reaction this has produced among Republicans. “The strategy is to pretend that Kamala Harris has never existed until this very moment,” wails Ben Shapiro, “That the Biden-HARRIS administration was never a thing. That she somehow was handed the nomination without a single vote WITHOUT owning Biden’s record. The audacity of LIES.” The Wall StreetJournal editorial page laments, “Mr. Trump has let Ms. Harris claim the mantle of change, though she has been Mr. Biden’s sidekick all along. This is political malpractice.”
If you recall, the Trump message involved reminding people how well the economy was performing in 2019, pretending he wasn’t president in 2020, then blaming the global post-pandemic inflation surge on his successor. Biden was too hapless to disrupt this narrative. Harris isn’t.
A second element of Obamism relies on carefully navigating the explosive cultural forces unleashed by Harris’s novel identity. Winning elections means gaining the approval of voters who hold moderate or conservative beliefs and cultural assumptions. Not all those fears can be assuaged by rolling out a white-haired former football coach who enjoys hunting more than spicy food. It entails carefully curating the nominee’s biography and platform.
Harris depicted her life story as “working class” — she does not come from the affluent part of the Bay Area, nor was her family dependent on income support. (Yes, there are still winnable voters out there who hold bigoted assumptions in their minds about the work habits of the urban poor.) The story she gave the country was of a striving, tight-knit upwardly mobile immigrant family, which Americans regard with pride.
Harris cast her lot firmly on the conservative side of social questions like criminal justice, border enforcement, the military, and patriotism. Democrats waved American flags and chanted “U-S-A!” with gusto and frequency. Harris presented her own plans as responsible, common sense, and potentially bipartisan. She cast her opponent, not herself, as the driver of radical change — somehow without undercutting her depicting of him as old news. Trump’s angry rejoinder that Harris is serving in the White House right now, along with his desperation to disavow himself from Project 2025, which he has previously touted as his master plan for a second term, is another sign of how well this is working.
This was a complete abandonment of the progressive assumption that Trump won because the working class had grown alienated by neoliberalism and desperate to overthrow the system. The transformation could also be traced in the party’s platform, as political scientist Matt Grossmann noticed. The word border, which appeared just eight times four years ago, received 49 mentions this year, while invocations of the term “systemic racism” fell from nine in 2020 to zero.
Harris’s choice was to focus relentlessly on targeting the voters she needs to win 270 electoral votes, at the expense of fan service for progressives. This has naturally created some dismay among the fans. Left-wing activists, who were initially thrilled with Harris’s nomination and her choice of Tim Walz as running met, met her speech with icy sarcasm, especially its embrace of the defense establishment and promises to bring together labor and entrepreneurs. (“The reference to ‘founders’ there is ominous,” observed David Dayen of the left-wing American Prospect.)
Alienating the left is not the point of these moves. It is simply the inevitable by-product. If you are targeting your message to the beliefs of the median voter, you are necessarily going to leave voters at the 99th percentile of the right-to-left spectrum feeling cold. The bitter complaints from the right that she is a fraud, and from the left that she is a sellout, are indications that Harris has calibrated her campaign perfectly.
Unlike Obama, Harris is almost certainly not going to have a Democratic Congress and an opportunity to expand the welfare state and new regulation. There is little point in selling the public on new liberal programs that a Republican-led Senate would ignore. If Harris does enjoy a historically consequential presidency, it will not run through the traditional channel of passing giant liberal laws through big Democratic majorities.
The question is will Harris become president at all? The evidence from Chicago all points to the conclusion that she knows exactly what to do.
Trump took this position expressly, twice, in his speech, albeit in a stream-of-consciousness riff. His basic point was that public critics of Trump-appointed judges who make rulings Trump approves of are “working the refs.”
Trump first claimed this is illegal. (“I really think it’s illegal what they do, with judges and justices. They’re playing the ref.”) Later in the speech, he said it ought to be illegal. (“Remember the term. Playing the ref with our judges and justices should be punishable by very serious fines and beyond that.”)
In the middle of these two statements, he managed, in typical Trumpian fashion, to strip away any pretense of intellectual consistency by (1) saying that “working the refs” is wonderful and brilliant, because it was done by his friend, Bobby Knight, the former Indiana basketball coach who endorsed him, leading to Trump winning Indiana by a landslide, and (2) immediately making his own criticism of judges who rule against him. “The New York court system is totally corrupt,” Trump said.
A law against criticizing judges would be highly problematic, of course, but that is obviously not what Trump wants, since he sandwiched his calls for such a law around criticism of judges who ruled against him. Trump wants to ban criticizing judges who rule the way Trump wants them to rule.
Trump would almost certainly not be able to pass such a law through Congress, and even if he did, it would stand little chance of surviving a clear First Amendment challenge. The Republican-controlled Supreme Court has shown a willingness to bend the law in favor of Trump and the conservative agenda to a sometimes-shocking degree, but an outright ban on criticism of judges would disregard the plain text of the Constitution to a degree that would be hard to imagine.
What matters here is that Trump has revealed once again his utter lack of respect for democratic values. He admires dictators. He believes any election he loses is illegitimate. He believes his political opponents and critics are per se criminal. And he has made this plain so many times that every fresh new piece of evidence of his dictatorial ambitions, each of which ought to be totally disqualifying on its own, barely attracts attention of the political media any more.
After absorbing the initial waves of shock from Thursday night’s debate debacle, allies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have begun whispering to the media their reasons why the Democratic ticket must consist of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It is that, if Biden steps aside, the party’s only option would be to anoint Harris. If they fail to do so, Black voters would be outraged and register their dismay at the polls (or by refusing to go to the polls), thus ensuring Donald Trump’s election.
The Biden logic then proceeds to its next step: Harris would be a worse nominee than Biden, thus nullifying any reason for him to relinquish his spot on the ticket.
You can see the logic being traced out via the media. “Biden allies have played out the scenarios and see little chance of anyone besides Harris winning the nomination if he stepped aside,” explains Axios. “Is the Democratic Party going to deny the nomination to the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected V.P.?”
“Most Democrats who want to replace Biden also remain extremely dubious that his incumbent running mate, Kamala Harris, could beat Trump — but if she sought the nomination, then denying that prize to the first woman of color who has served as vice president could tear apart the party,” reports Ron Brownstein. “The fear that such a fight could practically ensure defeat in November is one reason Democrats who are uneasy about renominating Biden have held their tongue for so long.”
Of course, Harris’s allies understandably dispute the premise that her nomination would be disastrous. But they very much cooperate with the implied threat that denying her the nomination would rip open mortal wounds in the Democratic coalition. “The fact that people keep coming back to this is so offensive to so many of us. They still don’t get that the message you’re saying to people, to this Democratic Party, is, we prefer a white person,” a veteran Democrat and Harris ally tells Politico, which notes that Harris’s allies and aides are “not shy about pointing out the optics of substituting any other candidate (likely White, possibly male) for Harris — a move that they suggest would upset not only Black delegates at the convention but also Black voters with whom the Biden campaign is already on shaky ground.”
And so, by the logic offered by the Biden and Harris teams, the ticket is frozen in place. Biden can’t step down because he would have to hand the role to Harris, and the party doesn’t trust her in that position. Harris’s allies are aiming a gun at the party, Biden is pointing at Harris, pleading his own helplessness.
If this reasoning characterized the situation accurately, then the party is indeed doomed to shuffle forlornly toward November and the likely restoration of Trump and all the horrorshe would bring. But I find the rationale not only suspiciously self-serving but also wrong on several key points.
First, while there was good reason to believe a year ago that Harris was clearly worse than Biden, there is much less reason to think that today. His catastrophic debate performance was an out-of-sample event. We will await more polling to measure the scale of the destruction, but Biden’s campaign had been pointing to the debate as the event that would redirect public attention from Biden’s faltering performance and onto Trump’s maniacal unfitness. Not only did Biden fail utterly, he achieved the opposite of his intention. It’s difficult to imagine anything Trump could do or say that would attract more attention than Biden spending an hour and a half sounding like a cast member in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Is Harris a mediocre politician? At this point, mediocrity at the head of the ticket would be a welcome improvement.
Now, while I think Harris is probably a better option than Biden, she is not the Democrats’ best option. If you undertake a change as radical as swapping out your presidential candidate because he’s losing to a sociopathic criminal, then you should really go ahead and pick a candidate whose political and governing skills have the confidence of the party elite. As Napoleon said, if you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.
This brings me to the next problem with the Biden-Harris argument for staying the course. If Harris is passed over, the threat is that Black voters won’t give Democrats the necessary landslide margins they need. That is happening already. Almost every poll shows the Biden-Harris ticket is garnering the lowest levels of Black support for any Democratic ticket in decades. The danger of a depressed Black electorate is being used to maintain a ticket that is losing in part because of a depressed Black electorate.
What evidence is there that having Harris as vice president and heir apparent has any positive effect on a constituency outside of political elites and professional activists who whisper to reporters? What reason is there to believe a different ticket, which could easily feature a different Black vice-presidential candidate on it, would fare any worse?
It helps to think more specifically about the hypothetical complaint that would ensue from Biden-Harris being replaced with, say, Whitmer-Booker. The complaint would be that Harris was passed over for a less-qualified white candidate, and Black candidates are being shunted into the vice presidency, a powerless role, because Democrats don’t trust them in the top job.
That complaint might have some rational basis if it weren’t for the very well-known fact that Democrats did nominate an African-American for president in the very recent past. Twice! Indeed, Barack Obama leaped ahead of the older white candidate whose supporters believed it was her turn to get the job. So the main basis of Harris’s discrimination charge would be obviously false.
That the hypothetical specter of baseless charges of racism are being used to empower an obviously ineffective white male candidate reveals a deeper problem to the Democratic Party’s approach to representational politics.
Identity politics in American elections is not some modern Democratic Party innovation. For most of our history, campaigns were bound by an unstated but extremely firm requirement that the candidate pool be limited to white men. Parties have always deliberately chosen candidates with backgrounds tailored to appeal to identity blocs — Protestant, Catholic, German, Irish, etc. It was long standard practice for presidential tickets to balance a Southern presidential nominee with a Northerner, or vice-versa. None of this was seen as fatally compromising qualifications for the sake of identity politics.
Still, even when parties employed hard regional or ethnic quotas for picking candidates, they still applied some test of candidate skill. The bosses in the smoke-filled room would try to assess whether the candidate could garner votes. That was the candidate’s job, garnering votes. And there has never been any reason to believe Harris possesses this talent at the level required to win a presidential election.
She won a Senate race in California, but that is a state where winning the nomination is tantamount to winning the general election. It does not require appealing to any voters who are not reliable Democrats. (For this same reason, I would absolutely not consider Gavin Newsom to replace Biden).
Harris is telegenic, and appears forceful in prepared settings when she can use her prosecutorial background. I was an early supporter of her 2020 presidential campaign. But that campaign was utterly shambolic. Despite having the benefit of the media treating her as a top-tier candidate, she committed a series of blunders, including changing her position on Medicare for All — at the time the most important issue in the campaign — three times, without ever being able to discuss the issue coherently.
Biden selected her anyway, due to a strange combination of factors. Early on, he promised to appoint a female vice-presidential nominee. And after winning the nomination, the murder of George Floyd led activists to pressure him to choose someone who was Black.
The combination of those two requirements functionally narrowed the candidate pool to a single person. Biden considered Karen Bass and Val Demings, who were both members of the House of Representatives, and even Susan Rice, who had never held elective office. But the traditional bar for vice presidents is a governor or senator, and Harris was literally the only Black woman who met that bar. It is surely true that deeply embedded racism and sexism has prevented more Black women from attaining those positions. But where things stood in 2020, Harris applied for a job in which she had the only qualifying resume.
A more sure-footed Biden campaign would have been able to resist demands that had boxed in their options to such an extreme degree. Here, I think, the extreme non-diversity of Biden’s inner circle left him highly vulnerable. Biden has long confined his trusted confidantes to a small handful of mostly male and entirely white advisers. This made female and non-white Democrats groups understandably suspicious that Biden was not listening to their perspective, and made it harder, especially in the feverish post-Floyd atmosphere, to push back. Biden’s path of least resistance was to avoid any identity politics fights during the campaign and get through to November with a united party.
Democrats hoped Harris learned from her campaign and would develop into a plausible successor. It’s clear that few leading Democrats believe she has done so. Assessing the performance of a vice president, who has no real official responsibilities, is notoriously amorphous and inherently subject to all kinds of bias, including racism and sexism. Still, Harris has churned through staff. Last year, a New York Timesstory on her performance contained an absolutely devastating passage:
But the painful reality for Ms. Harris is that in private conversations over the last few months, dozens of Democrats in the White House, on Capitol Hill and around the nation — including some who helped put her on the party’s 2020 ticket — said she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country. Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.
Harris can chalk this all up to racism and sexism, but even Democrats her own team selected as character witnesses have said they don’t think she is up to the job. If you want to understand why Democrats are so hesitant to replace Biden with Harris, this more than explains their belief.
So where does this leave the party right now? Obviously, Biden can’t change decisions he made four years ago. But this history should give Democrats a more skeptical perspective on the use and abuse of political jockeying styled as identity politics.
The modern Democratic Party’s laudable and correct interest in expanding its leadership to excluded groups has had the unfortunate side effect of allowing candidates to weaponize insinuation. Just try to recall the endless volley of charges of racism and sexism between supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008, Clinton and Sanders in 2016, or basically everybody in 2020 without cringing.
That history is the backstop of the party’s current paralysis. And that toxicity has now returned, with Biden-Harris supporters already taking to social media to tar Democrats who disagree with them as racist, sexist, or both. It may or may not be the case that Democrats are so deeply enmeshed in the most cartoonish form of identity politics discourse that they can’t make clear-headed political choices, even with the highest possible stakes.
What they should not do is passively accept this state of affairs as an unalterable force of nature. Democrats have a choice about how they conduct their public debates over their nominees. When political actors use charges of bias to position their favored candidate for power, they can subject these claims to the appropriate level of skepticism rather than treat them as nuclear weapons aimed at their base. Submitting to this form of extortion is a choice, as is, potentially, ignoring or resisting it.
This doesn’t mean Harris can’t be the nominee. At the moment, according to one post-debate poll, only 27 percent of Americans believe Joe Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president. This poses an almost-insurmountable obstacle to his election, even with Trump’s manifest unfitness. Biden is losing, and he has already squandered what his own campaign considered his best chance to change the race.
Again, even with all her limitations, Harris is probably a stronger candidate now than Biden. I also think there are better options than Harris. My choice would be Gretchen Whitmer, who’s displayed a repeated talent at appealing to swing voters, and who could be paired with a Black running mate like Cory Booker. There are other promising options, but I won’t pretend I can offer any single solution with any confidence that it’s the best way to go. I do believe that almost any change, including a Harris nomination, makes more sense than keeping a nominee who has so deeply forfeited public confidence.
My overarching point is that Democrats need to summon the collective willpower to make political choices in the clear-headed interest of their party and their country. It’s not too late, but very soon it will be. The Biden campaign has brought the party to a crisis point by a series of choices dictated by personal comfort, short-term thinking, and narrow self-interest. These decisions may be rational for the individuals involved, but they add up to a collective disaster.
If that persists, they will continue to drift toward a potentially irreversible setback for American democracy. If Biden and Harris haven’t opened their eyes to what we are now facing, everybody else in their party with influence has a duty to grab them by the shoulder and force them to.
Few political phenomena are more overdetermined than J.D. Vance’s endorsement of Donald Trump’s coup attempt. Vance has carried off a cynical but highly successful mid-career switch from venture capitalist to professional pseudo-populist that requires catering to the beliefs of his constituency; he has fallen in with far-right authoritarian intellectuals who long for the destruction of the republic; and he is angling for a spot on Trump’s ticket.
Each of these individually provide Vance with more than enough reason to bless Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term. Collectively, they make the decision a no-brainer.
But Vance, surprisingly, still possesses a brain, or at least enough pretensions to wish to justify his stance to those who do. And so, in his interview with Ross Douthat, Vance could have simply justified Trump’s attack on democracy by pledging fealty to Trump. Instead, he constructed an elaborate rationale for a man he once described as “America’s Hitler” attempting his own Beer Hall Putsch.
Like many Republicans, Vance feels embarrassed by the claims made by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani that the election was rigged by Dominion Voting Systems and Hugo Chavez. Instead he argues that it was rigged by emergency pandemic measures to expand mail-in voting and media coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop:
The argument is basically that there were a host of institutional actors, technology companies, various forms of censorship, that mobilized in 2020 in a way that they hadn’t in 2016. There was tech censorship. People were primed to push back against any October surprises.
And look, October surprises are part of American democracy, and whether you think Hunter Biden is as major an issue as I do or disagree, in American democracy you let the voters decide.
That was a way in which the basic democratic will of America was obstructed. I don’t see any reason to think that Dominion voting machines switched ballots, but there was a breakdown in democratic will.
Point No. 2 is that the rules of the game were changed in the middle. When does a ballot have to be mailed in Pennsylvania to count under the election rules? That was changed. That was changed for Covid reasons, in a way that partially is the fault of the Republican National Committee — we weren’t prepared for it, Democrats were, and they took advantage of it.
None of these complaints comes anywhere close to justifying Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. If voting procedures hadn’t been changed to accommodate a once-in-a-century pandemic, that would have distorted the result even more. And if biased media coverage makes elections illegitimate, then every Republican victory since the founding of Fox News deserves an asterisk.
Vance goes on to argue that Trump’s attempt to nullify the election result was fine because it followed constitutional procedures:
He was using the constitutional procedures. Now, your argument is that he was using them ineffectively, or maybe even illegitimately, but he was trying to take a constitutional process to its natural conclusion.
Suppose it’s true that all this was constitutional. The Constitution, according to Vance, allows a candidate who has clearly and provably lost an election to overturn the result by getting his allies in Congress to accept a series of absurd claims, and then prevail on his own vice-president to join them.
If that is true, then the Constitution contains a wormhole that nullifies elections and functionally creates a dictatorship, as long as the president has reliable allies in Congress and the vice-presidency. If the Constitution actually did hand this gun to the president, and the only thing standing between the country and dictatorship was his willingness not to pick it up, then that would make it all the more important to denounce Trump’s efforts to fire it.
Instead, Vance just shrugs off Trump’s immoral effort to overturn the election because it followed the rules up until January 6.
But this ridiculous argument is all academic anyway, because on January 6, Trump stopped following the rules. Here is where Douthat brings up this rather important flaw in Vance’s case. And here is Vance’s pathetic reply:
I think people really, really underrate the sense to which there is palpable and actionable frustration, and I’m always surprised that their assumption appears to be that Trump is the worst, rather than the best, expression of that frustration. Or at least, one of the better in the whole host of possibilities. We’re in this moment where people are really pissed off, and I think for legitimate reasons. And I don’t understand, looking at the country that we have right now, and saying, ‘The riot on January the 6th was the worst expression of this.’
All the lawyerly cleverness dissipates, and Vance is left muttering about how bad things happen and the other side is worse than Trump. There’s no half-serious justification, just tribal grievance.
“People are pissed off,” he explains. Well, yes, that happens. People are always pissed off. Humans have constructed various ways of working around this reality. One of them, a constitutional republic with fair elections and robust liberal protections, has worked fairly well. I propose we keep it going, even if Vance has calculated that his continued advancement might require putting it aside.
Hunter Biden’s conviction in Delaware over a minor charge is significant mainly because it blows to smithereens the arguments Republicans have made on behalf of Donald Trump. There’s the small claim that Trump didn’t receive a fair trial, that blue-state juries can’t render impartial verdicts on famous political figures. Analysts predicted a jury in Delaware, a tiny state where everybody seems to personally know and adore the Biden family, would go easy on his son. But this failed to transpire.
Most important is the idea that Joe Biden is personally “weaponizing” the justice system to target Trump. House Republicans devoted a hearing last week to pressing their unsubstantiated claim that Biden had orchestrated Alvin Bragg’s moves, as “evidenced” by Bragg’s hiring of an attorney with DOJ experience, a move they seem to believe is unusual.
It is not just the Trumpiest conservatives who believe this. Mainstream conservative pundits routinely assert that “the Democrats” — not just one Democratic prosecutor — decided to lock up Trump. Four-fifths of Republican voters, according to a recent poll, believe the decisions to prosecute Trump in New York came “from the Biden administration,” not from “prosecutors in New York.”
To hold this theory together — which, again, is the belief held by a supermajorityof Republicans, not just the Glenn Beck audience — you have to believe Biden is directing the activities of local prosecutors while exerting no control at all over the Justice Department of the branch of government he presides over.
Hunter Biden was convicted of lying on a form he submitted to purchase a firearm, which his wife quickly found and threw away without its ever being used. Elie Honig has argued that these charges, while legally valid, are the sort of case prosecutors would normally ignore.
Where are the legions of conservatives hysterically warning about rogue prosecutions? I believe balance dictates that we are due for several thousand incantations of Lavrentiy Beria’s infamous quote “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”
Sadly, conservative media, which had previously treated Hunter Biden’s addiction-fueled problems as America’s most pressing issue, have found his case less compelling even as its legal phase reached its climax.
“Where’s Hunter?” they taunted for months. Well, here he is, being held to the strictest legal standard by his father’s supposedly rigged Justice Department. And here is his father, mustering all the dignity he can to respect the verdict and even promise not to pardon his son.
It could not be more obvious that one candidate in this race genuinely believes in upholding the rule of law, while the other is a criminal who wishes to regain control of the government to run it like a mafia state.
One workaround gaining increasing traction in Washington is a plan to seize Russian assets in the United States and Europe, and use those to fund Ukrainian defense. There are technical arguments about the merits of this plan, but the real question is what Trump will say about it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has floated the idea of seizing Russian assets to get around the need for congressional appropriation. Some critics warn that this maneuver would undermine the dollar as the world’s major reserve currency — why would global oligarchs park their lucre in the United States and Europe if they would be vulnerable to seizure if their regime launches a war or commits some other unusually large atrocity?
The Brookings Institution argues that a well-designed policy “can assure foreign central banks that their reserves will not be seized arbitrarily.” Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, makes a similar case.
On the contrary side, Chris Caldwell argues that such a move would backfire on the financial system.
You will note that the disagreement on this question breaks down on similar lines as opinion about Russia and Vladimir Putin. Caldwell has praised Putin as “a symbol of national self-determination,” “a hero to populist conservatives around the world and anathema to progressives,” and — in my head, I always hear this line in the voice of Cameron Diaz and Matt Dillon in There’s Something About Mary, speaking simultaneously about Harold and Maude — “the pre-eminent statesman of our time.” So the fact Caldwell has developed strong beliefs about the technical merits of seizing assets from Putin’s oligarch network may not be entirely surprising.
But what about Trump? Since evidence first emerged in 2016 that Trump holds unusually friendly views about Vladimir Putin, and unusually hostile beliefs about the array of alliances Putin is trying to weaken, Americans have debated the nature of how and why he came to these beliefs.
Trump’s defenders insist he isn’t Russophile. He’s just a hard-headed America First populist who’s skeptical of wasting American blood and treasure for some romantic moral cause. He’s all about the money and self-interest, not some Russia dupe.
My argument, of course, is that Trump is a Russia dupe. He’s spouted Russian propaganda on a wide array of subjects, some of which have no connection whatsoever to American interests. Why is Trump claiming NATO membership forces the U.S. to back a war against Russia launched by Montenegro? Or that the Soviets were forced to invade Afghanistan in 1979 to defend themselves against terrorism?
Trump has not taken a position on seizing Russian assets, but the answer offers a useful test of the two competing theories. If Trump just cares about American self-interest, and opposes sending our money overseas, why wouldn’t he want to seize Russian assets? Sure, there are plausible objections about the long-term economic ramifications, but Trump is not, generally speaking, a long-term-ramifications guy.
The most Trumpian position would be to propose seizing Russian assets and keeping a cut for ourselves.
I don’t think Trump would say that. I think he’d dodge the question and avoid coming out in favor of something that would offend his Russian allies.
But it would be interesting if a reporter tried to get him on the record.
After Donald Trump’s failed coup attempt, many Establishment Republicans promised never to support him again. One of them, Eric Levine, reiterated this vow repeatedly. Last month, appearing on Fox News in his capacity as a Nikki Haley surrogate, Levine softened his stance only slightly. “If they get somebody like Michelle Obama, if they push out Biden,” he speculated, “that could push me to support Donald Trump, but I don’t see that happening.”
A full month has gone by, and there is no sign of Obama coming off the sidelines to impose Kenyan socialism on America. Levine, though, has lost patience and is endorsing Trump anyway.
In an email to his network, Levine explains that he is reversing himself “due to a dramatic change in circumstances.” That dramatic change, which he couldn’t have foreseen as recently as last month, is that “the cancer of the Social Justice agenda continues to metastasize.” The completely unforeseeable metastasis of the “Social Justice agenda” has forced Levine to rethink everything and endorse the insurrectionist.
Most people tend to see the progression of intellectual movements through society as a gradual process. Conservatives have called the spread of left-wing academic social-justice theory since the 1960s the “long march,” the very name of which implies an extended period of time. For Levine, however, its progress has come as a bolt from the blue.
A more cynical analysis would suggest Levine was never going to oppose Trump’s reelection. Republicans who denounced Trump after the insurrection are flocking to him en masse. The Washington Post recently noted that many of these prodigal sons are returning for the prospect of a large bag of loot.
Despite the constant drumbeat of demographic analysis that Republicans are attracting more working-class support as Democratic voters grow more affluent, the gulf in substantive economic positioning between the two parties remains unchanged. Joe Biden is running on a plan to increase taxes on the very wealthy, while Trump is promising to cut those taxes. In 2025, most of the Trump tax cuts will expire, as will Obamacare subsidies extended by the Inflation Reduction Act. The 2024 elections will therefore determine whether hundreds of billions of dollars remain in the pockets of wealthy people or instead fund things like health insurance for the middle class.
Oil billionaire Harold Hamm once complained, “January 6 separated a lot of people in the [Republican] Party … the fact that he wouldn’t accept the result.” The Washington Postnotes that Hamm “often rants, according to people who know him, about Biden’s energy and electric-car policies, and had a private meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in recent months.” Trump, of course, promises to end the electric-car revolution, which would obviously benefit Hamm’s oil business.
Robert Bigelow, a billionaire developer, said January 6 “lost me as a supporter … He showed that, in that particular hour, he was no commander.” Bigelow is now donating to a pro-Trump group and the former president’s legal-defense fund. He’s just a Bigelow, as the song almost goes.
I would hesitate to suggest all these donors are motivated entirely by class interest in some crude Marxist materialist fashion. (I don’t want to send some other wavering Republican scurrying back to Trump — they seem to be highly sensitive to the metastasis of left-wing theories.) Plenty of billionaires support Biden even if his agenda directly costs them money. Still, self-interest does seem to be playing a role in the large-scale reconciliation between Trump and the billionaire class observed by the Post.
Self-interest tends to work its magic through subconscious channels. Levine’s missive offers a useful study in rationalization. His rant is devoted to a long denunciation of the poisonous effects of social-justice ideology, the nexus between it and anti-Israel protests. The point at which it goes totally off the rails is when Levine writes, “These folks are the core of Joe Biden’s voting base.”
The core of Joe Biden’s voting base? They have been disrupting Biden’s speeches and denouncing him as “Genocide Joe,” which is not behavior associated with being in, let alone being the core of, a candidate’s voting base. Literally the same day Levine sent this email, left-wing protesters repeatedly shouted down a Biden fundraiser.
Meanwhile, it’s not as if Trump has apologized for his coup attempt, the event that prompted Levine’s “permanent” break. To the contrary, he has elevated its participants to political martyrdom and promised to free them from prison while continuing to insist any election he loses is by definition illegitimate.
The hatred for Biden from the far left sits in stark contrast to the adoration Trump receives from antisemites. His appearance on the scene opened the door for white nationalists and other antisemites to take a role in the Republican coalition, which had previously, mostly, shut them out. His gestures to the Nazi and Nazi-adjacent right are intermittent yet disturbing (hosting Nick Fuentes and Kanye West for dinner, insisting there were fine people on both sides of the Charlottesville march, etc.), but the devotion of the white nationalists to Trump is total. His promise to pardon the insurrectionists will have a galvanizing effect on the radical right.
Allowing roving paramilitary bands to feel empowered by the state to commit political violence with impunity is not a policy that historically favors the Jews. Levine writes, “The question becomes, as between [Trump and Biden], who will leave a better, safer, and more prosperous America? Hands down, the answer is Trump.”
Only one of those candidates is willing to accept the absolute minimal conditions of a functioning democracy — that the loser abide by the result and the winner be bound by the law while in office. The other candidate is willing to let Levine pass on a much larger fortune to his heirs tax free.
Trump’s threat took the form of a story that is likely exaggerated or made up completely (one obvious sign of Trump’s fake stories is that he is always being called “sir” in them), but what he said nonetheless reveals his attitude toward the United States’ most important alliance:
The president of a big country stood up and said, “Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and are attacked by Russia, will you protect us?”
I said, “You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?”
He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.”
“No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”
Trump has long depicted NATO as a protection racket, in which America’s allies pay up or else they get invaded by Russia. His defenders have sought to sanewash this disturbing idea by treating it as just Trump’s way of encouraging NATO allies to spend more on defense — see, Trump isn’t a Russia simp, they say, but a kind of hawk.
During his presidency, many allies did implement an (already-planned) increase in military expenditures, and NATO supporters tried to sell this to him as a Trump “win” forcing the allies to pay their “dues.” But Trump has refused to take this win, because his goal isn’t actually a stronger NATO, but a weaker one.
Trump has claimed that Russia never would have invaded Ukraine if he were still president. He has also insisted his presidency would put an end to wars. But it’s clear a second Trump term would create incentives for Vladimir Putin to undertake even more risky military adventures.
The risk of a second Trump presidency bringing a destabilizing war in Europe is now enormous. Whether or not Trump actually would directly urge Russia to attack allied countries he considers to be deadbeats — or perhaps whose leaders merely fail to flatter him sufficiently — the fact that he has already publicly suggested this is provocation enough. He has now floated the idea that the United States would abandon its NATO allies. That bell can’t be unrung.
This week, the United Auto Workers endorsed President Biden’s re-election. Biden has vigorously supported unions, both through direct policy actions, like appointing labor supporters to the National Labor Relations Board, and indirectly, by promoting a high-pressure labor market that has pushed up wages and an expanded safety net, as well as by walking picket lines and urging workers to organize.
Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump, had stacked the NLRB with union opponents, dedicated his presidency to an oligarchic agenda with attempts to cut taxes for the wealthy (successfully) and cut the social safety net and end democracy (unsuccessfully).
Given all the above, the UAW’s endorsement choice seems to have been fairly easy. However, it has drawn angry dissents. Johannah King-Slutzky, a Columbia University graduate student in English and comparative literature, complained to the Intercept, a left-wing publication with a staunchly anti-Israel line, “A president who supports genocide and is actively sending funds and weapons to Israel to kill children, families, that’s not something that I feel has earned my endorsement.”
Aparna Gopalan, also a graduate student (Harvard Anthropology) and UAW member, wrote a scathing article for Jewish Currents, a left-wing publication, decrying the endorsement. You might be confused as to why so many UAW members are graduate students at elite universities. The answer is that the UAW organized graduate students, who now account for more than a quarter of its members.
And while graduate students have material interests, they have taken, shall we say, a broader and more abstract view of how to pursue those interests. Gopalan’s article argues that the UAW has erred by confining its position to questions like labor law, economic policy, and the social safety net, which favor Biden over Trump. “In their most visionary iterations,” she argues, “U.S. unions have repeatedly reached for this capacious understanding of their role, insisting that in a globally integrated system of accumulation, everything — even foreign policy — is a ‘bread-and-butter issue.’” It may not be surprising that the graduate-student wing of the UAW has a more visionary understanding of its mission than do the people who work in car factories.
Gopalan’s story quotes fellow UAW member Adithya Gungi (also a grad student at Columbia), who says, “Donald Trump needs to be opposed. But this does not mean a full-throated endorsement of a Democratic president who has been actively supporting a catastrophic genocide in Palestine.”
Actually, that is exactly what it means. Let me explain a feature of the American political system that may not have been taught at the Ph.D. level at Harvard and Columbia but is nonetheless extremely pertinent. In a political system in which two parties compete for a series of winner-take-all state contests, without a parliamentary-style system allowing small parties to accumulate delegates, one of the two major parties is going to win.
Since Donald Trump is the all-but-certain Republican nominee, there are two possible outcomes: Either Trump will win the election or Biden will. Anything that reduces Biden’s chances of winning — say, denying him the UAW endorsement in a must-win purple state filled with autoworkers — will by definition increase the likelihood that Trump wins.
I can certainly understand why bitter critics of Israel would be reluctant to support Biden, who (even as he is working to implement a cease-fire) has taken a generally pro-Israel line. The trouble is that his opponent, Trump, is considerably less empathetic toward Palestinian lives than Biden is. He has not only given complete support to the Israeli right, but also “would support expelling Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) from Congress for voting against a resolution condemning Hamas.” So, supporting Trump is a very strange position even for a single-issue anti-Israel voter.
