ReportWire

Tag: West Wing

  • The Real Difference Between Trump and Biden

    The Real Difference Between Trump and Biden

    Listen to this article

    Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.

    Americans likely face a choice this fall between two men they don’t want for president. Or they can stay home and get one of the two guys they don’t want for president anyway. The reasons for voter disdain are clear enough: Poll respondents say Joe Biden is too old, an impression reinforced by last week’s special-counsel report, and they have always been troubled by Donald Trump’s judgment and character (though a majority think he’s too old too.)

    Voters have genuine questions about both men. But we’ve seen each occupy the presidency. One thing the two administrations have made clear is that whereas Biden follows an approach to governance that seems to offset some of his weaknesses, Trump’s preferred managerial style seems to amplify his.

    Many people treat elections as a chance to vote a single individual into office; as a result, they tend to focus disproportionately on the personality, character, and temperament of the people running. But voters are also choosing a platform—a set of policies as well as a set of people, chosen by the president, who will shape and implement them. The president is the conductor of an orchestra, not a solo artist. As the past eight years have made very clear, the difference in governance between a Trump administration and a Biden administration is not subtle—for example, on foreign policy, border security, and economics—and voters have plenty of evidence on which to base their decision.

    But for the sake of argument, let’s consider the potential effects of Biden’s failures of memory and Trump’s … well, it’s a little tough to say what exactly is going on with Trump’s mental state. The former president has always had a penchant for saying strange things and acting impulsively, and it’s hard to know whether recent lapses are indications of new troubles or the same deficits that have long been present. His always-dark rhetoric has become more apocalyptic and vengeance-focused, and he frequently seems forgetful or confused about basic facts.

    To what extent would either of their struggles be material in a future presidential term? One key distinction is that Biden and Trump have fundamentally different conceptions of the presidency as an office. Biden’s approach to governance has been more or less in keeping with the traditions of recent decades. Biden’s Cabinet and West Wing are (for better or worse) stocked with longtime political and policy hands who have extensive experience in government. Cabinet secretaries largely run their departments through normal channels. Policy proposals are usually formulated by subject-area experts. The president’s job is to sit atop this apparatus and set broad direction.

    Read: The presidency is not a math test

    Biden doesn’t always defer to experts, and he has clashed with and overruled advisers on some topics, including, notably, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Such occasional clashes are fairly typical—as long as they’re occasional. As my colleague Graeme Wood wrote this week, “The presidency is an endless series of judgment calls, not a four-year math test. In fact, large parts of the executive branch exist, in effect, to do the math problems on the president’s behalf, then present to him all those tough judgment calls with the calculations already factored in.”

    This doesn’t mean that Biden’s readily apparent aging doesn’t bring risks. The presidency requires a great deal of energy, and crises can happen at all hours and on top of one another, testing the stamina of any person. The oldest president before Biden, Ronald Reagan, struggled with acuity in his second term, an administration that produced a huge, appalling scandal of which he claimed to be unaware.

    In contrast to the model of the president as the ultimate decision maker, Trump has approached the presidency less like a Fortune 500 CEO and more like the sole proprietor of a small business. (Though he boasts about his experience running a business empire, the Trump Organization also ran this way—it is a company with a large bottom line but with concentrated and insular management by corporate standards.) As president, Trump had a tendency to micromanage details—the launching system for a new aircraft carrier, the paint scheme on Air Force One—while evincing little interest in major policy questions, such as a long-promised replacement for Obamacare.

    At times, Trump has described his role in practically messianic terms: “I alone can fix it,” he infamously said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He has claimed to be the world’s foremost expert on a wide variety of subjects, and he often disregarded the views of policy experts in his administration, complaining that they tried to talk him out of ideas (when they didn’t just obstruct him). He and his allies have embarked on a major campaign to ensure that staffers in a second Trump administration would be picked for their ideological and personal loyalty to him. Axios has reported that the speechwriter Stephen Miller could be the next attorney general, even though Miller is not an attorney.

    Perhaps as a result of these different approaches to the job, people who have served under the men have divergent views on them. Whereas Biden can seem bumbling and mild in public, aides’ accounts of his private demeanor depict an engaged, incisive, and sometimes hot-tempered president. That’s also the view that emerges from my colleague Franklin Foer’s book The Last Politician. “He has a kind of mantra: ‘You can never give me too much detail,’” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said. “The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it, because he is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented and focused,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last weekend. (As Jon Stewart noted on Monday night, the public might be more convinced were these moments videotaped, like the gaffes.)

    Former Trump aides are not so complimentary. Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law,” adding, “God help us.” Former Attorney General Bill Barr said that he “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper described him as “unfit for office.” Of 44 former Cabinet members queried by NBC, only four said they supported Trump’s return to office. Even allowing for the puffery of politics, the contrast is dramatic.

    Read: A Hail Mary to save ‘The Daily Show’

    None of this is to say that Biden’s memory lapses aren’t worth concern or that he is as vigorous as he was as a younger man. But someone voting for Biden is selecting, above all, a set of policy ideas and promises that he has laid out, with the expectation that the apparatus of the executive branch will implement them.

    Voting for Trump is opting for a charismatic individual who brings to office a set of attitudes rather than a platform. Considering the presidency as a matter of individual mental acuity grants the field to Trump’s own preferred conception of unified personal power, so it’s striking that the comparison makes the dangers posed by Trump’s mentality so stark.

    David A. Graham

    Source link

  • Joe Biden Has a Cornel West Problem

    Joe Biden Has a Cornel West Problem

    Pull up a sticky green lawn chair, everyone. It’s time for another round of Mounting Democratic Jitters, cherished summer pastime from Wilmington to the West Wing. Today’s installment: Cornel West, unlikely MAGA accessory.

    West, the famed academic and civil-rights activist, is a Green Party candidate for president. He probably will not win. Not a single state or, in all likelihood, a single electoral vote. But he remains a persistent object of concern around the president these days.

    I’ve talked with many of these White House worrywarts, along with their counterparts on Joe Biden’s reelection team and the usual kettles of Democratic anxiety who start bubbling up whenever the next existential-threat election is upon us. Even with the nuisance primary challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. polling in the double digits, West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit.

    You can understand the sensitivities, given the history. Democrats still recoil at the name Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee in 2016, whose vote total in key battlegrounds—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—wound up exceeding the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states. What’s Dr. Stein doing these days, anyway?

    “She is my interim campaign manager,” Cornel West told me this week in a phone interview. Not a joke, as Biden would say. Or an acid flashback. Apparently Ralph Nader was not available. Not Dennis Kucinich, either (already snapped up to run RFK Jr.’s campaign). It might be kind of funny if the stakes didn’t involve a return Trump ordeal in the White House.

    “The fact that Jill Stein is running his campaign is a little on the nose,” one senior Democratic campaign strategist told me.

    Read: The first MAGA Democrat

    West has repeatedly denied that he might play a spoiler role. “I would say that most of the people who vote for me would not have voted for Biden,” he told me. “They would have probably stayed home.” In a recent CNN appearance, West dismissed the two parties as a “corporate duopoly” and professed “great respect for my dear brother Ralph Nader and great respect for sister Jill Stein.” This did nothing to assuage Democratic jitters.

    I asked West whether he would campaign all the way to Election Day 2024, or if he might reconsider his venture at some point. “My goal is to go all the way to November,” he said, but allowed that circumstances could change and so could his plans. “I’m trying to be a jazzlike man,” he said. “Trying to be improvisational.”

    In his campaign-launch video, West promised that his candidacy would focus on core progressive issues such as health care, housing, reproductive rights, and “de-escalating the destruction” done to the Earth and our democracy. “Neither political party wants to tell the truth,” West said, by way of explaining why he is running as a third-party candidate.

    Notably, West has asserted that NATO was as much to blame for Russia’s war in Ukraine as the Kremlin. He has railed against the coalition as an “expanding instrument” of Western aggression, which he says is what provoked Russia’s onslaught. “This proxy war between the American Empire and the Russian Federation could lead to World War III,” he wrote in a social-media post calling for diplomatic talks. West also dismissed as a “sham” a House resolution—passed Tuesday—that affirmed U.S. support for Israel. “The painful truth is that the Israeli state—like the USA—has been racist in practice since its inception,” West wrote on Twitter.

    Several Democrats were eager to tell their own truths about West’s endeavor, expressing uniform exasperation.

    “This is not the time in order to experiment. This is not the time to play around on the margins,” warned Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison during a recent appearance on MSNBC. “What we see is a lot of folks who want to be relevant and try to be relevant in these elections and not looking at the big picture.”

    “Too little attention is being paid to this,” David Axelrod, the former top Barack Obama strategist, told me. Axelrod recently gave voice to the gathering Democratic freak-out when he tweeted out some basic historical parallels. “In 2016, the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Now, with Cornel West as their likely nominee, they could easily do it again.”

    In our interview, Axelrod noted that the 2020 race between Biden and Trump, in which neither Stein nor West was on the ballot, underscores how slim the Democrats’ margin of error remains. “When you have three states that you won by 41,000 votes combined, you just cannot afford to bleed votes, even a few of them,” Axelrod told me.

    Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair of one of these states—Wisconsin—said he expects Trump allies to help prop up any third-party effort as a way to undermine Biden. “Regardless of the motivations of third-party candidates themselves, they can have the effect of delivering net votes to Trump next year,” Wikler said, “especially if a Trump-aligned super PAC pours money into targeted messages,” he added. “And those are exactly the kind of cynical games you have to expect.”

    Cedric Richmond, a former Democratic congressman and White House adviser who recently signed on as co-chair of the Biden campaign, called West a “substantive person.” But Richmond argued that Biden has earned the support of the left through his record on the environment, health care, gun reform, and other progressive causes. “They also know that [Biden] could have done a hell of a lot more if not for this hostile Supreme Court,” Richmond told me. “And they know they got this hostile Supreme Court because ‘Hillary wasn’t good enough,’ because ‘we weren’t happy and we wanted to support Jill Stein’ or whatever the reason was at the time.” Now that voters have experienced a Trump presidency, he said, the cost of casting a protest vote with a third-party candidate should be much more apparent. “I think people have seen this movie, and they know the ending,” Richmond said.

    In recent days, the putative-centrist outfit No Labels—which many Democrats have been quick to label as a pro-Trump collaborator—has been the main source of third-party hand-wringing.  The group is trying to recruit a so-called unity ticket that would appear on ballots across the country, possibly led by Senator Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat.

    Read: Joe Lieberman weighs the Trump risk

    “The idea that a third-party candidate won’t hurt the Democratic nominee is preposterous on its face,” Matt Bennett, executive vice president of Third Way, a center-left policy think tank that lately has been focused on stopping No Labels, told me. Recent polls show that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit when a third-party candidate is added to the mix. Likewise, an NBC survey from last month revealed that 44 percent of registered voters would be open to a third-party candidate—and there were considerably more Democrats saying this (45 percent) than Republicans (34 percent).

    But Bennett explained that if No Labels does not recruit a serious candidate to actually run, the group will remain a largely hypothetical menace. West, meanwhile, is definitely running. The Green Party has an organizational structure in place in many states that will ensure the nominee’s position on general-election ballots. West has deep roots on the left, and is better known than Stein was in 2016. Like Clinton, Biden has faced uncertainty about how much enthusiasm he can expect from his own party, especially young progressives.

    “Dr. West has a huge following among college-age voters and a lot of folks who are more interested in social movements than they are in supporting Democratic or Republican candidates,” Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who was the executive director of the State Democratic Party of New York from 2015 to 2018, told me.

    West was a vocal supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in the 2020 Democratic primary. He has said that he wound up voting for Biden in the general election because “a fascist catastrophe is worse than a neoliberal disaster.” He also dubbed Biden “mediocre” and “milquetoast” (a tepid endorsement, let’s say).

    Supporters of Biden are hopeful that the blessing of progressive allies such as Sanders, who endorsed his reelection in April, will insulate the president from the threat of West-inspired defections to the Green Party. “What Bernie can do is say, ‘Look man, we thought the existential threat of Trump had waned, but it’s still here,’” Smikle said. “We need you to show up again.”

    Another prominent Bernie booster from 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, endorsed Biden during a recent appearance on the podcast Pod Save America. The host Jon Favreau asked a follow-up about what she thought of West. Ocasio-Cortez appeared to tread carefully but sounded deferential. “I think Dr. West has an incredible history in this country,” she said. “What he gives voice to is incredibly important.” She went on to slam No Labels as a source of great concern, given “the sheer amount of money and bad-faith actors involved with it.”

    “Not all third-party candidacies are created equal,” Ocasio-Cortez summarized. But she landed on a pragmatic point. “The United States has a winner-take-all system, whether we like that or not,” she said, adding that the cost of messing around could be fascism. “We have to live with that reality,” she said. Live with Joe Biden, in other words. Because the alternative is far worse—not a joke.

    Mark Leibovich

    Source link