There's no more time for magical thinking

The Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina is a 58-year-old Holocaust denier and AAA-certified whack job named Mark Robinson, who appeared in MAGA church, and said the following in an almost 30-minute rant:

We now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intent. You know, there’s a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield, and guess what we did to it? We killed it! … When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, what did we do? We flew to Japan! And we killed the Japanese Army and Navy! … We didn’t argue and capitulate and talk about, well, maybe we shouldn’t fight the Nazis that hard. No, they’re bad. Kill them. Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful. Too bad. Get mad at me if you want to.

Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity! When you have wicked people doing wicked things, torturing and murdering and raping. It’s time to call out, uh, those guys in green and go have them handled. Or those boys in blue and have them go handle it.…

We need to start handling our business again.… Don’t you feel it slipping away? … The further we start sliding into making 1776 a distant memory and the tenets of socialism and communism start coming into clearer focus. They’re watching us. They’re listening to us. They’re tracking us. They get mad at you. They cancel you. They dox you. They kick you off social media. They come in and close down your business. Folks, it’s happening … because we have forgotten who we are.

No doubt, the demented MAGA pastor finished it all up with a bit of cream on top, declaring the murder to be part of Jesus’s grand plan for the country he founded.

When President Biden sat down with George Stephanopoulos, here is what he said about losing:

I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that's what this is about. Look, George. Think of it this way. You've heard me say this before. I think the United States and the world is at an inflection point when the things that happen in the next several years are gonna determine what the next six, seven decades are gonna be like.

When asked if he watched the debate afterwards, Biden said:

I don't think I did, no.

Here is what he said when Stephanopoulos said that he’d never seen a president with a 36% approval rating get re-elected:

Well, I don't believe that's my approval rating. That's not what our polls show.

When Stephanopoulos said that he was now behind in the popular vote, he said:

I don't-- I don't buy that.

When he was asked:

You haven't seen the-- the fall-off in the polls? You haven't seen the reports of discontent in the Democratic Party, House Democrats, Senate Democrats?

Biden’s response was:

I've seen it from the press.

Here was Donald Trump’s message to America on July 4, which reads like it was written by Arthur Fleck:

Let me try and explain where things stand at this hour, 122 days before the US presidential election. Trump is winning. America is losing.

Here is what President Biden said about democracy in France last month at Pointe du Hoc, when referring to the “ghosts of Pointe du Hoc:”

They’re not asking us to do their job. They’re asking us to do our job: to protect freedom in our time, to defend democracy, to stand up aggression abroad and at home, to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

Surely its preservation — worth dying for — is worth retiring for.

We know what President Biden would say in the aftermath of defeat, but what would Gavin Newsom say? “Oops?” “My bad? “We were in it to win it until we didn’t?”

How about the rest of the party? What will Chuck Schumer say? How about Hakeem Jeffries?

The president of the United States is completely isolated from what is happening to him politically because he has been sequestered from reality by a small group of people, including his wife who, whatever the original intention may have been, are now doing something deeply wrong to their country because of their self-interest. It is a hideous and painful thing to watch because both the country and a good man are being abused. “I’m running the world” is quite a thing to say, let alone believe.

Certainly, the delusions of the American media and the instinct to explain complexity reductively and find a lowest common denominator explanation have created a perverted understanding of what political leaders actually do, or are supposed to be doing.

They do not push buttons in a capsule like an engineer maintaining systems. The American media have abetted the fantasy that the president controls events, as opposed to being the captain of a ship tossed by them. Wisdom is the grace to appreciate what can be controlled and what cannot. The awfulness of this moment is compounded by witnessing the deconstruction of a man who understands this concept at the most epic of levels.

There is another aspect of the interview that I find jarring, and I want to lay out my prejudices on the matter clearly, transparently and directly. Stephanopoulos asked a question about President Biden serving as commander in chief until he would be 86.

Here was Biden’s answer:

Yes, I am, because, George, the last thing I want to do is not be able to meet that. I think, as some of senior economist and senior foreign policy specialists say, if I stop now, I'd go down in history as a pretty successful President. No one thought I could get done what we got done.

The French are considering making a 28-year-old fascist named Jordan Bardella their prime minister.  The US Constitution sets the bar for the presidency at age 35, but imagining there were none, I would never vote for a 28-year-old to be president. Ever.

The question also goes the other way. Here, I’m much more flexible, but I’d like to try an experiment, and I’d like to invite participation — not vitriol — in thinking it through.

The term of presidential service is four years, and traditionally it has greatly aged the youngest men who have held the office. Would you vote for someone who was running at age 96 who would serve to age 100 for a second term under any circumstances? What about someone who was 90? 88? 86? 84?

Politics is a brutal business. Power is a harsh game. It is an unfair business. Often, people inject tremendous emotion into the harshness of the realities that arise during long political campaigns. They seek some referee to descend from somewhere to throw a flag or stop some movement of the will of the American people from happening. Of course no such magical figure exists. There is only reality, and it is brutal.

Here is the reality, which I have said many times: whomever the election is about will lose.

Here is an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson’s essay today, warning the country about Project 2025:

Journalist Jennifer Schulze of Heartland Signal noted today that as of 8:00 this morning, the New York Times had published 192 pieces on Biden’s debate performance: 142 news articles and 50 opinion pieces. Trump was covered in 92 stories, about half of which were about the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Although Trump has frequently slurred his words or trailed off while speaking and repeatedly fell asleep at his own criminal trial, none of the pieces mentioned Trump’s mental fitness. 

The Biden campaign cannot survive this imbalance of media coverage, and they have no plan to break out of the deadly spin that will kill them and grievously wound America. This cannot be fixed, and it will only get worse. This is the worst outcome — the deadliest political result — and the absolute one thing that could never be allowed to happen has occurred. The 2024 race is about President Biden and each appearance is an existential event, and will be covered as such. Each slip-up will require Democratic candidates to make a choice between Trump-like devotion or an embrace of reality.  A contest between which side loves their leader the most is going to end in disappointment for the 46th president.

I thought the George Stephanopoulos interview was a masterpiece by a journalist with enormous integrity and experience. I was thinking about it afterwards, and thought about what Biden might have said if Stephanopoulos turned to him and said, “What do you think your approval level really is?”

During the next hours and days a tremendously difficult series of meetings, conversations and reckonings are going to take place. The only thing that matters is the preservation of the United States and the concepts advanced during the last 50 years of the 20th century. There can be no retreat and no surrrender against extremism. That is what Trump represents. He is the issue, and his malice, wickedness, ignorance, corruption and incompetence are all obscured by a very specific type of vanity.

Trump has been made invisible by the man who claims, “I don't think anybody's more qualified to be president or win this race than me.” It is a spectacular moment — and a low and petty one. We need a politics of humility and greatness of love and service. What we need, we are not getting, and time is running out to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe. The magical thinking has run out of runway, and now there is only a hard choice.

Hard choices can be easy ones when all that is required is doing the right thing. It is clear the president has been badly served. There is still time. He deserves better. We all do.

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