Earlier this year, I wrote a long story arguing that the dominant mood of the American political scene is the exhaustion of the anti-Trump coalition. While Donald Trump’s will to power, and that of his allies, burns hotter than ever, his opponents have slunk into resignation and despair.
I reiterated the theme in a column last week, suggesting the Democrats were prepared to essentially abdicate the presidency rather than undertake the difficult and painful work of confronting and replacing a candidate they believe can’t win.
This is a very strange explanation for political events — so strange I’ve often questioned my own thinking. Political parties exist in order to win. Sometimes they sacrifice their chances of winning to pursue other political goals (say, advocating an unpopular position they consider important). But the political-science models I learned as an undergraduate generally assume they are attempting to maximize their power in one form or another. There’s no factor in any model I know of to account for a party simply giving up. Yet a raft of new reports this weekend suggest precisely that. Consider the following items from the news in the immediate wake of the failed assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Robert Costa reports:
“Those Democrats who have concerns about President Biden are now standing down, politically, will back President Biden, because of this fragile political moment. All of that talk of the debate faded almost instantly among my top Democratic sources as this unfolded. They say it’s time for the country to stick together, and that means Democrats sticking together as well.”
Costa is saying that Democrats who believe Biden is the wrong nominee for their party are “standing down.” The reason is that the country has to stick together and therefore Democrats also have to stick together. This rationale is incoherent, even contradictory. The country sticking together means something different from, and close to the opposite of, the parties cohering internally. President Biden is deeply unpopular.
There’s no theory of national unity that requires Democrats to stand behind a president disliked by the entire Republican Party and most independents, unless the theory is to give up on trying to win the election and let Trump have it.
Crazy as it sounds, that may be the theory. NBC quotes a “longtime Democratic insider” complaining, ‘“We’re so beyond fucked,” as well as “a veteran Democratic consultant” who says, “The presidential contest ended last night,” and, “Now it’s time to focus on keeping the Senate and trying to pick up the House. The only positive thing to come out of last night for Democrats is we are no longer talking about Joe Biden’s age today.”
Semafor quotes a Democrat in Congress who supports Biden as the nominee, who moans, “That’s the whole fucking election. Every image from that is iconic and couldn’t have been created on a Hollywood movie.” The belief, to be clear, is that Biden cannot win and the Democrats should not try to nominate a different presidential candidate. Politico’s Playbook this morning has a blind quote from a Democratic aide who wants to replace Biden but says, “I think this is over.” And finally, a “senior House Democrat” tells Axios, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” When I wrote about the fraying of the anti-Trump coalition, my main focus was on its edges. The most left-wing portions of the coalition were disgusted with Biden’s support for Israel, and the most conservative elements were bizarrely focused on punishing Biden in response to his left-wing critics.
The sagging morale on display right now is taking place within the very heart of the Democratic Party. It does not have an especially pronounced ideological character. The party is responding to the shock of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump by standing down its efforts to deny him office.
The spirit of the last two days is strikingly reminiscent of the post-9/11 atmosphere. Democrats decided en masse that national unity required withholding all political criticism of the Bush administration. Democrats actively praised Bush’s leadership, putting aside all questions of his administration’s failure to heed warnings of the attacks. The news media followed suit, pulling Phil Donahue (at the time the only liberal voice on prime-time cable news) off the air in favor of a flag-waving message.
The mainstream media painted George W. Bush as a transformed man, jolted into seriousness and elevated to statesmanship by the call of history. Republicans proclaimed he had been divinely chosen to lead the nation. (While it has been forgotten in embarrassment, the Bush personality cult rivaled the current Trump cult in its scope and quasi-theological character). Republicans used the moment to delegitimize all critiques of their leader as unpatriotic. Many Democrats, carrying out what they believed was their responsible institutional role, complied. The result of this dangerously unbalanced equation was a comprehensive political and moral disaster.
The current moment bears many of the same traits. You have the mainstream news media depicting the Republican leader as a newly sober and changed figure, an intensified personality cult on the right, all of which are pressuring Democrats to silence or dampen their critiques. The news media is both following and driving the changes — MSNBC has temporarily pulled Morning Joe off the air for fear a guest would utter an offensive remark, echoing its post-9/11 instincts.
Democrats may not be rallying to Trump as they did to Bush, but they have followed the herdlike instinct to depict the assassination attempt as though it cleanses him of sin. Here is another quote, from a senior Democratic Senate aide, in Semafor’s story: Trump “was already on track to win and the fact that he is now a victim of political violence rather than the perpetrator undermines Biden’s core appeal [emphasis added].” Trump did not stop being a perpetrator of political violence because he was targeted. Nor did the danger of his authoritarian inclinations shrink. But Trump has seen an opportunity to use the tragedy to reshape his image, and the opposition feels either helpless in the face of it or resigned to cooperate.
The most revealing thing about the Democratic response is the confessions by Democrats that they can’t or shouldn’t continue their efforts to replace Biden as the nominee. Of course, some Democrats believe Biden is their strongest nominee, or that the act of replacing him would itself do more harm than good. Their behavior is rational.
What isn’t rational is the decision by Democrats who believe a different candidate would stand a better chance of winning but who have decided to give up. For them, the assassination attempt provides an excuse to avoid the intraparty conflict this undertaking would require, with all its professional risks and personal discomfort.
And while the current moment, with its calls to “lower the temperature” and wishcasting of a new Trump, is likely to expire much faster than the post-9/11 Bush rally, it doesn’t need to last long to have irreversible effects. Biden is playing for time. The longer Democrats drag out their choice, the greater his odds of outlasting his doubters and securing the nomination.
Nothing about the last two days made Biden’s plan for beating Trump more plausible. The plan, to the extent one existed, consisted of hoping the polls were wrong and/or that the passage of time would make voters focus more on their concerns regarding Trump and less on their concerns with the incumbent. What has changed is that his intraparty skeptics have begun succumbing to defeatism. Having passed through the stages of denial, anger, and bargaining, they are progressing to depression, then inevitably to acceptance. If you have a certain institutional mind-set, it is easy to rationalize this surrender as an act of responsibility. But it is not. It is sad and pathetic.
