18.07.2024

No driver at the wheel

The incumbent is not all there; the challenger nearly dies in an assassination attempt. All the more reason to ditch the entire US presidential system, argues Paul Demarty

Following American politics from afar this past month has been strange.

On July 13, a young man was shot dead after apparently attempting to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. He got close, grazing the former president’s right ear. As I write, little enough is known about his motives. They may not be terribly interesting: the last man to make an attempt on an American president’s life did it to impress Jodie Foster, apparently without success.

This event, as well it might, has thrown the American media into a state of hysteria. It is, perhaps, a sticky wicket, at least for many of them. So much energy has been invested in presenting Trump as a uniquely aberrant political force, a cancer in American governance. Now somebody has tried to kill him. What else did you expect, allege the Trumpists? If you constantly accuse someone of being a new Hitler, when going back in time and killing Hitler is such a cliché of science fiction that you could hardly get away with it today, why should someone not take it seriously?

Indeed, there has recently been a flare-up in what they call the ‘fascism debate’ in American contemporary historical studies (basically: is he or isn’t he?). Some sceptics have argued that, if the ‘Trump is fascist’ contingent really believed that, they would not be wasting time writing learned articles on the subject. They would be stockpiling weapons. Perhaps this young man, armed with his dad’s AR-15 semi-automatic, Thomas Matthew Crooks, took the rebuke seriously?

That would be the most reasonable projection onto the attempted assassination. Conspiracy theories swirl around all such events. American politics seems unusually given to such conceptions of political violence - from the assassination of Jack Kennedy to the attack on the Twin Towers and beyond. (Justin Roczniak, a leftwing podcaster, recently noted - when internet paranoiacs started claiming that the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore was an “inside job” - that, for some people, it is quite impossible for any piece of infrastructure to be destroyed without the state being somehow behind it.)

We expect the conspiracy theories birthed in the last few days to have a good long life. There are more similarities, after all, between Donald Trump and JFK than some people like to think. Both men are accurately described as Machiavellian, bullying, sexually incontinent, with the morals - as Joe Biden would say - of an alley cat. Yet both are perfect screens for mass projection. The ferocious anti-communism of JFK is reinterpreted as a pacifism sure to be snuffed out by the military-industrial complex; and the crude ‘might makes right’ attitude of Trump is weirdly interpreted as a subversive ‘isolationism’. Of course ‘they’ wanted to get rid of him.

Senility

This botched killing succeeded, unlike any previous stimulus, in taking Joe Biden’s senility out of the headlines. That is the strangest story of all, for we have seen everything change, and yet nothing; and the change has been occasioned by the revelation of precisely no new information at all.

Joe Biden was, after all, obviously in the throes of cognitive decline four years ago, when the Democrats’ immune system put him up as the antibody to Bernie Sanders’s second tilt at the Democratic nomination. His candidacy had not been encouraged by his friends. “You don’t have to do this,” Barack Obama is supposed to have told him. He did not listen. Listening no longer appears to be his strong suit. Unfortunately, neither is speaking. The cheerfully lowbrow wit of his younger days, still flickering from time to time during his presidency, is gone from more and more of his public appearances. There is only a strange, mumbling, shambling ghost in Scranton Joe’s place; an unblinking, confused stare; a possibly fictional golf handicap.

For all his crimes, it is difficult not to pity him at this hour. Very many readers of this paper will have watched friends and loved ones lapse into senility, Alzheimer’s or other irreversible conditions of cognitive degeneration. No small part of it, in many cases, is the stubbornness with which the victims of these conditions hold onto the possibility that nothing is wrong: that the gentle attempts of the family to manage the problem are some kind of hostile conspiracy. But these are, after all, typically private tragedies. Biden occupies the least private position in the whole world. To put it bluntly, our dementia-stricken relatives do not, usually, have the exclusive and inalienable political authority to end human civilisation in thermonuclear fire.

Therefore it is wrong to see the Biden situation as essentially a private matter, into which a salacious media is intruding, although - if the torrent of leaks in the bourgeois press are to be believed - it is his wife, Jill, and notoriously erratic son, Hunter, who have formed a laager around him and encouraged him to press on. The fact that the president is senile, and was senile at the time of his election - the fact, indeed, that this has more or less happened before, in the case of Ronald Reagan’s second term - is a social dysfunction. How do such men get the nuclear codes?

Biden’s progress

In Biden’s case, the story starts a while ago. From humble, Irish-American roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he made good and proceeded to a career in law and ultimately politics, becoming a senator for Delaware in 1972. (One of the many sobering factoids people bring up about his age is that he served as a senator under Richard Nixon.)

He has made a great deal, over the years, of this no-malarkey ‘Scranton Joe’ persona. It has worked for him, on the whole, even if it is somewhat mythical. Joe’s father was not a factory hand, but a successful businessman who was ultimately ruined: that is what makes his background humble. Delaware itself is an internal tax haven, and a fiefdom of the chemical engineering empire of DuPont, and little else, which he made no effort to change in the near half-century in which he represented it. The stupendously corrupt health insurance industry has always had Delaware senators in its pocket. Yet his straight-talking and scrappy manner has served him well, and made him one of those senior politicians you could imagine having a beer with.

It seems also to have bred a certain chippiness - that, for all he is part of the Democratic political furniture, he is still an outsider. Franklin Foer, in his recent and rather glowing book on the first two years of his presidency, suggests that Biden saw his victory as a kind of revenge against the party establishment, who somehow never thought him up to snuff. He was convinced not to stand in 2016 - it was, after all, Hillary Clinton’s “turn” - and seems to have bitterly regretted it. He thinks he could have won. He is probably right.

The surprise package in the Democratic nomination struggle in 2016 was, of course, Bernie Sanders, the long-standing semi-independent senator from Vermont, whose pro-labour social democracy and condemnations of the wealthy proved surprisingly durable over the course of the campaign. The Democratic elites were always going to see him off; but they actually had to lift a finger or two to do it. Clinton, already widely disliked, was further discredited by Sanders’ attacks, and his refusal to drop out until late in the campaign, for which the Hillaryite faithful have never forgiven him. (It was her turn.) The victory of Donald Trump over her initiated a political crisis that is still ongoing.

Biden was not to be denied in 2020. Yet it became clear, as the primary debates dragged on, that he was not quite the sharp-witted, fighting Irishman he had once been. Sanders stood again, and in the early stages of the contest, made the running. More mainstream, left-posing figures like Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar were rapidly sidelined. Panic set in. Obama is largely credited with orchestrating a mass pulling-out of centrist candidates in favour of Biden.

He still had to beat Trump, of course, and ultimately did - with narrow, but definite, victories in the blue-collar swing states, where his appeal was always likely to be an asset. On the way there, however, he offered limp debate performances, where his confusion and irritability was - I would say unignorable, but the mainstream media largely did ignore it, and pandemic conditions largely allowed him to conduct the campaign from his Führerbunker. By November 2020, the pattern of selective blindness was already in play.

Democratic-leaning media have, ever since, involved themselves in a conspiracy of silence, for all they now howl that they have been deceived by all the president’s men (and his wife). We have watched Biden confuse his living and dead sons, grow increasingly prone to embarrassing falls, and even heard unlikely rumours that he had soiled himself during an audience with the pope. All the way along, Trump has made it part of his routine. Polling consistently suggests that Americans think Biden is too old for the job. He was let off from prosecution for mishandling documents, in part because juries would be unlikely to convict an “elderly man with a poor memory” of a crime which “requires a mental state of wilfulness”.

Yet all this was quietly ignored. There has been no crack in the ‘Blue code of silence’. The press gallery has mutely looked on, while the Democratic machine methodically rigged this year’s primary. After all, it is simply not the done thing to replace the incumbent.

Until a few weeks ago, the line of attack was nothing less than the claim that videos clearly showing Biden wandering off, making gaffes and so on were instances of misinformation. The term, ‘cheapfake’, was coined to describe videos that had allegedly been deceptively edited. The ‘deception’, however, turned out to be only showing the worrying bit of footage out of a whole video. Thinking about this for more than three seconds gives the lie to it. Suppose the rumour that Biden shat himself in the Vatican was true: the equivalent claim would be to say that failing to talk about any of the time Biden was not actively defecating constituted “misinformation”. On balance, every political correspondent in the liberal press corps should be fired, and go into a trade where gullibility is an asset.

Disaster

All that changed on June 27, when Biden and Trump faced off for the first time in a head-to-head debate. This disaster - whose lowlights we will not rehearse - made Biden’s decline unignorable. Crucially, it broke the dam in the media.

In the following days, The New York Times published multiple op-eds and an editorial urging the president to stand down as candidate. All but the most desperate major media followed suit. In due course, many members of congress have done the same. (Pathetically, that does not include the famous ‘Squad’, who have rallied around him.) As I write, there are rumours that donors are threatening to withhold further contributions, although Biden-Harris 2024 already has a decent war-chest in hand.

The leak-spigot is now fully open. We have heard that he has often been no more than a ghostly presence at important fundraising events; that he deputised the noted blues-rock guitarist, Anthony Blinken, to speak to the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, because he was already in bed at 8pm. He is only fully compos mentis, apparently, between the hours of 10am and 4pm.

Despite all this, he has insisted that he is still standing (in both senses of that word!). He has claimed that it is all a plot of “the elites”, which is not even the stupidest conspiracy theory circulating among his supporters. (The idea has spread that this is all the work of the media, who are trying to make him look bad, so the one reliable source of ratings - Trump - gets back in. Readers may make their own judgment.) He insists he can get back on track, and announced a striking populist platform for his next term at a rally on July 13, which seems to be a concession to Sanders and the Squad (we wonder what the donors think of that).

But how? Nearly every time he speaks, he makes some gaffe (which has been true for a while, but now there is extra scrutiny). Whenever he hides away from public engagements, that is interpreted as a sign of unfitness too. There was a bit of both in last Thursday’s address to a Nato conference, in which he introduced Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin”, tried to laugh it off, and then delayed the subsequent press conference by close to an hour - presumably while hysterical handlers attempted to prepare him for the inevitable barrage of hostile questions about his condition. He could always make great play of the evil on the other side, but, now there has been an attempt on Trump’s life, it seems the Democrats are prepared to keep the powder dry for a time.

Dementia and Parkinson’s disease are not conditions that tend to get better with time. Already trailing Trump going into this eventful few weeks, and now trailing further behind, it seems he is doomed to lose. Having sprung against him, can the media really be believed if they go back to supporting him? Can that genie go back in the bottle?

If he insists on taking it all the way, there are bizarrely few remedies at hand. For all the defects of the British constitution, at least parliament can get rid of a prime minister through a vote of no confidence. The Democratic nomination process has remedies in theory, and the Chicago convention has not even yet taken place and nominated him. But that would require anointing a successor and generally far more decisive action among Democratic elites than has been evident so far. His cabinet could declare him incapacitated under the 25th amendment, but they are people who entirely owe their positions to him individually. He could be impeached and convicted, but of what? In any case, it has never happened, despite several attempts dating back centuries. Why would Trump-addled house Republicans even do it, when keeping Sleepy Joe around means a near guarantee of victory in November?

The available replacements are a mixed bag. There is Kamala Harris, the vice-president - that would be the easiest switch. The Democratic ticket would get to keep all the money it has already raised without any further hassle. She is at least a good speaker on abortion - the one issue where the Democrats enjoy a clear advantage over the Republicans, thanks to the Dobbs decision and the ugliness of its implementation in several red states. Nonetheless, she is not popular as an individual. Only now, with Biden’s post-debate approval ratings at an historically awful level, is she favoured over him. She has kept a low profile during their administration. She may become more popular if forced meaningfully onto the campaign trail - or less.

If not her, we are likely in the territory of plucking a successful Democratic governor from the state level. Gavin Newsom of California is talked about, though he has not really had to learn to fight, having proceeded from one blue rotten borough to the next - the days of the Republican ‘governator’, Arnold Schwarzenegger, seem strangely long ago. There is JB Pritzker of Illinois - like Trump a scion of a real-estate empire and, also like him, someone with something resembling the common touch. Or there is Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who has boxed clever in an important swing state, passed meaningful legislation with wafer-thin majorities in the state legislature, and is generally well-regarded by the political cognoscenti.

The trouble with all these people is, firstly, that getting them onto the ticket would be difficult, and probably require arranging a contested convention - all but impossible without Biden’s say-so. They also have little name recognition outside their home states. They might flourish, or they might bomb, as Florida governors Ron DeSantis and Jeb Bush did on the Republican ticket.

Elected monarchy

All these options have a common weakness, which is that they involve yet further backroom machinations among a political elite staggering under successive blows to its reputation. The liberal media seethes - self-servingly - because it considers itself betrayed by Democratic insiders’ deceptions on the point of Biden’s cognitive health. As far as the right is concerned, it is already canon that these shadowy forces are behind the attempt on the life of Trump, whether by endlessly denouncing him as a new Hitler, or by directly arranging to have him ‘taken care of’. No senior Democrat can escape these two distrusts - they all covered for Biden, indeed continue to do so in public (while often apparently attempting to sort things out in private); and they all traffic in the kind of anti-Trump rhetoric that, in the light of Crooks’s actions, sounds to the right like an admission of guilt.

One could not ask for a better illustration of the shortcomings of presidential ‘democracy’ - better described as ‘elected monarchy’. A president could hardly qualify for the title if his removal were easy; but this merely produces a culture of impunity, whether in the form of Biden’s stubborn refusal to face reality or Trump’s serial threats on the liberty of his enemies. It is better not to have such a monstrous office at all. Caucus leaders in the house and the senate are frequently offloaded, especially in these days of fire-breathing far-right factions. Good.

American presidentialism, when it functions, allows the state core to have a stronger hand in politics than it might otherwise. The president, for practical purposes, has control over matters of war and peace, of geostrategy, and so forth. For the formulation and execution of these policies, he needs the aid of the permanent civil, intelligence and military bureaucracy, who enjoy considerable influence between administrations. “Whoever wins,” as the anarchists say, “the government gets in.” Indeed, now that Biden’s infirmity is obvious, the question arises: who is actually running the country? It is, after all, still running, if not enormously successfully. Executive functions are, roughly, being carried out.

For all the froth, US policy - agonising disengagement from the near east, dismemberment of Russia and escalating conflict with China - has been consistent, from Obama to Trump to Biden (and, we suppose, to Trump again next year). It is difficult to argue that any part of it is being carried out successfully, or even that Trump’s narcissism and Biden’s senescence have made much difference. (Niall Ferguson, the Tory historian and American transplant, recently courted scandal by suggesting that, in the “new cold war” with China, “we - and not the Chinese - might be the Soviets”. There is certainly the whiff of late-Brezhnev about all this.)

One thinks of the spoken-word vocal by Godspeed You! Black Emperor: ‘Dead flag blues’: “The car is on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel … We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.”

Escape means escape from the chains of American constitutionalism - a third American revolution, that will finally deliver on the democratic and republican promise of the country’s best moments.