Needs to be said (in a strategically unpaywalled manner). I usually come to SB for the cool, unemotional analysis; considering the chaos swirling around us for the past week, I’m glad Matt is taking this tone. This was a monumental f*** up that will be hard to fix.
Was it a f***-up (“He can run again, win, and do the job. He just needs the right support & great execution.”)? Or was it a deliberate fraud (“If we don’t let the American people see how bad he is, we might be able to hold on to the White House.”)?
Know *what*? We found out all we needed to know at the end of June, and good on the Biden team for forcing the early debate.
For those who think the Democrats would have been better off had Biden not so delayed his eventual dropping out, you are simply wrong. There's a simplistic view that a long and open primary process would have delivered a strong candidate, a unified party, and a moderate message that would have resonated with the American people. That view simply doesn't understand the dynamics of the party and the course of events (e.g., what Oct. 7 would have done to the primary debate and party cohesion).
The real mistake was Biden treating the 22 midterms as a mandate to run as an octogenarian POTUS. He kept at it even as his poll numbers became dismal.
Would it have been better to have had a normal primary process vs the rushed one? Yes. Would a rushed one been better than what happened, I donno? But Biden delaying the inevitable didn’t help if Harris was to take over, and I don’t think Biden really gave Harris the support or room to campaign she deserved.
No, a full primary would have been a disaster for the Democrats.
Two reasons:
1) The progressive Left had not been discredited and remained the dominant force in the party and, just like in 2016 and 2020, they would have forced the candidates and the eventual nominee to take unpopular stands. This is especially so given the surprising strength of the party in the midterms
2) Oct. 7 and the course of the war would have been the dominant issue in the heat of the primary campaign and would have torn the party apart. The eventual “winner” would have been a bleeding wreck and spent all his/her time trying to repair the intense divisions in the party rather than turning full force on Trump and the Republicans. Shortcircuiting the primary let Biden take all the heat of that anger and kept it out of the presidential race.
Obviously, in the end Trump won but I firmly believe the defeat would have been much worse, at the top and down the ballot, with a full primary.
The lesson is that primaries are dangerous for Democrats and we need to fix that problem for 2028, not just blame all our problems on Biden hanging around too long. That kind of thinking will lead us to disaster.
"not just blame all our problems on Biden hanging around too long"
Oh, I don't think you'll find anyone saying Biden was the *sole* source of the Democratic Party's problems. But how people, including Biden, behaved between the start of 2024 and his resignation, reveals a lot about how they think and operate, and that's useful knowledge.
At a minimum, it reveals that Democrats do not believe their own messaging about transparency, honor, and integrity if it gets in the way of what elected officials and party operatives think is best for them and their careers. If this is how the party's going to behave, then they need to make a much more compelling policy argument, because the difference between them and the Republicans on "good government" and "public virtue" is smaller - definitely there, but smaller - then they led the public to believe.
Since we are debating a counter-factual, I offer the following reasons to suspect an open primary would not have been a disaster, esp. relative to the factual reality:
1) It would have obviated or undercut the GOP talking points that Harris was simply "anointed" as a "diversity hire", and that Dems operate through "corrupt" and "rigged" processes.
2) It would have forced Harris to address - and hopefully disavow - her circa-2019/2020 woke-sounding comments.
3) Was October 7 and Gaza really destined to be the dominant issue for Dems as of the summer of 2024? I wonder if this is where the progressive/Groups bias of party elites misleads or obscures what was important to the median Democratic voter. According to an October 2024 Gallup poll, it was pretty far down the list: https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx
4) No doubt, some progressive primary challengers would have played the Gaza card against Harris and other would-be centrists. But why is this so daunting compared to other hot button topics that excite progressives but are less important to low-info or moderate voters?
The progressive left had been discredited long before an open Democratic party would have gotten going. Losing in 2020 by more than they had lost in 2016 broke the back of the movement, or at least convinced it's members that they couldn't win at the ballot box anytime soon. And by early 2024, the vibe shift to the right was already well underway, and most Democratic voters already thought their own party had shifted too far left.
Moreover, it would be crazy to think that distinguishing themselves from the moderates on Gaza and trans issues--which would be the main places where they could distinguish themselves from the moderates--would help progressive left candidates in an open 2024 primary. This was never going to be a cycle where they had a real chance. That's before you consider the relative paucity of decent progressive candidates, especially as compared to the exceptionally deep bench of moderates we had.
The worst outcome of an open primary would have been losing a few crazy pro-Hamas voters. We would have more than made up that ground with normies just by not seeming to anoint someone nobody liked that much. When you add in the fact that an open primary would have selected for somebody who was actually a decent candidate (i.e. Buttigieg, Shapiro, Whitmer, Moore, etc...), it seems very likely we would have won.
I will say that, at the time, I thought the 2022 midterm results were genuinely stunning and it had a real impact on how I viewed the state of American politics. Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back it's clear that this was the beginning of a series of mistakes that led us to the present moment. But I see how people got there.
A full primary starting in July would have had the same outcome -- Harris -- since imho none of the likely candidates would have been able to go out on a serious anti-Biden limb and garner a majority consensus around D primary voters. D voters, btw, might not have wanted a decent afro-asian woman candidates for... exactly whom? Kamala proved to be a much better campaigner than the Biden folks thought of, but not a great strategist (*she could* have put some daylight between her and Biden and did not, chose another non-strategist for VP). But her faults such as they might have been were completely aligned with the party at large.
What party cohesion was attained by not holding a primary? Democrats put up its worst performance among women, minorities, and young people in the 21st century. Harris got something like only 36% of the vote in Dearborn, MI, and was the first Democrat to lose in South Texas in over a century.
Maybe she united the staffers, activists, consultants, and donors, but who really cares. She obviously didn't united the actual rank-and-file voters that have reliably voted for Democrats in the past
Losing is bad and always is, but let’s not catastrophize. She lost by 1.5 percentage points — a narrow outcome historically — when people were outraged by (now mostly moderate) inflation and incumbents around the world were being tossed from office.
And I’m old enough to remember the early joy, enthusiasm, and unity that followed her taking charge after Biden dropped out. She certainly gave our party its best shot and far more of a chance than a bloody, destructive primary would have yielded.
But my point is that the joy, enthusiasm, and unity you refer to came from hyperpartisan liberal Democrats who would've been joyful, enthusiastic, and united around the winner of a bloody, destructive primary.
The many previously loyal Democrats who pulled the lever for Trump, especially those who still voted Democrat down ballot, obviously weren't very joyful, enthusiastic, and united behind Harris.
I'm a Democrat who was never enthusiastic about Harris and really only voted for her because the alternative was Trump.
I'm curious to know who you think would have run in the 2024 Democratic Primaries and how they would have done. I also don't understand what you think would have been so "bloody" about it.
Nobody serious was going to run on the Columbia quad / Hamas platform, so the Gaza issue would have been a fight about how hard to press for a cease-fire, how urgently to call for a two-state solution, and how stridently to criticize Netanyahu for being an opportunistic asshole.
The rest of it would have been a more-or-less respectful debate over Biden's choices, missed opportunities and priorities... but with more candidates able to speak in complete sentences with fewer malapropisms and confusing anachronisms. Who would have been the moderate Dem candidates trying to "bloody" Biden or Harris and what do you think they would have said?
I originally agreed with this, but Matt's continued discussion around how Harris did not separate herself from Biden has changed my mind. I don't think there was a way for her to do that effectively. A new candidate who hadn't been part of the administration would have been able to do that more effectively. They could have talked about the good that Biden did, while being much more forthright about the bad as well.
Possibly. Harris couldn’t throw Biden under the bus because that would have backfired on her (disloyalty, where were you, all that kind of stuff). Could Whitmer have trashed Biden? Maybe. But he was still her President and the party’s leader. It’s a really fine line to draw and an unpopular Presidency is an albatross that would probably have hurt any candidate.
Biden definitely was an albatross around any Democratic candidate. But the line that you are pushing is that this is best that Democrats could have done in this situation means that there was no way to beat Trump. I'm unwilling to accept that conclusion.
edit - I acknowledge that this might be willful obtuseness on my part.
One lesson is that the party in power will be judged by voters for their assessed performance of its incumbent president, even if said incumbent is not running for reelection. People voted in 2000 based on Clinton. Senior Bush won Reagan's third term. Hubert Humphrey couldn't get out of LBJ's shadow. You can bear hug your party's sitting president or kick him in the balls, and it really won't make a difference to your campaign either way.
Damned by the president's advisors, she later had to rely on the usual suspects in the media - fact-checkers and other types of friendly but feckless flunkies - to 'splain to us all that, no, actually she wasn't formally named a "border czar."
The only way that it could have happened was for Biden to agree to accept significant criticism from her and still support her. But as is evident throughout this discussion, Biden was more about Biden and less about country/Democratic party success than people thought.
Would a primary process have been worse than the erosion of trust not only in Joe Biden, but everyone around him, including Kamala Harris, and his party, because they were complicit in trying to Weekend-at-Bernie's Biden over the finish line as the pretense that he was in great shape and ready for another four years got thinner day by day?
This is the salient point, I think. Was the Democratic party of 2023 capable of recognizing the threat posed by Biden's record and age and course-correcting with a new candidate who would have been critical of Biden and spoken more directly and convincingly to median voter concerns about inflation, immigration and social issues? Would the average Democratic primary voter have understood the threat and supported an explicitly "not-Biden" candidate? Would a winning lefty candidate (like Harris) have tried to reach out and consolidate support from Not-Biden voters the way Biden reached out to the lefties after 2020?
I think Harris probably would've just won the nomination anyway, but the party wouldn't have been weighed down in 2024 after spending a year and half pretending Biden wasn't in mental decline. Even if you think Biden's administration was fine, it still would've been better for Biden to resign sometime after January 2023, hand things over to Harris, and for her to run a sort of "let us continue" campaign. That way you don't have the Biden age/mental acuity scandal at all.
October 7 would have made any Democratic primary* absolutely ruinous. I don't think people appreciate how bad it would have gotten.
Like, guys, we're talking about a primary where the "Zionist" would have been one of the biggest words in the world cloud of the discourse. That probably wouldn't have worked well in any respect.
You can say, well, Whitmer and Pritzker and Buttigieg, et al, wouldn't have fallen into that trap... forget it. The trap comes and finds you. Democrats didn't want the 2024 election to be about transgender issues, either.
Given that the push to remove Biden clearly predated June by a good amount**, I would guess that there were people who were advocating hard for a primary who lost the argument, once the reality of what that primary would be became apparent.
* Thank you to the respondent who pointed out my possibly Freudian typo, "Democratic party"
** (I would say previous pushes were 1:1 correlated with NYT opinion page Biden-age outbursts, so one in April of '23 around when Biden announced, and another in October around the filing deadline for primaries.)
I assume you meant to write "primary" in your first sentence so yes absolutely. I'm not sure the people early on pushing for Biden to drop out changed their mind lost the argument as people realized how ruinous a primary would have been. I'm still not sure people understand that.
Ha, yes. I did mean primary. Thanks for catching that. (Enough people, left and right, DO consider the party itself "absolutely ruinous" that I don't want to even accidentally draw that association.)
I think it was pretty clearly a screwup. If his aids were covering up how frail and infirm Biden was, and they knew he was unable to be President then they would never have let him on the debate stage. If this was a conspiracy they would have ran the campaign even more controlled than they did. No: the simplest explanation with the most evidence is that Biden is an arrogant and proud man who really thought he could win, and that he pushed his team to do as he asked.
Biden has been in politics for decades, has a very loyal team, built a solid administration, and when he said 'go' they went and they did what they could to put him across the finish line.
To be clear: neither explanation absolves Biden, who should have known that he couldn't do it and should have retired either way. I do not believe he is senile, and I do not believe he lacks agency. He could have, and should have, chose not to run. Not for any other reason than: he was too old to do the job, or at least was too old to convince people he can do the job (they're the same question at the end of the day).
The last year has revealed Biden as a selfish man who despite all his lofty rhetoric, was in it for himself and the people he personally knew. There were glimpses of that in the past, like how he lied about the circumstances of his first wife's car accident to make himself seem more sympathetic, but the scale and consequences of him clinging to power and then metaphorically shitting on the carpet on his way out the door should make that clear.
People should feel absolved of any obligation to defend the man himself, separate from his policies.
...
(And he couldn't even be bothered to keep his dogs from biting the people assigned to take a bullet for him!)
Attacking Biden personally does no good, and bluntly I still appreciate the man’s service and his presidency. The sin of hubris and arrogance is a very common one among politicians and I don’t think any President (except maybe George HW Bush) would have willingly stepped aside either. LBJ only did it, if my memory serves, because he was shoved aside.
I have more anger over the party. They knew or should have known what would happen and they let it happen. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have their own blame in this too
I don't actually think he "lied" about his wife's car accident. Words mean things, and "lie" means "a conscious telling of an untruth." A mistake or error or false belief is not a lie. Now, in truth, his first wife was in a car with screaming kids and she below a stoplight at the absolutely worst time. People blow stoplights -- I've blown stoplights! It was her fault. This doesn't demonstrate moral turpitude; she made a mistake.
But it's hard for Joe Biden the man to accept that his wife caused her own death and death of his infant daughter. I think over the years Biden convinced himself that, in fact, the driver of the truck was drunk and that caused the accident. I think he really believed that story.
It doesn't matter if Biden finds it hard to accept that his wife's death was not the fault of the truck driver that hit her - he used his public platform to slander that truck driver, and that is a messed up thing to do.
Agree. I also don’t believe he is senile, which made this harder - good days, bad days, rapid deterioration over the past few years in terms of endurance and verbal dexterity but still able to make reasonable decisions. Not a conspiracy, just impossible accumulating choices and very hard to draw the line when you’re watching it happen in real time.
> No: the simplest explanation with the most evidence is that Biden is an arrogant and proud man who really thought he could win, and that he pushed his team to do as he asked.
Honestly this is my take away as well, especially given his post debate interviews, and even his post election comments. Scranton Joe is a stubborn SOB and while he did some good things, his legacy like RBG's will be judged by the mess they left behind instead of some of the good they did.
Yea. It’s infuriating and sad. Biden was not a bad president. He wasn’t Jimmy Carter (in office) but his big mistakes are going to outweigh his sound judgment. I have no regrets voting for him, but I’m disappointed in how he left office. I’m particularly mad he pardoned his son
My theory is that they knew the odds of a disaster were significant. However, *not* having a debate would be conceding the issue.
So they rolled the dice. I don't know if the odds of him having a bad night were 25%, or 50%, or 80%, but even at 80%, that leaves a 20% chance of victory.
The decision to not have a Super Bowl interview is obvious in retrospect.
One, even if they knew he was losing it, they probably had some denial about how much.
Two, Trump was so horrible in the 2020 debates, they kind of thought Biden could stand there and just watch Trump be horrible. Paradoxically, I think the rules they imposed actually helped Trump, who was shockingly disciplined, for Trump.
Third, I think Biden was in fact incompetent for his last year or so in office -- I mean he was as bad as my dad was when I took over managing his finances. But I also think he had a genuinely bad day in the debate.
It could be both - a fraud on the part of the White House, and a f*** up at the party level for letting things get to the point where they're *so bad* that the nation unequivocally chooses *this.* I know that theoretically Biden was the party leader, but so much of the party apparatus seems to have been living in a parallel fantasy universe in which people love to be scolded, I'm apportioning my blame widely.
I just walked to work listening to Josh Barro's "centrist take" podcast, and I'm even more pissed off at "our side" now.
Finally, for reasons having to do with my job at the time, I agree with your take on Bush/Iraq.
The politics of the 2010s was so joyless. Covid happened and Democrats when handed a win continued to push that contrarian joylessness we see coming from progressives and sought to appease the insatiable Groups.
Joe Biden had one job, keep Trump from power and he laid the groundwork for Trump’s return. You have multiple obvious felonies and never could be bothered to indict him. We got DEIA HR reps, gamed the social cost of carbon, and hamstringed all your infrastructure funding with adjective-justice red tape. What an abject failure.
And yet manufacturing is surging due to Biden investments. Somehow the requirement for a daycare facility didn't stop the TSMC Arizona fab dead in its tracks but instead is zooming like a race car.
That's great, but because Biden completely fucked up his one job of preventing Trump from being in power, Trump will now be in office to reap the benefits from what Biden sowed.
My angst is more at IRA and BEV subsidies than the CHIPS Act (the bipartisan stuff stripped a lot of the everything bagelness he had. God BBB was a mess.)
BBB was terrible and revealed the continuing strength of the progressives in the party, to its and our detriment. But all it did was waste precious time (bad enough!) rather than result in terrible law. Instead we got the IRA which is fantastic.
Well, John McCain didn't run as an anti-war candidate. So far as I could tell at the time, his critique of Bush is that he didn't invade enough countries. McCain wanted American War for Georgia (the Eurasian Georgia, not the one where we burned Atlanta in the prior War for Georgia) and American invasion of Syria.
The least popular part of the Bush legacy he didn't repudiate; he doubled down.
The "fraud" thesis strikes me as being pretty weak. Basically we didn't get any stories about Biden not being able to do the job from people in meetings with him like the GOP leadership in the Congress in 2021-2023. Same if you bother to go watch old interviews with him on YouTube, the decline was pretty quick and seemed to have happened in early 2024.
Yeah. I think people in general are way underestimating the capacity of our species for sincere self-deception. This is especially true in cases of cognitive decline (I have a bit of experience with this in my own family, as I'm sure other SB readers do, too). It's hard to face facts sometimes when people we love are in decline.
Mind you, the folks running executive branch operations should be cooly rational actors constantly thinking of the national interest, and they should be capable of clear-eyed objectivity at all times. Key word being "should."
I strongly suspect (and yes, I've read the famous WSJ article) a lot of White House staffers and campaign people were saying to themselves (and believing) something along the lines of "Yeah, the president looks and sounds really old these days, so too much public exposure will hurt our chances! But dolgurnit the results—great job market, great stock market, declining inflation,, plunging overdose deaths and homicide, a stabilizing border situation, restored relations with our allies, the end of the Afghanistan quagmire, the end of Covid, tons of legislative achievements, record oil production, surging industrial output—speak for themselves. And we dare not give up the incumbency advantage."
It was a fuckup (although I continue to believe the biggest fuck up was nominating a 77 year old in the first place, back in 2020), sure. But it's far from clear the fuckup was mainly conspiratorial in nature.
You only need a few insiders engaged in the fraud. Then they can lead everyone else to fucking up. But it does become a kind of Ponzi scheme where Matt’s a fuckup for accepting the fraud but then unwittingly commits the fraud as he leads others to swallowing it and being fuck ups.
It’s okay, I agree that now is the time to say let’s be more honest and better next time. Let’s see if some Dems have it in them.
Matt has been great on the honesty front since the election.
Chapelle made an interesting distinction on a SNL appearance where he called Trump an honest liar. There is some difference between honesty and truthfulness.
Honesty seems both more general and more encompassing of the person. To be honest you must be open. Truthfulness seems more specific. Smart people are often very good at being truthful and kind of dishonest at the same time. I think Kamala Harris landed this way with many voters.
The most honest public intellectual I read is Nate Silver. I like Sam Harris too. He is throughly truthful and highly honest but does pull his punches if he thinks there are larger narratives to be concerned about. Nate seems to just say honestly what he believes in the moment.
As Matt frees himself from institutional constraints he becomes more honest. I am sure there are other social pressures to be less so. I hope this trend continues in those headwinds.
I don’t see any disagreement here. He was a pretty good president into late 2023. But he made some fundamentally bad decisions that ended up being so bad that we may well have been better off letting Trump flail for eight consecutive years.
I will never believe that Trump winning in 2020 would have been good for the nation and the world.
Not saying I disagree, Kenny, but what were those "fundamentally bad decisions"? I have plenty of disagreements with Biden (dangling weapons in front of Ukraine, student debt relief, letting BBB drag on so long, taking four weeks instead of two weeks to drop out after the debate, etc.) but I'm not aware of anything that was 'fundamentally bad.'
Most of his decision around Harris were bad. He set her up for failure. Including by picking her in the first place, but if Harris had been given hard tasks to do that were still achievable, she could have run on a record.
Instead she was tied to the border, one of the two very unpopular parts of the 46th administration. And all the "Not The Border Czar" pieces confirm that it was something they wanted no affiliation with. Had the border somehow been cleaned up she'd have run on "Border Czar In Chief."
The main "fundamentally bad" decisions were not taking the border / asylum issue seriously until early 24 and not pivoting on the economy to going all in on fighting inflation. More generally, shifting to the left after winning the primary and handing over control of hiring for the administration to the left was also "fundamentally bad".
The biggest ones are around the re-election campaign (and setting Harris up for failure from early on), but I think several of the late term decisions, particularly the questionable pardons and constitutional interpretations at the transition, may have made things worse.
Well, there is one way Trump winning in 2020 would have been better. A voter on Sarah Longwell's "The Focus Group" explained that he was voting for Trump because that way we wouldn't have "another Jan. 6."
So as long as Republicans always and must always win the election, we can always have "peaceful transfers of power." (Not the other way, of course.) Yay.
I'm not sure he was "a good president into late 2023". MY linked to a good piece that documents Biden's problems (indecision in particular, and its downstream effects) basically from the get go [1].
Plus, Biden was so reclusive that how is possible to say he was a good president until ____? He was reclusive the entire time, so even if he was totally fine at the beginning, how do you know when things went south? There's a reason that people like MY were fooled until the curtains were dramatically ripped back.
I would argue that he was “good” in the sense of advancing partisan Democrat objectives (something that most of the swing voters who put him powers disagree with) but almost from the minute he took power he was damaging the Dem brand. The Dems had a chance to co-opt swing voters and liberal leaning Republicans basically creating a long term majority. All Biden had to do was govern from the center, not try to be the next FDR, and serve one term while leaving a competent successor. All thing he promised while campaigning. This would have give Dems a serious edge for several electoral cycles and possibly cemented swing voters into Dems.
His choice to embrace the Warren wing and the Groups, basically trying to use Trump’s insanity to leverage push a bunch of fringe economic and social issues along with his inability to relinquish power causes the opposite. Instead of a saner and better government, we are left with a very damaged Dem brand and a vastly empowered Trump regime.
I think Matt under estimates his failure because all he has to do was broadly follow his own campaign and he could have left the country much better off.
Basically he tried to be a damn good Democrat president and failed. Leaving a person he claimed was a threat to democracy more empowered than before. Had he simply acted like Trump was a threat and governed like a Clinton or Obama (or like he governed as a senator and VP) he would have left us all better off.
That said, it appears that Trump will act like himself (I.e., an idiot) and just create chaos. Bad but unlikely to result in any long term electoral success.
It was crazy to me that Biden had a 50/50 Senate and a tiny majority in the House and somehow decided he was FDR. Did he not look at how big the Democratic majorities were in 1932?
This set the Democrats back, but luckily they didn’t pass dumb legislation and Manchin helped them pass some smart bills.
I think the problem here is that Matt is saying he was a good President and a terrible politician. It would probably help for Matt to make this more explicit.
When I saw Wicked on stage 15 years ago, I thought it was a great show, despite having no good music - even though having good music is usually a major part of being a good musical!
Many plays have no music at all, so a musical without good music can work fine—just as non-musical plays do. There’s no equivalent for a president who’s a crummy politician.
Like, no one would say that a brain surgeon who sucks at brain surgery is actually a great brain surgeon because they’re a great administrator.
Sure there is. You can have a President who is excellent at doing the job of being an executive, but is simultaneously poor at advertising himself and his accomplishments to the public. The result is that this President might have excellent policy accomplishments during the four years of his term, and then won't win re-election at the end of it. And that's a pretty accurate description of what happened.
This is my view - for 2.5 to 3 years he was a strong contender for the most accomplished president of my lifetime, and then sometime around the invasion of Gaza [1] and the completion of the soft landing from inflation it just all went to hell, 21-3 in the Super Bowl style. And his behavior post-election did significant damage to his already imperiled legacy.
(This is also why I have trouble faulting Kamala Harris for not breaking harder with Biden - where exactly did he misstep policy-wise in those first three years? You can argue he should have gone it alone with executive actions on asylum seekers earlier rather than try to work with Republicans, and maybe that there should have been less COVID relief to prevent future inflation. But I don't think "We shouldn't have sent the American taxpayer another stimulus check," is an electoral winner. Low-information voters are hoping Trump restores stimulus payments!)
[1] I also think Gaza was a no-win situation for Biden that he played pretty well; Netanyahu was always going to wait out the 2024 election in the hopes of getting a better deal from the Republicans he's so assiduously courted.
I have never understood the "most accomplished president of my lifetime" view. What did he achieve that was lasting? Surely the ACA, alone, outweighs anything Biden managed to achieve?
I don’t understand it either. He certainly passed a bunch of bills that spent a lot of money—partly a consequence of his inability to say “no”, and maybe some people mistake spending money for accomplishments?
He left on a timeline negotiated by Trump. Props for Biden for following thru, but Trump may well have left too. In contrast, the ACA would not have happened if McCain won.
Props for following through, but also he kinda fucked it up. The pullout was chaotic, lots of promises to local allies were broken, people died as a result.
I guess, although I think this likely would have happened anyway and isn’t much of a historical pivot point. I also don’t know if I’d call the retreat an accomplishment in the first place? I don’t see withdrawal from Vietnam as an accomplishment of Nixon’s, even if it was better than the alternative.
US Inflation seems in line with most Western countries, including ones like Germany that did not provided stimulus. Now I'm open to the possibility the US is large enough and Western economies are so closely linked that the Biden stimulus drove inflation everywhere, but I haven't seen a lot of economists argue that case. Regardless, in the context of "How could Harris distance herself from Biden?" the response "I wouldn't have provided stimulus he did," seems a nonstarter.
Dealing with asylum seekers was both a Biden misstep and the most promising place for Harris to show daylight, but the Trump campaign did a very good job of associating her with "being in charge of the border" before she had a chance to explain her role in the initial policy.
As I understand it, economists have argued that Biden's stimulus added 2 percentage points to inflation's peak, certainly a minority part, but a big deal nonetheless. Afterwards, there were lots of small things that were slightly inflationary but the left preferred and he consistently sided with the left. He also could have dropped Trump's terrifs to lower some prices.
You can think he was a good President while understanding that he was unpopular and behind in head-to-head polling with his likely rival, so unlikely to win re-election. We faced this in 1980 with Jimmy Carter, who was a great man and a good President (smart, engaged, detail-oriented, reform-minded, unafraid to grapple with tough issues), but who was handed a pile of feces by history and thus was doomed to failure. This was evident in late '79, so we had primaries and Ted Kennedy lost to Carter, but they engaged, debated, etc. I think it's pretty clear that Biden would NOT have survived a primary season with his reputation for cognitive competence intact. We might have nominated him anyway because his weakness was the key to maintaining the coalition of moderates and lefties that went on to support Harris, but I think the more likely outcome would have been one or more incidents like the June debate, which would have forced him to drop out earlier, but with a few alternatives already actively engaged in a campaign for the hearts and minds of Democratic primary voters.
In 1980 we had an alternative candidate with enough bravado, conviction, name recognition and money to challenge a weak incumbent from the left. In 2024, we had crickets. Nobody from the moderate/common sense/abundance Democrats wing willing to fight Biden from the center. Why? If the answer is the mopey "the nasty lefties had too much power in the incumbent administration", then that's a failure of the party faction most of us believe in.
Oh good lord no. He had to get out. I was besides myself calling for him to get out and I am clearly the biggest Biden supporter here on SB. The following four weeks after the debate were an agony.
But in the end he *did* get out and I will go to my grave believing that him getting out around that time (though a little earlier would have been better) happened to put the Democrats in a far better electoral situation than had there been a full, long open primary.
I remember this is how I felt as well, I even thought he did a great State of the Union address even when the Republicans were trying to interrupt him and trip him up. That was not the same Biden that showed up in the months following and the debate stage. Him also slow walking the administration response to immigration was a bad move that hurt Dems up and down the ballot imo.
Many believe that even if the candidacy itself was a f***up, the decisive f***up was the meltdown following the debate, when the party spent a month of prime election season eating itself instead of campaigning for its candidate.
That establishment-leaning coastal liberals, who clearly understand American politics worse than literally anybody, given who DID win the election, say that there's no way Biden could have won, if the party had supported him, is just as arrogant as saying that he would have been likely to win.
I've seen conservatives say that the staffers around Biden hiding the extent of his senility is a bigger scandal than Watergate. As a Democrat, my first response was to dismiss this as crazy, but I might be coming around to that position.
What's worse, covering up a break-in to help win an election that was already a historic landslide, or having the country secretly be run by unelected staffers for several years?
It’d probably be good politics for the GOP to call in senior level dem staffers to do a hearing on this…
I still buy the argument that Biden was still competent behind the scenes, but his public image completely destroyed the party. It’s actually insane Sanders and AOC stuck by him until the end.
I don't know, Ben. The NYTimes article from last week (the first of many, I suspect) shows some real diminished capacity, as did last month's WSJ article.
Open articles follow for those who don't subscribe:
I agree diminished capacity. But I still think with advisors, you get someone who is competent. If you sparingly watch him speak in public, it's easy to just see a guy who is totally out to lunch.
I mean, part of this article is about his infirmity preventing him from seeing the most basic of realities: that he would not have beaten Trump, that in fact his aura was so bad it spread from him to befoul the rest of the party.
You can chalk up thinking that to old-guy hubris, but a competently minded politician wouldn't have said it publicly on the way out the door.
A ton of politicians believe absurd things about their own capacity. We literally just elected one in Donald Trump, and nobody thinks his arrogance is a sign of senility.
1. Trump's style of arrogance is one symptom of his larger personality disorder. 2. All politicians have an exaggerated sense of their own capacity, but expressing it so destructively for Harris was a weird, pathological move.
Johnson refused to seek nomination, Nixon resigned when the writing was on the wall. These were extraordinary cases, just as now. But if Trump was really as big of a threat as he is plainly proving himself to be now, in real time, then giving Biden credit for doing what obviously had to be done is cold comfort.
It's easy to Monday morning quarterback, of course. But there were people, like Ezra Klein, who were floating bolder strategies last summer, when we needed to take bold action. That was the time to take a stand, and if more had done so, maybe we wouldn't be currently eating this shit-sandwich.
So Ben, if you were a criminal defendant, would you have hired Biden to represent you at trial for your life last year? Assume for these purposes that he went into criminal law and had a good track record as a trial lawyer in his 40s, 50s, and even 60s.
I think his advisors, similar to yourself and Matt Yglesias, were determined to see the best possible scenario. I also think it became intensely personal for both the professional advisors and Biden's family, and that led to compromised judgement.
The Hur report should have been the wake up call. It's one on one with a neutral investigator, someone appointed by Biden's DOJ. Given more recent revelations of how the prep work for those meetings went, Hur's description of how that prosecution would have ended should not have come as such a surprise.
The debate was when everyone who wasn't actively convincing themselves of his competence saw his condition.
I suspect Republicans can't hold those hearings because Trump is just as old as Biden was when he was elected and we're going to see some of the same problems in the next 4 years.
The issue isn't hypocrisy; it's that the Democrats would have a right to speak at those hearings and present evidence, and they could use it to turn it around on Trump.
If they were smarter, the Dems would angrily turn those hearings on Biden staffers. Full on "what did you know and when did you know it" career-enders, with a side of "Yeah, these guys fucked up operatically. They organized not just a shit-show, but a full-on turd circus. Since we probably can't prosecute them for it, this is what they get instead". The kind of humiliation that somehow makes you seem like the dumbest guy in town, in spite of the fact that Tom Tuberville and Mazie Hirono are right there in the room with you.
What evidence do we have that Hirono is a particularly unintelligent senator? When I think of members of Congress that are notably unintelligent, I think of Tuberville, MTG, Boebert, and Hank Johnson.
Do they? The right of Democrats to do anything in the House, other than participate in floor votes exists only by permission of Republicans. If Republicans wanted to hold a party line vote to kick all Democrats off the committee that would be doing the questioning, there would be nothing to stop them, other than the court of public opinion and the next election.
Well Biden's White House was being run by progressive activists and making constant policy concessions to appease them. Kind of weird to see them attack him when he was ostensibly governing as one of them.
He was obviously diminished in the 2020 election. It was so obvious comedians were ripping on him and building web series based on it. I can't believe anyone was "surprised" by the 2024 debate.
"It depends what the actual truth of the situation is!"
I wish I could tell which comment you are replying to -- given how the threads work here, you either have to quote what you are replying to, or leave your readers with the impression that something or other depends on the truth of some situation or another, but who knows what.
I think that the American people, in their naïveté, believe they’re electing an individual to be in charge.
Besides, who do you think has a better chance at being elected right now: Buttigieg, Shapiro (as examples) or “Democratic staffers”? I submit that going around saying “no matter who wins, Democratic staffers will run the country” is bad for winning elections.
Getting a senile figurehead elected so you can stay in power actually is scandalous.
And BTW, we poo-poo the idea that there are emergencies and think everything is taken care of, but if you read up on the Cuban Missile Crisis, it actually kind of mattered that the President was a pretty young guy who could stay up late, keep a clear head, and exercise leadership. We might have gotten a war if the staffers had been running things.
I don't even like Kennedy's presidency that much, but that seems obviously true. If you look at other democracies they tend to put in power people in their 40's and 50's (often women in this day and age) and the fact we insist on electing Methuselah every 4 years creates a long-tail risk for the country and the world.
If the choice is between Democratic staffers and a team of Heritage Foundation staffers and Elon Musk staffers, I think that's a pretty clear choice. If the voters don't get that, you're right, they're naive, and I don't know how to address that.
I also note you haven't identified anything that differentiates Trump and Biden. If Biden is a senile figurehead, then Trump certainly is as well.
Voters are "naive"? I can't believe that anyone in a democratic country would choose to criticize the voters. You're supposed to criticize the opposition. This attitude is why the Democrats lost, and the voters elected a wrecking ball instead. I think they are dead serious about it.
It’s not just generic democratic staffers though - it’s either a team selected by Buttigieg or a team selected by Shapiro or a team selected by Whitmer or …
Those are different teams, and people’s beliefs about individuals are often really based on their teams, so it’s probably ok that people mistake the team for the individual.
It’s fine that we say Magellan circumnavigated the world, even though it was mostly his team, and he even died halfway through.
To be fair, all those haughty journalists at the Times were asking him to sit, and not to lie still with his eyes closed and his hands folded neatly over his chest.
I don't think that's true. It's the elected President who gets to choose WHICH staffers, not the voters directly. I think that Obama's staffing decisions would have been very different and much better than Biden's.
Did Biden after the 2024 election leave the Party in better shape then when he took office? Really insulting how Biden marginalized Harris then after the election had his team continue to float the idea he should have run and could have won. How any Democrat can defend Biden by using the low bar of Trump is delusional.
My experience working with executives is that they assert themselves and engage in policy decisions. Bill Clinton and Obama were both putting in long hours and engaging on policy and priorities. Even Trump who is not engaged in the day to day will fire or otherwise humiliate a staffer who was out of line.
Again in corporate situations I've seen weak leaders who's staff run them. There is a major difference.
This is what I don't get about the idea that the left would've triumphed in a primary - besides an invasion of Israel, what did the left want from Biden that it didn't get?
"...or having the country secretly be run by unelected staffers for several years?"
There is a big difference between
"Biden was not at the top of his game and he tried to hide that,"
and
"The country was secretly run by unelected staffers."
The country was still being run by Biden -- I have seen no evidence that he was so compromised that he was not involved in the day-to-day decisions made in the WH. He was slower, stupider, and less articulate than when he was a younger man. But he was still doing his job, and running the country, and doing it worse than he would have done ten years previous.
There is plenty to criticize in all of that, without pretending that he was in Woodrow Wilson's condition. He was not.
I dunno. After that debate performance, I would need to see evidence that he actually was involved in day to day decision making, because my assumption is that he was not.
But then a few weeks after that, we had that massive multi country hostage release that they all claim he helped negotiate to get citizens back from Russia? Like maybe Biden is just much better one on one? Or maybe people who worked for him really just love him and always saw the best of him? I don't know if we'll ever get an honest answer. It's possible that he just hired a bunch of good people in the administration, but I agree I almost didn't recognize the Joe Biden that showed up to that debate.
The problem with this is the country is never actually run by a single person. What we depend on is that the president hires good people and has the ability to identify situations where staff is potentially wrong. In short, a president needs to be able to know when staff is BSing.
I don’t think Biden was actually incompetent in the sense of not knowing what’s going on around him, etc. But he plainly was a shell of himself who no longer had the ability or endurance to do the job. He was no longer managing his staff-his staff was managing the circumstances around him, and in effect, were managing Biden himself.
This *feels* like the same willful ignorance that Matt talks about in the article that partisan Democrats had about Biden's age generally.
Case in point - we assume that the debate might was a bad night for Biden, but are we sure that wasn't an average or good night for him?
You might think, no one would let him continue if that was a good night for him, but it's beyond me to believe anyone let him continue with those kind of nights at all.
We're all ignorant of the facts now, and with luck we'll all learn more of the facts later. I have no stock in defending the guy -- I agree that he screwed up, big time, and I agree that he was impaired.
But I don't think we have anything like enough evidence to say that "the country secretly [was] run by unelected staffers for several years." That's a conspiracy theory that would require more evidence than any of us have.
But the saying "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me" exists for a reason. We were fooled once by Biden and staff into thinking he was capable of running for re-election. Having been fooled on that, I think the onus is now to prove he actually was firmly in control of his administration.
But I see the preponderance of the evidence saying he wasn't. Both in his indecisiveness that Matt talks about. The lack of communication and interaction with his cabinet and people on the Hill and how much of that was run through his staff with almost no direct Biden involvement. He didn't even have direct interaction with his own pollsters when running his campaign! Can you see any other politician running a campaign and not doing that?
>Case in point - we assume that the debate might was a bad night for Biden, but are we sure that wasn't an average or good night for him?<
We're not sure it wasn't an average or good night for him, true. Just like we're not sure it was a bad night for him. The outcomes the country had been experiencing for three plus years at that point substantially suggested his administration was a pretty effective one. The President's own public appearances, age, and a number of other things suggested just the opposite.
Democrat shouldn't have nominated a 77 year old in 2020. Biden shouldn't have started out running for a second term. Once he did start running in early 2024, the best course of action for the country wasn't crystal clear, at least not to the key players (maybe it should have been, but it wasn't). All three things can be true.
"The outcomes the country had been experiencing for three plus years at that point substantially suggested his administration was a pretty effective one."
The American public just demonstrated they disagree with this. They might be wrong, but I think that losing a race to be re-elected (or in his case, not even making it that far and dragging down your VP replacement) is a strong signal of failure.
"The "he's only got 4 good hours a day" reports...."
Do they support the claim that his staffers were secretly running the country in a conspiracy that's bigger than Watergate? I'm still not hearing that. There are lots of effective executives that make a lot of decisions in 4 hours.
As I said to John E. -- I don't know his condition. He may have been severely impaired, or he may have just tired easily. But I think conspiracy-talk in this context is silly.
I don't think it was a "conspiracy bigger than Watergate". That's right wing spin.
But I think Biden is very much gone in the head. I wouldn't have hired him to run a McDonalds and he had no business being President. His mental incompetence is far, far greater than Democrats are willing to admit. We dodged a bullet, and we're going to have to dodge more bullets with Trump being as old as he is.
And, as unpalatable as this will sound, there's nothing in the constitution that spells out how little or how much the President may rely on his staff. I mean, the country has been *substantially* run by "unelected staffers" for decades. The government is far too sprawling an operation for the President to be engaged in much more than top-level decision making and priority-setting.
At the very least, Ron Klain, Jeff Zients, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and other top Biden admin officials should testify to what they knew about Biden's condition and when they knew it.
While Biden was always old and not at 100%, I still think it's possible that Biden's condition took a turn for the worst just in the past year or so. But these people owe the Democratic Party, and more importantly the country, an explanation.
The people in the hot seat, I believe, are Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini. They both had formal jobs that were senior-but-not-that-senior but involved a lot of direct contact with the president and First Lady (they would travel to Delaware over the weekend for example).
Good point, would make sense to hear from people interacting with the Bidens in a more informal capacity. Would also be interesting to hear from the White House Physician and the Bidens' Secret Service detail
It genuinely does seem like things went to shit in the final year-18 months, Whether that was Biden's incapacity kicking up a notch or it was there all along but Ron Klain was actually just shockingly good at being "Prime Minister" and actually running the country and Zients wasn't its hard to tell. But it seemed like there was a big diminution after Klain left.
I think it's very plausible that part of the agreement, explicit or not, was "Harris, you keep my people around, or we will spend the rest of the campaign undermining you."
I think it’s a cop out. Most Americans thought he was too old by a large margin and most Democrats when polled would have preferred someone else. So Democrats, I think, knew there was a problem but operated on a “dance with the one that brung you” mentality.
Then, tribal partisanship kicked in and caused Democrats to vigorously defend against the notion that Biden was too old. Not just professional political people, but Democrats debating online, many of whom were belittling when the question of age or ability was brought up, or, for example, leaped immediately to the conclusion that the Hur report was a political hit job.
In short there was a high degree of self-deception going on which prevented pressure from being placed on Biden until his problems couldn’t be papered over anymore.
Now the narrative is that Biden or his staff are solely to blame for that, when in reality the only people who were really fooled were Democrats who fooled themselves.
Finally, I don’t blame Biden too much. In my experience, especially as the guardian for a family member with dementia, a lot of old people with declining cognitive issues are simply unable to see, much less assess, their own condition. They literally are unable to perceive that something is wrong with themselves and, like all humans, are able to rationalize things that do pop up away. If there is a villain here when it comes to attempts to hide Biden’s health, it’s more likely to be Jill Biden than Joe IMO.
1. Vice Presidents are bad presidential candidates and parties should refuse to nominate them for President.
2. Parties should create mechanisms to ruthlessly nominate the best possible presidential candidate and should not be built to protect unpopular incumbent Presidents who are going to lose reelection.
Do I know how to solve these two problems? No. But they are the electoral problems here.
All true, and part of the rationale for the self-deception that prevented anyone but Harris from being the alternative. But I think Harris did better than most expected which admittedly isn't saying much.
As for solving the problem, Democrats have been following the GoP into weak party land subject to the whims of fickle and unrepresentative primary voters and the "Groups", and I think they need to try to reverse that.
Why do you say that Vice Presidents are bad presidential candidates? I'm sixty. By my count there are seven Vice Presidents who ran for President in my lifetime.
LBJ and Ford both ran as President, after assuming the office of President due to death/resignation of the President, so they don't really count either way for your thesis. That leaves five.
Things didn't end well for Nixon, but he lost in 1960 and then won in 1968 and 1972.
Mondale lost in 1984, but Jesus Christ walking on water probably couldn't have beaten Reagan in 1984.
George HW Bush won in 1988. His loss in 1992 had to do with his own performance as President, not his being Vice President.
Al Gore lost in 2000, but he won the popular vote and was a few hanging chads away from being President.
Joe Biden won in 2020 and was forced out of the race in 2024.
So that's five Vice Presidents running for President in my lifetime. Three won; one lost a very close call, and the final lost a blowout that probably wasn't winnable for any candidate.
It seems to me that Vice Presidents who go on to get the nomination have a pretty good record.
One big reason for pick Harris as the de-facto replacement was money. According to the minutia of campaign finance law, Harris (by being Biden's VP) was the only candidate who could take over the campaign without having the funds held up by weeks of red tape.
The counter-argument, of course, is the huge amount of money that Harris raised within days of starting her campaign, which meant a huge pent-up appetite among Democratic donors to give to anyone other than Biden. So, access to money would not have been a problem, even for a non-Harris candidate.
History textbooks still talk about the Woodrow Wilson stroke a hundred years later and the Biden situation seems worse. So many more people were involved, over a longer time, and the staffers changed policy to a huge degree.
Edith Wilson actually fits the "I committed a little light treason" meme. I love the idea of subjecting top Biden staffers to Congressional hearings on this, and I'd love the worst of grilling to come from clearly pissed-off Dems. Throwing Biden under the bus may make good tactical sense, whether you think it's actually deserved or not. Throwing his enablers so far under the bus that they end up publicly disgraced teaching high school social studies in Oklahoma is both good tactics and well merited.
"unelected" is such a weak sauce criticism. They were picked by rhe guy who was elected and helped enact the policies he was promised to enact. Say what you actually mean because just listing who is and isn't directly on the ballot is nonsensical as a criticism.
There is a difference between having staffers who help focus on details, and plausibly not even being aware of anything that's going on (and, unlike Trump, not doing any media to disavow that notion).
If you're incapable of doing a friendly super bowl interview to show America that you're awake at the wheel, then you're probably not awake at the wheel.
Even if staffers were covering up for him, so what? Isn't protecting their boss part of their job? And, part of the deal in voting for Biden given his age was the knowledge that he would hire competent people, so even if they do end up running the country for him, the country still functions.
I think the idea that Biden's top aides were supposed to throw their boss under the bus, and that they didn't is this huge scandal, this just feels like typical Republican B.S. And, it's not like staffers of a senile Republican president would be any less protective of their boss. A quick Google search shows that Ronald Reagan likely had Alzheimer's while president, for example.
Several years? Lots of good things got done over the past several years.
Was he clearly declining over the past year? Yep. Did it take him a bit longer to drop out than might have been optimal. Arguable, but sure maybe I guess.
Someone sometime has to explain to me how his dropping out in, say, December 2022 would have left the party and the nation better off. Someone sometime has to explain to me how his increasing problems with age led to palpable problems in policy and managing the country (i.e., *not* campaigning).
"how his dropping out in, say, December 2022 would have left the party and the nation better off"
The party wouldn't been revealed as being full of people so craven and/or cowardly that they felt like they had to go out and pretend Biden was totally up to be President until January 2029 as his declining mental ability became more and more obvious, culminating in one of the most alarming debate performances by any presidential candidate in the TV era.
So instead we got a young, strong candidate who ran a good (if far from perfect) campaign.
And we also learned on Nov. 5 that in the end the American electorate isn't really bothered by the idea of electing an old guy who is clearly declining mentally.
But we didn’t get that younger, stronger candidate — we got the very old president flailing around until his incapacity became obvious, and then a pivot. I think she did a pretty good job handling the pivot, but it was a bad situation.
If he had voluntarily quit in, idk, March, endorsed Harris, resigned from office, we’d have been in a better spot and still avoided the race-to-the-left primary.
But that candidate also effectively said, "I approve of everything the current president, who two-thirds of people disapprove of, has done" - and before she was the candidate she was totally behind Biden, as it became ever more obvious that he wasn't up to the job.
A young, strong candidate who ran a fairly good campaign was pretty likely if Biden dropped out of the race in 2022. Trump’s win was clearly much more contingent.
In retrospect, Biden should have made a very explicit pledge during the 2020 campaign that he would be a one-term president, and made consistent statements to the press throughout his presidency that he was sticking to that. No need to keep people guessing even until 2022.
I think Biden's presidency revealed to many Americans what the Democratic Party has become: "hahaha, you have to vote for us because your only other option is Trump!" 10-20 years ago, would the party/sympathetic media *ever* have put up with
1. A bizarre presidency-by-committee situation where it's unclear who's accountable for decisions?
2. The president unilaterally declaring amendments ratified?
3. Pardons for family members who haven't been accused of anything?
Of course Trump is worse. But it's infuriating that Democrats have responded to a weak candidate like Trump not by trying to win, but by taking advantage of the situation to become worse themselves! While the Trump years have made me more resolute in voting for Democrats, Democrats' conduct has also definitely pushed me to the right intellectually.
I'm not sure that better "position-taking" is going to quickly solve the problem. There's a well-earned lack of trust that won't be easy to solve. I don't think anyone believes, at this point, that any Democratic president *won't* effectively be running the Warren administration.
Trump's rebranding of the GOP happened not just because he took a few heterodox positions. He humiliated the entire party leadership and got them to kowtow to him anyway. Is there any Democrat who can do this? I guess we'll see, but I'm a little skeptical.
Bill Clinton had "the era of big government is over". Democrats need a "America isn't a racist, borderline-genocidal monster where workers subsist on starvation wages*". Obviously it needs to be pithier than that. But it is very difficult to win elections when leading voices in your coalition are so scathing about the country. Didn't work for Labour in Britain, hasn't worked for Democrats in America.
* Assuming Trump doesn't actually wreck the country so badly as to make that description accurate
"While the Trump years have made me more resolute in voting for Democrats, Democrats' conduct has also definitely pushed me to the right intellectually."
I've had a hard time articulating my current political leanings, but this hits the nail on the head for me. Thank you.
I've been wondering about this myself. Maybe it's because only a Trump 2.0 can just run roughshod over the entrenched interests (and not worry about the unfortunate collateral damage)? I bet even anti-DEI DeSantis would have taken years to do even half of what Trump has already done.
Their strategy is somehow the worst of both worlds. They run as the party that believes rules and norms are good as a matter of principle. Then they break the rules and norms, making them seem hypocritical and nullifying the value of the brand. But they don’t break them enough to achieve anything.
Exactly, they wanted credit for purporting to believe in norms and the threat Trump posed, but they neither wanted those norms to constrain themselves nor actually take the actions that the purported threat implied.
This is the depressing conclusion I have reached as well. Elected Democrats mostly chose the rhetoric of being the vanguard of democracy at a moment of mortal threat but never once believed it was literally true. None of their other choices make sense if you legitimately think failure ends in 1933 Germany! The only moment they arguably acted as such was coalescing to block Bernie from winning, but even that now appears less about preserving democracy and more about not losing so they can achieve all their positional policy goals rather. It was purely instrumental.
I don't understand why people are conspiratorial about Bernie and the 2020 primary, it was clear that Bernie only had a plurality of support and most voters wanted a non-Bernie candidate. Once the party did the job of identifying that candidate voters consolidated on the choice. Did the party make the mistake of picking Biden instead of Bullock, yes but the will of the voters was not-Bernie
Matt's point that this basically ratified republicans not utterly specious arguments about democratic Lawfare though are just immensely damaging. Mostly referring to the NY and GA cases, the documents case was basically iron clad, the J6 case while aggressive, never got off the ground more or less because it started so late. Regardless, Biden has done just as much to torch belief in the sanctity of rule of law as trump did.
"Biden has done just as much to torch belief in the sanctity of rule of law as trump did"
This is not true - the blanket pardon of everyone involved in January 6th is much worse than anything Biden did. Biden's pardons gave conservative rags the ability to write technically true things like "Biden did bad pardons before Trump did his bad pardons" that deliberately look only at similarities in kind and not enormous differences in degree, but the idea that Trump wouldn't be breaking norms and bending laws without Biden's actions is ridiculous.
I think this goes back to Matt's analogy on the Politix pod about kids in a restaurant. If Democrats ran on "we are the party that controls our children, and we are mad at rancorous restaurant guests and will stop that," then let their kids be disruptive, it matters much less to voters who desire a chaos free environment to dine who was whining and who was turning over pots and pans in the kitchen. In absolute terms you are correct, they are not comparable. But in terms of how people view the importance of these norms, it is democrats failure to enforce and uphold them that does greater marginal damage to the project itself.
I genuinely honest to god believe a President announcing that there is a 28th Amendment and that it is "the law of the land" is absolutely fucking insane and would be the most unbelievable abuse of constitutional authority we have ever seen if carried to fruition. That it had incredibly little impact in reality does not negate that the method if carried out would essentially end the united states as we understand it and ought not be countenanced in any form.
Because the Archivist mercifully didn't want to light the republic on fire, we didn't get a constitutional change by fiat but the method employed here is vastly more damaging than a malice application of an indisputably constitutional power. Imagine if Trump declared tomorrow he was enacting a 29th amendment to ban abortion and would fire every archivist until someone agreed with him. Obviously the courts would stop him but we are full bore crisis at that moment.
But Biden would never have done what you imagine (with reason!) Trump doing. The ERA thing was such a big nothing that it won't even rise to the level of a minor trivia question in a year.
I'm proud of a country where the archivist can tell the President, "No way, sir." I want to retain that. I fear that disappearing under Trump. Who will stand against him?
I believe those were commutations of Federal death sentences , not pardons, because Biden does not believe in the death penalty. They will continue to be imprisoned for life. J6 pardons let loose a bunch of violent seditionists to do more crime and run for office if they want.
That makes no sense. Biden torched trust by not intervening in state prosecutions of Trump? Trump promising to weaponize the DOJ against people who plainly didn't commit crimes isn't what damaged the trust, it was Biden trying to prevent that?
Have you met voters? They aren't that rigorous. I'm not blaming Biden for Alvin Bragg or Fani William's adventurism, but the Dem line all along was basically trust the courts, trust the rule of law, it will work itself out correctly. If that was true, then there was no reason to fear Trump's fake charges against people who did not commit crimes. Pardoning them preemptively was a tell to voters that they do not believe this is how courts work, they believe they are just venues for partisan retribution, hence the need for a preemptive remedy if you will.
Can't you see that you are saying the exact same things a Trump supporter would say when describing the FBI under Comey and the actions of Robert Mueller?
Each side using "look at THEM" as a justification for their leader's terrible actions.
The documents case was arguably complicated by the Biden documents next to the Corvette. Don't get me wrong; I don't think any former President or Vice President should be carrying classified documents home. And for the life of me I don't know why Trump didn't just say it was inadvertent and give them back. I mean, he did it, but when everybody does it, it seems like selective prosecution.
The New York case was a bogus legal theory, and I suspect it will be overturned on appeal.
I actually supported that because I think the threat of jail for Hunter would have him rolling on Joe within five minutes, and the resulting exposure would have been catastrophic for the whole country.
Eh, I assume KateLE does not mean 'roll and reveal Biden's secret nefarious dealings with X' but 'roll and say whatever he was told to say to get out of trouble.'
I've never seen a person use "roll" that way. And also, Hunter was not being threatened with jail over anything implicated Joe anyway. How's he gonna get out of the gun charge by "rolling" on Joe?
So, the usual way someone rolls to get out of trouble is they give up someone else, a bigger fish, either on the same crime they were caught on or another crime they are aware of.
This could be honest, or not.
There's an amusing scene in Brooklyn 99, where having caught the extremely prolific car thief, the Pontiac Bandit, he offers information on various other criminals, in exchange for a reduced sentence, or immunity from prosecution.
This has obvious potential upsides as well as obvious incentives to lie.
Exactly this! I can understand the temptation to exploit the situation when your opponent gives you a gift in nominating a uniquely unpopular nominee. But when that nominee is also uniquely unfit and dangerous, it is unforgiveably irresponsible to do so.
"3. Pardons for family members who haven't been accused of anything?"
If I'm the outgoing President, and I'm facing Trump/Bondi/Kash Patel, you're damn straight I'm pardoning my family "who haven't (YET) been accused of anything."
Anyone who thinks that trio won't release the hounds of hell on anyone they choose has not been paying attention.
Not sure if you're replying to me, as I don't see how this refutes or elaborates on my point: Biden shouldn't have allowed the corruption his family members seem to have engaged in. If he'd done that, there wouldn't have been any crimes, investigations, or pardons.
Yeah, I get that it's mildly damaging in actual reality and more damaging in the public's eye, but blaming it on Biden is tough for me -- his hand was really forced, and was forced because of Trump specifically. He wouldn't have been pardoning with an incoming Romney or GWB presidency.
If the American people are outraged by the norm breaking of the Joe Biden pardons, then they should look in the mirror to see the source of that regrettable behavior: their decision to put Trump back in the White House.
The first line of defense against Trump remains the courts and the standards of evidence enforced in our courtrooms. If Biden had any confidence in our system of justice, that is a fight he should have allowed to proceed. Instead, he abandoned that fight before letting it go forward. He conceded what those unfairly targeted had the right to contest. It could have been a fight that many of us would have rallied to support, through legal defense donations and cheering on articulate advocates defending the accused in their days in court. History is made in such contests.nIt was a fight we should have relished, not shirked.
If you think that the courts would not have delivered justice, how do you know that? And what other battleground would you choose for fighting back against any Trumped-up prosecutions in the days ahead? There may yet be politically-motivated prosecutions to contest, but Biden undercut the presumption of innocence and the norms that would have otherwise put such prosecutions in a dark light.
In my opinion, Biden's pardons were the worst decision he ever made.
Everyone Trump targets is innocent. We don’t need a fraudulent prosecution, even when we win in court, to prove that.
To fight this desperate battle against the oncoming evils of the Trump administration, we have to be ready to use every tool at our disposal. And yes that includes pardons. Trump doesn’t deserve the dignity of our people being forced into a courtroom showdown. Screw him. Take away that particular noxious tool.
Nothing that Trump has shown to date indicates that he deserves the benefit of the doubt or the right to be treated as a worthy foe. Pardons are totally legal. Use them. Use them!
I think the verdicts of juries, and the process that delivers those verdicts, would carry more weight and command more attention from the public than any individual's opinion on this post. If we're picking our fights to counter and rein in Trump, I'd pick the courts and juries weighing the evidence and delivering justice in response to any prosecutions of the kind we're talking about here as one of the best ways to do so.
“Trump's rebranding of the GOP happened not just because he took a few heterodox positions. He humiliated the entire party leadership and got them to kowtow to him anyway. Is there any Democrat who can do this?”
Why is this something you want a Democrat to do? It seems bad.
Definitely some strong achievements there. I would argue that their function is also to win elections and build the Democratic brand (in order to pass more legislation) and in my view the Democratic brand has crumbled across large swaths of the country. According to the chart, we've lost 7 points of party ID between 2008 and 2024, with the GOP gaining 6 points in the same time period.
I think its dramatically underrated in public discourse how badly Obama going to a friggin' baseball game with Castro and then the Dems immediately almost nominating a literal self proclaimed socialist absolutely nuked the party's competitiveness with huge swaths of Latino voters, particularly in Florida. And for what gain exactly? Does the Cuban embargo make sense as a national security matter in 2025? definitely not. But did so publicly embracing Cuba help achieve any tangible political goal whatsoever or did we just end up with much worse politics at home and worse treatment for suffering Cubans for that matter? Absolutely yes.
This criticism is going to age horrifically in under a year and is only going to be looked at worse. Pointing out that Trump is a corrupt fascist is not a bad argument. It also isn't true because you have to ignore the entire Dem policy platform to make it, but the fascism part is the part that will be unthinkable in the wake of how much suffering Trump causes.
The more you are worried about how bad Trump is, the more you need to hold yourself to a high standard governing and campaigning. While the Democrats did some good things, they largely handed Trump the victory with huge blunders on illegal immigration, inflation, candidates, and campaign strategy. Fine, Trump is a corrupt fascist. How bad do you have to be at politics for voters to elect him anyway?
I agree that Trump is a corrupt fascist but I don’t see where OP said he wasn’t or that it was a bad argument to say he is? He said that “SINCE Trump is a corrupt fascist the quality of our candidates is irrelevant” is a bad (implicit) argument.
It was truly heartbreaking to watch all the people who called Biden a selfish, self dealing, corrupt, DC insider, crypt keeper, secret progressive, out of touch weirdo be proven mostly right by the end of the administration through a data point chart so clear that when you connect the dots it spells out “fuck you”.
I too am angry at Biden, angry at those who defended him when they knew the truth, and angry at myself for being fooled by that miserable old man.
I hope his funeral is an hour long and they only show it on cspan.
You'll probably get your wish, I don't think Biden will make it until 2029, and given how pissy Trump was about flags flying at half staff because of Carter, you know he'll do everything he can to make the farewell to Biden as short and low-key as possible.
Sorry, is this chart a figure of speech or there's some data/diagram/graph?
Also, is one hour too much or too little? (It could be a 60second TikTok, after all that's how most of the people will really get awareness of the fact.)
To your point tho Bo, I can't think of any other Conservative Meme that went from fringe opinion (Sleepy joe accusations in 2019/2020) to essentially proven reality in a faster amount of time or more fervently from fringe to ubiquitous.
It was easy to ignore because it came from Trump and ... sure, old man speaks slow, who cares, he won! And of course 4 years later people were tired already, midterms, supreme court this, judge that, and the gap between the swing voter and the regular D voter is already an unfathomable chasm. (Hence the comments like "I would vote for a dead rat over Trump" and so on.)
It's good to distance yourself from catastrophe and failure. Trump did that retroactively with Bush's foreign policy (which he supported at the time) and Obama did it in real time, by opposing the Iraq War before it started. Obama's record of opposition let him say, after the fact, "I told you so," and this was part of why he beat Hillary for the nomination in 2008.
The new Trump administration is going to be a complete catastrophe -- they are riding high on a potent cocktail of hubris, ideology, and ketamine, and it is going to end in a monumental train wreck.
The smart Democratic play would be to start talking, now, about the illegality, the foolishness, the arrogance and overreach, so that when it crashes down they can convincingly say, "we told you so."
Instead, morons like Schumer are talking about bipartisanship. This is political malpractice -- it means owning the catastrophe when it comes, instead of being the honest forecaster who told it to you straight. Schumer should be parroting Obama's line: I'm not against all Republicans, just criminal ones.
Yes, we should distance ourselves from the Biden debacle. But the Trump crackup is going to be even bigger, and now is the time for Democrats to start distancing themselves from it, loudly.
"Instead, morons like Schumer are talking about bipartisanship. This is political malpractice -- it means owning the catastrophe when it comes, instead of being the honest forecaster who told it to you straight. Schumer should be parroting Obama's line: I'm not against all Republicans, just criminal ones."
I just don't think this is true. Democrats were swarming all day yesterday.
It's always smart to say you're open to bipartisanship, even while driving the knife in.
As we economists say “talk is cheap.” Democrats are letting Trump set up his own disaster and I don’t think they are going to help at all passing a new budget or CR.
The issue is that the public doesn't want to hear from Chuck Schumer or anyone who smells like the Biden administration, the ossified Democratic leadership, or the type of white person who would drape themselves in a Kente cloth.
They are all branded hysterical, cringe, and rubes -- and more importantly, losers -- and I don't think there's any coming back from it.
Only a guy like Fetterman, who is wisely keeping his powder dry, and (more important) seems tethered to reality, can be the public face of the party.
Thank you! I'm so tired of people saying "Dems are silent", "No one is fighting back", like come on, just because it didn't show up on your social media feed doesn't mean that Dems are just rolling over. People just making a comment, maybe people should think before they speak and look into it first.
Honestly, I can't wait until Schumer retires. The Dem party will be better for it.
"It's always smart to say you're open to bipartisanship, even while driving the knife in."
I don't agree with this at all -- if your message is "Trump and the GOP are a danger to Democracy and the country", you can't also be saying "but we'll try to work with them".
And, of course, Trump sure hasn't expressed any openness to bipartisanship, and he just won.
I also like Wes Moore's responsiveness and maturity right now. Ruben Gallego as well. The Dems have a deep bench with Whitmer and Shapiro as well, I think there is an opportunity for the young people to make some noise in the future.
I think a talented enough politician could split the baby and simultaneously argue 1) Against Biden, his catastrophic decision to stay in the race and the cover up, 2) Against the progressive hive mind and the Elizabeth Warren presidency in disguise while espousing the principles of the CSDM, and 3) Argue that trump and his cronies were monstrously bad *for trump voters*. The Rhetorical shift that Matt highlights that Trump struck in 2016 was he was dismissive of Bush and the fallout in his wake but not of Bush voters for their choices. He clearly drew the line that Bush failed, gave us Obama which was worse, and I will be a break from both of them, more in line with what you wanted a republican to be.
A more talented pol can argue against both Bidenism and Trump, but not against Biden voters and not against the getable share of marginal Trump voters who hated Biden but don't cultishly love DJT.
Who's a fresh face on the scene who made a little splash and is getting talked about as a possible VP candidate soon? That's where you'll find the next Obama at this point.
Can I ask a sidebar as a former Warren voter: why has it become trendy to say "Bidens administration was sabotaged by Warrenite staffers"?
Does it just boil down to failed student debt cancellation? Because many of her ideas that found a home in his administration were NOT the things that made him unpopular.
I think it is a useful shorthand for the worst exigencies of "The Groups" and hyper educated progressive activist group think. It crystalizes the ways in which Biden's admin was left in the Warrenite sense as opposed to the Sanders 2016 sense. More about Land Acknowledgements and the like than just visceral hatred of rich industrialists or whatever. This may not make sense to voters much to the right of this comment section but its the distinction between the Hard materialist Left and Progressives. In many ways this is the least popular variant of left politics, many voters at least credit Sanders for being an independent voice or whatever they like about him. Warren is seen as just the worst animation of liberal elitism. And voters saw this in things like Student Loan cancelation but also liberal opinions on immigration enforcement, crime, etc.
That's fair and makes sense. I think I'm just still bitter about her treatment in 2019-20 as I believed, and still believe, that her underlying focus on strong families, fostering competition and "a strong capitalism with rules," protecting consumers, and distributed growth are quite popular ideas, whereas she was popularly depicted as "extremist woman from Massachusetts." The fact that even today her name - and not Sanders who won far more votes, had a much larger campaign apparatus, is an avowed socialist, and was dominant among 20 something leftists - is shorthand for progressive staffers who undermined Biden just exemplifies my perception of how she was treated in that primary.
She certainly wasn't the loudest voice in the room campaigning on identity politics beyond pointing out that women should be able to both have kids and pursue a career.
I think its almost more about affect in the minds of voters than about their respective policies and motivations. To lean on an old Weeds turn of phrase from Jane Coaston, its the idea of Bernie Sanders vs Bernie the living senator and the Idea of Elizabeth Warren vs Warren the living law prof, academic and senator.
That makes sense - I appreciate you taking the time to explain even if it still grinds my gears a bit (a lot). In keeping with the theme of Matt's post: I'm very confident she'd have had a more successful administration!
I will always like and respect her for the reasons you say but she was not a strong campaigner (either in an appealing to voters sense or in a leading her organization sense) and let this other stuff take over way too much - unfortunately partly to distinguish herself from Sanders, when really they are very aligned on the bread and butter economics. Some of that came from his camp also.
Agreed with that. I also thought her strong alignment with teachers' unions and full-throated embrace of total aversion to school choice was both 1) A massive self-own in that campaign, and 2) A preview of a massive political issue for Dems in the years since. She could and should have stuck with her prior beliefs and carved out a niche as "school choice is a progressive value, as is prioritizing education over job engine as the key function of public schools" and I think it'd have helped her immensely. Perhaps to the point above, she may have been led astray by her own staffers on this.
Neo-Brandeis anti-trust is a Warren thing, right? It means an FTC that isn’t focused on keeping consumer costs down at a time when inflation is political poison. It also makes tech your enemy, which has various negative political consequences.
Warren called for abolishing ICE, decriminalizing illegal immigration, “affirming asylum protections” and increasing the refugee admissions cap. I assume the Warrenites in the immigration field weren’t helping Biden to pursue politically sustainable policy.
I think those were both probably more politically impactful than the student loan stuff.
Fair points. I'll disagree about the positioning of her anti-trust efforts; the essential framing of it less about about "deconsolidate corporate / employer power" INSTEAD OF "keep consumer prices low," and more about both/and (as opposed to ignoring the former altogether). Warren was in fact probably the loudest voice on the left over the past 4 years harping on inflation - ironically, in a way I disagreed with.
The reality of Warren's stance on immigration is that most Dems, myself included, believed in most of that and still do; I suspect most of those stances would poll very, very highly among 2020 Sanders voters and even higher among his staffers. Among my many disappointments with Biden is that a total mismanagement of the border (stemming I think from heavy indecisiveness) and a perceived lack of caring about inflation swung popular opinion far right on immigration in a way that is already having tragic impacts.
The problem is, I don’t think it’s true that Trump and cronies (2017-2021 edition) were really bad for Trump voters. He just didn’t really get anything done because he’s lazy and was surrounded by people trying to bubble-wrap him away from power. And the economy continued chugging along. Toss in Covid, whose existence wasn’t his fault, and OWS, which was a genuine achievement, and you can see where the nostalgia came from.
This edition of Trump is very different and going to be an epic disaster, but I think the epic disaster has to actually happen before politicians can run on it.
Totally agree on the distinction here. The benefit now, unlike in 2024, is democrats can argue against this version of president Trump, which may provide easier footing.
I don't get this. Americans love talk of bipartisanship, and Schumer is out of power so it's the best tool he has to try and slow down Trump. Sitting back and doing nothing but criticism is fine if you think anything Trump does can be recovered. But if you think he could do truly terrible things, then you take any chance to influence him not to.
I'm not sure any Americans love bipartisanship more than most Americans loved the idea of a crusade in the Middle East back in 2002-2003. So, Obama's stance at that time was not driven by his attempts to do what's popular.
"...if you think he could do truly terrible things, then you take any chance to influence him not to."
That's a good general policy, I agree. Perhaps Obama was freed up by the realization that his stance could have no influence on the Neo-Cons' obsession -- he was not trading away any chance to improve things by speaking his mind. Schumer may think he can still influence the decisions of the Heritage zealots: I think he's kidding himself. Democrats are not going to be given any meaningful say: they should simply stand back and tell the truth about the illegality and folly of it all.
I think you are conflating what Schumer (Senate *Minority* leader) should be doing with what a future Democratic presidential candidate should be doing. The latter should be doing exactly what you are saying. Schumer should be doing what he can to mitigate the damage that Trump is doing. Some of that will be condemning things Trump is doing, but other times it will be trying to exert what influence Democrats have over policy - including bipartisanship.
I agree, but there's also a difference between mitigating the damage and saving the Republicans and protecting Americans from understanding all the consequences of Republican rule.
That's why if the Republicans are hellbent on shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt ceiling, Democrats in Congress should say "Have at it" rather than providing the votes to prevent the Republican majority from carrying out its will.
"That's why if the Republicans are hellbent on shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt ceiling, Democrats in Congress should say "Have at it" rather than providing the votes to prevent the Republican majority from carrying out its will."
I disagree with this and I think you do too. Politics has become to similar to spouses going through a terrible divorce. Willing to burn the house down to spite the other side. But the actions government officials take or don't take have long reaching consequences. The government defaulting on its debt likely has severe economic consequences that would hurt a lot of ordinary people. To the extent that people are in government to help people, this is abandons that to feel good about being in the right and proving others were wrong to vote for them.
If Mike Johnson needs, say, 100 Democratic votes to keep the government open or extend the debt ceiling because most Republicans refuse to step up, I say let it rip. Unless the Democrats can extract truly painful concessions from the Republicans.
One reason Trump and the Republicans keep winning despite their stands is that people see no impact on their personal lives. In part because the Democrats stand ready to smooth the rough edges of the opposing party. Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans wreak horrific damage on things that don’t directly touch Americans.
It’s time for parliamentary-style government. If the ruling party refuses, say, to keep us from defaulting then let it be so.
Part of Schumer's audience is also Collins and Murkowski...they are very much Republicans but there is some non-zero amount of what they do that is influenced by whether they feel they are being treated respectfully by the D senators. Unfortunately they're no longer enough to swing a vote by themselves but it can still matter.
As much as I've criticized Democrats like Schumer he's doing the right thing by mostly sitting back and letting Trump and the GOP hang themselves.
So far, it's working out okay. Trump's approval and Democrats pulled off an upset win in a special election in an Iowa district that voted for Trump by over 20 points.
I'm not American, so maybe I'm missing something, but my outside view is that Biden's pardons were really really bad. The fact that Trump tried one billion times to overturn the 2020 election and the courts told him no (including SCOTUS where Republican appointees have a 6/9 majority) was great for the image of US democracy. And now Biden tells us that these courts are not to be trusted.
PS: Given that I think everyone expected at least some pardons for the J6 rioters, which would have allowed the next Democrat to win the White House to also pardon a potentially convicted Fauci, I really really don't understand what happened here.
Trump is right now taking Secret Service protection and security clearances away from anyone who has been critical of him. Kash Patel has been threatening to go after Trump's critics and basically ruin their lives for criticizing Trump. This is why things like the Cheney pardon happened.
Biden never took Trump seriously. He didn’t care about Trump’s crimes or Jan 6. There was no indictment after 4 years. Actions speak louder than words. Biden won on a fluke due to Covid and acted like it was some mandate to enact a massive progressive agenda that was out of step with public opinion.
I'd like to think that Biden stayed as far away from the operations of the Department of Justice as possible. If the Trump indictment was delayed that almost certainly had absolutely nothing to do with Biden.
Biden wasn't the Attorney General. The multiple efforts to bring Trump to justice, while obviously ineffective in the end, were substantial and well-documented, and in large measure were stymied by Republican opposition (that is, Republican judges). Our system isn't designed to allow 50% of the polity to indict the leader of the other 50%.
If Biden had fired Merrick Garland ten months in because of insufficient aggressiveness in prosecuting Trump, he'd have been crucified. And even then it's not clear it would have made a difference.
Huh? I assume you mean conviction, because Trump was indicted 4x over in 2023.
It's pretty clear the calculation here was "we have to do everything by the book or it won't stick". They just didn't count on Judge Cannon being explicitly in the tank.
The one thing it should have been clear to the DOJ though, and wasn't in retrospect, is that Trump is expert at slowing down court cases. They should have anticipated that and had a better strategy.
I object to the pardons, but here's my best argument for them.
The courts will ultimately exonerate whichever witch hunt victims Trump goes after assuming they're actually not guilty of the crime.
In the _meantime_ this is a lot of stress to put on people who are ultimately just having the kitchen sink thrown at them. By pre-pardoning he saves them from all of the _other_ effects of going to court.
I personally still object because while I think it's a good thing to protect them from that, but I don't think it's a good _enough_ thing to overcome the negatives.
That's a good comment, and I agree with you. However, I think (and, again, I'm not American so I can very easily be wrong!) that the Republicans can anyway drag even the pardoned people. For example, a pardon wouldn't have saved Hillary Clinton from the Benghazi committee, right? So, the threat of stress and sink throwing still exists.
PS: A lot of other commenters mention politicized actions of the DOJ or the FBI. I don't want to respond to everybody individually and make this thread huge, but my point is that I expect that the courts won't agree with whatever politicized prosecution Trump and his people do.
A pardon would have made her job much easier since would not have to worry about perjury vs incriminating herself. The issue is that it would have tainted both her image and Obama and I don't think even her supporters in the Democratic Party leadership would have been willing to try to run her for president. I think the Fauci pardon is probably good for this reason (he's old and doesn't have any future ambition to my knowledge and the justice department could easily ruin his life). I think Biden pardoning his relatives was particularly bad (especially his brother).
It depends on the pardon. As of Jan20, he pardoned a lot of people and the vast majority were good. There are two other buckets: one he wouldn’t have to pardon if republicans were in any way normal people (think Fauci and Cheney); and the other ones are the problematic ones, like his brother.
I'm talking mostly about cases like Fauci and Cheney. The courts said no to Trump in 2020, and I think that sent a powerful message. Why would they say yes this time?
You could debate whether it was politically astute or necessary. (I don't think it was.)
But I don't think there's a reasonable argument that pardoning someone like Liz Cheney was a corrupt or immoral act.
The equivalency on this thread between the Jan 6 pardons--criminals convicted of trespassing, sedition, and aggravated violence in some cases--and that of Fauci or Cheney baffles me. (Not saying you. Just generally.)
A conspiracy theory that I'm willing to believe in is that Biden wanted to pardon people like his brother, and he added Liz Cheney to the list to draw the attention there. I think that's immoral. To clarify, I don't believe that Liz Cheney committed crimes, but I do believe that the J6 rioters committed crimes.
The thing is, Trump complains about things being done to him that are not (political persecution), but that he fully intends to do to others. The "weaponization of the DOJ" was not a thing under Biden. Trump really is and was corrupt, and was caught and called out again and again, although the clock ran out before he was fully adjudicated. The prosecutions and investigations of him were legitimate. (There were some missteps along the way, but they were also discovered and corrected). A corrupt DOJ working at the behest of the president doesn't prosecute that president's own son, FFS.
Trump's intentions, made explicit throughout his campaign, were indeed to go after his political enemies, not for actual wrongdoing but because he can. The justice system depends not only on laws but on rules and norms. Trump breaks them all. There's a category difference. Democracy runs in part on the honor system, and Trump has no honor. So that's why Biden felt he had to pardon people who didn't actually do anything wrong.
IMO, the Hunter and other family pardons were a disgrace. Again, a category difference.
Pardons are an uncontroversial authority of American presidents. There have been bad pardons before. The pardon power should probably be restrained or done away with altogether, but no I don't think this is really bad. I'm saving really bad for things that threaten the continued existence of the American Republic. Everything else is meh
It’s difficult to calibrate what “really, really bad “ means in terms of American politics.
There’s been a lot of norm smashing in the last 10 years and Obama’s rise was norm smashing in a different way. However, political mistakes between from, say 1928 and to 1974 (not to mention the GWOT) killed alot more people.
>And now Biden tells us that these courts are not to be trusted.<
I think he was telling us Donald Trump's Justice Department is not to be trusted. And I fear he's right about that. Also, political prosecutions can bankrupt a person, even if, in the end, they're not convicted (or even charged).
He called the prosecution by his own Justice Department of Hunter Biden politically motivated. He voided the decision by a jury for the same reason. He said the system cannot be trusted to mete out justice if the person being charged is politically connected.
> He called the prosecution by his own Justice Department
Hunter was prosecuted by a Special Counsel, which yes, in theory is "his own DOJ", but the whole point of the Special Counsel is that they're supposed to be independent. So it's not a contradiction to say that this prosecution was politically motivated while others were not.
What's happening here is that Trump and his minions are vicious and vindictive and will use all the powers in their control to hound people to hell so Biden said screw it, I'm going to throw what blanket of protection I have over them to try to keep the flesheating zombies of the new administration as far away from them as possible.
The great danger is normalizing Trump. Just look at his actions in the first week or so. My god, four years of this to come.
I am a contrarian on pardons. I think Biden was totally justified to issue those pardons and while Trump's pardons obviously included some people who shouldn't have been pardoned, too much is made of this. An unchecked presidential pardon power is good because prosecutors overcharge, overprosecute, and, with the help of judges, oversentence.
I strongly disagree. Prosecutors overcharge etc., sure, but why should the counter to that be one official who cancels the sentences of defendants close to himself? Favors for the friends, families, and allies of the country's highest official, and excessive punishments for the obscure and unknown, hardly seems like justice to me.
Because any other system will get captured by prosecutors and because of the President's limited bandwidth and political checks, it's not as though all the guilty people are ever getting out of prison.
Prosecutors are just a far bigger danger than presidents are in this situation. You care about what the President does because it gets publicity and is politically salient-- meanwhile people rot in prisons that you don't know about because of prosecutors.
My point is, people still rot in prisons that we don't know about because of prosecutors, even with the pardon. If the president doesn't individually know or care about these people, they will not be pardoned. The power of the pardon does not fix excessive prosecution, except for people who get the individual attention of the president.
Pardoning doesn't fix the problem of large numbers of little-known people suffering from prosecutors' excesses. It just creates a new problem that the president's associates get special privileges, and a corrupt president can organize a conspiracy to commit crimes with impunity. Worst of both worlds.
If we had some system of minor officials reviewing prosecutions by committee, and reversing the most unreasonable ones, that would be less easily corrupted, and might have higher bandwidth to deal with all the bad prosecutions. But it's a bad idea to give this power to a single official who has so much other power.
Presidents actually do pardon deserving people. All the time. There's an entire NGO bureaucracy dedicated to identifying those people and bringing them to the attention of the executive branch. So you are just wrong on that.
The problem with committees and the like is that they end up being dominated by prosecutors whose basic position is exemplified by the "DOJ pardon guidelines"-- nobody gets a pardon until they are out of prison for 5 years. Prosecutors highly dislike pardons because they tell the public what everyone knows, which is that prosecutors are often cruel and sometimes even convict innocent people.
So an unchecked presidential power is better. You can get upset at the political pardons, but a good thing to remember is that the political scores you want to settle are not the most important thing the government does. The normies who get out of prison because of pardons are simply more important than the politically charged people you care about.
That's an interesting perspective. But it seems safer to me to improve our justice system rather than going down our current path, which is an open invitation to a system whereby it becomes commonplace to see people committing crimes on behalf of a criminal president who has promised to pardon them.
This ignores that the worst abuses of prosecutorial discretion happens by often times elected *State* DA's and judges, for which the President has no pardon authority at all. The DOJ has infinite time and resources to bring a case and will not unless they generally speaking believe it is iron clad. The potential for a Federal Crime to be charged and convicted on a truly innocent defendant is just vanishingly smaller than a random DA in rural America somewhere. The positive case for Pardon power is simply dramatically weaker for a President than for a Governor, but it retains even more potential for corrupt abuse. We should abolish it for POTUS while generally retaining such powers for Governors, where it can be applied in its most high minded aspirational form of forgiveness and mercy.
Federal prosecutors can be very bad. State prosecutors might be worse, but there have been wrongful convictions on the federal level and more importantly, there is A TON of oversentencing and overpunishment by federal prosecutors.
And at any event, I don't mind pardons in such situations either. If anything we should do lots more pardons just because of prosecutors' abuse of supervised release and restitution provisions, which make it impossible for offenders to reintegrate into society. And much of that abuse happens on the federal level because parole has been abolished.
I liked the thread a few days ago about amendments to change the pardon power. The two ideas I really like are (1) requiring that all proposed pardons be published for some period of time, and (2) having congress review proposed pardons, either by a vote or by establishing some kind of pardon board.
I think most people underrate the importance of (1). Apparently Trump's blanket pardon of J6ers was in part due to Trump's personal frustration with having to sort through everything. (1) also might have prevented Biden's screw-up pardoning the criminal from the ACLU list who was apparently behind a child murder.
Yes, Biden messed up, but not in any way that should have been meaningful when making the choice this election gave us. Not standing up to The Groups isn't great, but it's not nearly as bad as willingly letting the Heritage Foundation take over OPM.
This has been a pretty awful first week of the Trump administration. I've got plenty of anger, but I feel like it's far better directed towards the folks ACTUALLY DOING the bad things, and the voters who explicitly voted for them to do these things.
We've got plenty of problems, but Biden is no longer one of them. And if the voters had elected him, Trump/Musk wouldn't be a problem anymore either.
One thing it shows how important the bully pulpit is and how hamstrung Biden was by not being able to use it. As time goes on leaving the country with Trump and going down as one of the most unpopular presidents since WW2 will be the Biden legacy.
This whole thing reminds me of the polling from the 2012 election, where polled people just refused to believe the GOP’s actual positions and assumed the pollster was lying.
Harris told the electorate that Trump was going to implement Project 2025. Trump lied and said he wasn’t. The voters went “eh, he says lots of things”.
Now that Trump is doing exactly what Harris said he would do, we don’t need to really say much about Biden. Maybe there’s value in throwing him under the bus, I dunno, but “I told you so” is probably equally effective.
I think this overrates the maturity of our politics. Breaking with Biden would've gotten attention, doing it late is bad but better than never.
I have no doubt that Trump will pay some political price, but it's hard to say if it will be directly due to his actions or just ordinary thermostatic reaction. I genuinely think his supporters will continue to happily eat his shit sandwiches regardless of what he does, and we just have to hope that the people come out in 26 and 28 to flush the previous administration.
A large part of why we’ve had very stupid politics is that voters have been constantly saved from GOP policy by the courts, by John McCain, by staffers, whatever.
But I’ve seen reports of people having stuff canceled over the impoundment and that’s something they can feel. Democrats need to step aside, let the voters have what they wanted.
I get the emotional pull of "the voters deserve to get what they voted for, and hard." But too many innocent people are caught in the crossfire for that to be a tenable position.
The majority of Trump voters are not going to feel the most acute consequences of his actions. His most fervent supporters aren't the rural poor, but suburban Fox News viewers. People comfortable enough to spend all day consuming right-wing internet propaganda.
I would have thought that suburban economies are generally less directly relevant on federal grants than many urban, rural, or small town economies, where a university, a military base, or a federal program, might be more significant.
Why should voters have believed Harris? She had a history of flip-flopping on her own positions and was a major part of an administration that had seemingly covered up the condition of a senile, old president.
I agree with you, but Americans seemingly have the memory of a goldfish and Trump is like a Teflon politician unlike any I've seen before in a Democracy. He simultaneously tells it like it is, but never means what he says and people never remember or think he is going to do any of the shitty things he promises to do.
Now from this we can take away a couple things. First, it's possible that Americans are entitled and just never think that good government programs would ever truly go away in what they view as a split government. Two, they like the Trump vibe but not the rhetoric. Three, the general populace is stupid and doesn't get any news that doesn't reinforce their bias. Four, a combination of all of the above.
That all said, it also reminds me a bit of people who like Democrat policy positions on polls until they found out they are Dem policies. Maybe politics is just like football at this point?
Exactly. Trump ran on an inflationary, anti-democractic platform, and people are acting surprised that he is trying to accomplish what he campaigned on. There was a substantial group of people who ignored all of his rhetoric and loudly exclaimed "everything's more expensive and the Democrats love trans people and illegals!" When the federal funding freeze affects their kids school lunch, when the price of a cell phone triples because of nonsensical tarrifs, and when grocery store price do the same because the underclass of workers who do all the shit jobs Americans can't have either went into hiding or been deported, will it still be Biden's fault? Can't we blame the voters?
The problem with these what-ifs is that they are not persuading anyone. Trump and his whole cult will find amazing new arguments, and the median voter will be exactly where they are right now, between a stone and a hard place.
If the Dems are trying to do a cultural influence victory (à la Civilization style) they do need to accumulate enough points *weighted* by the things that people care about. Like shoplifting. Spamming graphs and charts about how it's within normal variance is not that. Or perceived fairness in sports.
If they can't do this then they need to win the communication/persuasion game, but they are even worse at that. (Likely because it's much harder to penetrate the cult with communications than with basic facts.)
The thing is, blaming “the voters” doesn’t DO anything. If anything, it alienates them further. But holding people who made bad choices accountable so that future politicians don’t make those choices actually could change future events for the better.
Specifically for iPhones, their price isn't set by the cost to Apple + reasonable markup. It's set by what the market will bear which has meant significant ~~consumer~~ supplier surplus for Apple.
A lot of industries (including non-apple smart phones) are competitive and will see inflation as there really isn't room to squeeze, but if Apple's costs suddenly went up it would mostly come out of their profits.
If those same capital-gee Groups with all their fancy PhDs couldn't figure out that *they* are the problem, then they can go fuck themselves (or just wait until Trump's henchmen get to them).
Initially it was insightful and relaxing to read Matt, but it seems he's also a tad clueless about how incompetent the Dem/Biden team was (and of course still is) at internal and external positioning, and of course from that flows that they fucked up the message, all kinds of communication, their image, and so on. It was a misallocation of political capital on an epic scale. (Spending time and effort on student loans ... did not move the needle even one bit.) And of course they suck at selling. (Sure, Obama already maxed out their hope-it card, but then it's on them to figure out a new way to skin the proverbial cat. After all a 70-something convicted felon did figure it out.)
Schumer was loudly and publicly pushing Biden to do the student loan thing, arguing in part it would help Dems shore up support with young voters. It's not just the Groups, many prominent electeds (and not just fringe left ones) bought into Groupthink and were pressuring the administration.
Groupthink might have worked if the left publicly was willing to give Biden credit for student loans and the growth at the bottom of the wage scale. But instead we got "DoorDash is too expensive now" and then Gaza.
"pushing Biden to do the student loan thing, arguing in part it would help Dems shore up support with young voters"
If that's true, it's so stupid. Young people vote at much lower rates than older people, and the young people who went to college and have student loans are very likely already in blue states where their extra votes would be wasted. There's no way student loan forgiveness packs a big positive punch as an issue in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania.
Did the student loan thing really harm him? It's horrible populist policy, but so many of the things Trump ran on were just as dumb, yet politically popular.
But someone willing and capable of burning their party to the ground. And unlike Trump, it would be great if this person actually rebuilt the party around principle, and not a monument to his own golden idol.
I just don’t think appealing to this sense that there is a higher set of rules that the voters should abide by is a great way to think about politics anymore. The teacher is not coming to weigh the various sins and punish the appropriate actor. The voters preferred January 6 to The Groups, so I doubt they care about the Office of Personnel Management.
But I think the point is that “vote for Democrats, we’re not as bad as the Republicans” is not sufficient.
Whether it fair or not, Democrats are structurally disadvantaged because of the electoral college, the Senate, gerrymandering, the lack of representation of DC and Puerto Rico and on and on. All the things about we talked about in 2016 and 2020 but have forgotten in 2024.
Democrats did not meaningfully change any of this when they had power, and they are not able to change all because a lot of it just has to do with the geography how people are distributed. And others posts require overcoming huge barriers like constitutional amendments, which can only come about with bipartisan support.
Furthermore, crafting a message when you’re a party of change is hard when you’ve just been holding power. When your ideology is conservative (let’s avoid change or even roll back recent changes), your base will forgive you if you didn’t get a lot done.
So this structural disadvantage for Democrats is a reality they need to deal with. Being not as bad as Republicans is just not enough for Democrats. I think you’re right that Republicans are worse, which is why it’s so important for Democrats to get this stuff right, so they can actually have a shot at winning.
According to Nate Silver the electoral college disadvantage is basically gone, and the House is either now fair or close to it, basically the only "unfair" advantage GOP has left is the senate. The Dems lost the 2024 elections "Fair and square" and the good news that if they manage to become more popular than GOP in 26 or 28 then that will be reflected in the election results. In THAT respect, at least, we are actually in a far better place than we've been since 2010!
How is it true that the electoral college disadvantage is gone, yet the Senate disadvantage remains? Because the electoral college votes are just the number of House seats plus the number of Senate seats. If Democrats are more likely to live in larger states, isn’t there still an electoral college advantage for Republicans still? And for the House, while a couple states made nonpartisan commissions since 2016, like Michigan, still Republicans did quite well in state legislatures in 2020. If you can link me to the Silver article that explains that that would be great.
I agree that the Democrats lost 2024 fair and square, no question. That’s why Democrats are actually having this conversation about what went wrong, which they avoided in 2016.
But even without all of these disadvantages, the Democrats still cannot rely on being just not as bad as the Republicans. They have more ambitious policy agenda, a more politically attentive base, and a more delicate coalition.
I may be wrong on the senate, then. And I am mentioning Nate Silver’s assertion re:the electoral college. I am sure he asserted this. I didn’t bother getting in to his reasoning. It’s a projection to the figure anyway, we won’t know if and how much ec advantage anyone has until the results , but as I recall his argument was based on the recent realignment which basically made the gop base more geographically wasteful and the Dems more efficient. You’d need to google it to find the details.
For at least 3 years, voters made it abundantly clear what they liked and didn't like about the Democrats, demonstrated a willingness to elect the Democrats who did (or didn't do) these things. They also made it abundantly clear they were willing to vote for Trump if Democrats strayed too far away from what they wanted.
All correct. Want to add my and my wife's experience to this discussion, in case there are others who feel this way.
We are (or were) centrist Democrats. A year before the election we switched to being Independents. The reason was that Biden/Harris administration turned pure "progressive," and we knew that progressive views were losers in terms of the general public.
In fact, in many forums we expressed this idea: "Progressives would rather experience the inner glow of feeling "right" than win elections."
Why should we invest energy in a "cause" that doesn't really even want to win?
As long as progressives are running the show Democrats will lose.
Good point. Just look at the transgender sports bill that just passed the house. Even with almost 80% of the electorate supporting keeping sports seperate by natal sex (and over 60% of Democrats), only two Democrats voted for the bill (neither of which was Seth Moulton). The 2026 GOP attack ads write themselves.
Who cares? It's not about the specifics of the bill, it's about winning elections which means not being on the wrong side of the electorate. Pander to the voters, not the groups. The "Kamala is for they/them" ad was tremendously effective. Don't give the GOP more ammo. Vote for the bill, take the dub and look to get a Democratic majority in the 2026.
Answer: To protect girl's and women's sports. Our daughter is a nationally known athlete, and has set a Guinness world record. If her record is surpassed by another runner, then it should be by a natal woman. We will celebrate, with our daughter, that runner's accomplishment. But only if she's beaten by a natal woman.
I hear other progressives say "What about Title IX and the real struggle for women's equality? Why didn't you care about that?" and I think "that's whataboutism". Trans women in women's sports is either right and fair, or it's not. You can argue that point or you can change the subject.
If anyone cares, I think the governing bodies of sport (like FIFA, or the IOC, or the NCAA) should make rules regarding who can participate in women's sports. I think IOC track and field requires an estrogen-to-testosterone ratio of like 4:1. Anyone who meets those requirements then can participate. That's a path forward to balance equality, compromise, and fairness.
Um ... Guinness World records are mostly gimmicks and few elite athletes care seriously about them. Citing that as some sort of achievement that must be protected at all costs does not do much for your credibility.
never set one have you? You simply cannot wrap your brain around the fact that some peoples' records are not gimmicks but are accomplishments that are almost unfathomable.
So, try it yourself. Start today and run 32 miles a day, without a missed day, for 201 days, and with taking only 20 minutes for the entire 32 miles to take breaks that can't be longer than 5 minutes each....in other words it's constant running.. You'll be the record holder. Come back in several months and let us know how it went. And let us know if it's a gimmick. And if you're a natal female we'll celebrate too! For real. We will.
My hat's off to her! That is an accomplishment. I am a runner, so I know how hard that is. As a mid distance girl, I don't like anything above a half marathon and top out around 30 miles a week.
But just because something is personally hard, doesn't mean it's meaningful on the societal level to the extent that national elections and policy should prioritize it.
I also couldn't even try to set such a record, because I have kids (yes, that I physically gave birth to as a natal female) to financially support. Sure, you might celebrate me, but would you pay me? Because overall, my ability to provide for them is FAR more important than running an insane amount of miles per day, no matter how grueling that is.
Holy .. woah! Hat's off to the lady! That sounds overly brutal (and completely excessive, but absolutely unquestionably deserving of respect and accolades!)
Is endurance easier for males? After a few naive google searches to me it seems female genetics is better suited for it :o
"This study shows for the first time that the gap between men and women shrinks when trail running distance increases, which demonstrates that endurance is greater in women."
Though I guess at the top the deciding factor is probably more cultural. Are we even encouraging women to do these extreme things, or are we encouraging them a bit more to have a family, yadda-yadda.)
I don't think that's an outrageous position, but I'll point out that here we are with men pushing women out of the spaces which have been created for them.
I would say that the arguments for women not being a suspect class are a bit early.
Jessica: I'm operating on the basis of surveys. The main issue for swing voters was progressive ideas. And they have been shown, over and over, to be unpopular.....some VERY unpopular. Why do you think the Trump ad about Harris caring about they/them is considered, on the basis of research, to be the most effective ad ever? Unless progressives can admit they are out of touch then Democrats will continue to lose. Something like 15 million Biden voters stayed home in this election, despite being told over and over that "Democracy is at stake?"
Unlimited immigration is a progressive idea. And it got STOMPED.
It's even worse than that unfortunately. Because these so called progressives ad infinitum bashed Biden for being a boring centrist ghoul, and Biden and "the groups" were pandering to them for abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
Of course these idiots infected a lot of people with the commie vanguard mind virus. (Be the better person, show an example to the people and they will follow.)
Which might have worked for about 20 minutes sometime in 1917 October, but just in a few years it became "You know better." And ironically ... Lenin himself was dismayed at the rise of "Russians First" mentality in the Party.
If folks haven’t already, I would encourage people here to listen to the recent episode of Stay Tuned with Preet that had Astead Herndon on. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-maga-house-divided-with-kara-swisher-heather/id1265845136?i=1000685132479 In it, Herndon makes a number of important points like: 1- do Democrats actually *want* to be a working class party? He doesn’t think it is clear they do, and he points out it will be really hard to get more working class votes if it isn’t what you actually want. And 2- he points out that Democrats have tried to “message” their way out of issues like immigration, before actually figuring out what they really believe on it- which makes those messages appear inauthentic. More people should have been listening to Herndon through this whole election cycle- he was pounding drum back in 2022 that a lot of Democratic voters did not want Biden to run again, and he took a lot of crap about that then.
The Democratic Party doesn't want uneducated rubes in its coalition. The problem is there are not enough highly educated people in the country to form anything close to a majority coalition.
The problem, here, is that the Republicans have always made themselves the official anti-worker party. This makes the D's the defacto workers party. Unfortunately, this has lead to the D's basically ignoring workers (as guaranteed votes) for most of the last 30 years. I always assumed that eventually there would be some comeuppance. I just didn't think it would be as horrific as Trump.
Excellent point. If you think you're the de-facto workers party, you can proceed to court the votes of people with opinions you know those workers might not like ("there are 27 genders", "defund the police", "America is shameful", etc.)
I absolutely want the Democrats to be the party of working-class Americans, and of all other Americans who support the rule of law and our small-d democratic tradition.
What that means to me:
-promote policies that improve the lives of working-class Americans materially, including but not limited to:
-a strong social safety net
-good vocational training, so that you don't need a college education to have a decent job
-support unions
-abundant housing construction/YIMBY/ONE BILLION HOUSES so that a working-class person doesn't have to shell out two-thirds of their paycheck for mortgage or rent
-reshore some key industries (like computer chips), both for national security reasons and to create more factory jobs in the US
-fix immigration; enforce immigration laws, expand legal temporary immigration (like for agricultural workers) if needed for "jobs Americans won't do"
-dispense with performative wokery/academic vocab like "Latinx" that is alienating to working-class voters.
What that does NOT mean:
-run on grievance and stoking fear against "The Other" (elites, liberals, Haitian immigrants eating pets, etc.)
Everyone told us democracy was at stake but what was really at stake was their own filthy jobs showing that they are just like any other politician. Definitely not on the right side of history more on the side of self-centered slime bags. And they wonder why those of us hate them and don't trust them and just view them as self-serving jackasses. A great exemplar of this is pelosi not wanting to vote against inside trading. Why should we trust these people who say character and integrity matter and yet live the opposite. The people who said Trump was a massive danger which I believe he is yet could not sacrifice themselves to organize in a way that ensures electoral victory and the flourishing of American citizens. And do I think some sweeping shift of messaging will fix this? Heck no You will just have a criticize your own team brand of politician but the same kind of immoral bullcrap under the hood.
Are you saying that the actions of this week *don’t* support the claim that democracy was at stake? We’ve had a bunch of blatantly illegal orders thrown at the wall with some of them (TikTok) sticking for a while.
No, I totally think it was... But you would never know that given the behavior or democrat candidates, the party etc.. Joe Biden 11th hour drop out etc
Let us also not forget the rest of the family, specifically Jill and Hunter who also clearly couldn’t be bothered to convince Joe to not run. All of them let their ego’s and pride get in the way of what they knew was best for the country.
Jill was like a parent whose child is playing in a sports event and always blames the coach for her child not playing. In this case Jill is the parent blaming the Party and Country.
Hunter was probably being unselfish. If daddy had been re-elected, he wouldn’t have gotten a timely pardon. Indeed, Hunter would have been better off if Biden had quit after being VP
I’m tempted to say that the insanity of the 2020 primary was way more damaging than we knew at the time.
But really, 2020 did work out as well as it probably could have. It was Biden’s ego-driven decision to seek a second term that did us in. And boy, that one was a doozy.
I find very little to disagree with, apart from your contention that only Republicans and some on "the left" were and are angry with Biden
I and many other moderate-ish and/or mainstream-ish Democrats were incandescently angry with Biden (and his family and inner advisor circle) after the debate, and we were the collective force that pushed him off the ticket. (Remember that for a while his main protectors in the party were AOC and the CBC, while Pelosi and others were publicly and privately all but imploring him to step aside.) While those of us who engaged with the media were mindful of being respectful in our rhetoric both before he actually handed off the keys and after, that was for the calculated reasons you allude to. Namely, before his acquiescence, to not push him further into a stubborn refusal, and after, to help unify a somewhat fractured party, which I believe mostly worked.
What is remarkable to me is the tiny sliver of donors and others who claim Biden would have won. This is ludicrous on its face. When Biden dropped from the ticket, his own campaign's polling had him down in Virginia and (I think) Minnesota.
Jon Favreau said he saw internal campaign polling that had trump winning 400 EVs! That's losing Illinois Colorado levels bad. And have to assume that polling is still structurally discounting Trump's support.
As a matter of strategy, you want to be making your margin in the swing states, not running up the score where it doesn’t matter. She did better in the swing states and her losing margin was quite small. I’m not high-fiving anyone about it, but it’s obvious to me Biden would not have done better.
Did she? I thought she won New Jersey 52-46, same as Virginia, New Mexico, and Maine. It’s true that these states have been considered close-to-swing in a way that New Jersey hadn’t, but this isn’t close to losing.
Yeah I guess that's really what I mean. Harris was notably weak relative to expectations in New Jersey in a way that wasn't true of those other states, but you're right she didn't almost lose it.
In the Trump era, the Democratic Party has been trying to sell itself as the party of normalcy, stability, competence, and honesty. The gaslighting around Biden’s age greatly damaged this image, and made even reasonable Dems (like Matt) seem like they were either disconnected from reality or a bunch of liars.
I agree with the Dems on most issues, and I am genuinely worried about a Trump presidency, but this episode reminded me why I’m still an independent — partisanship rots people’s brains!
Can you expand more on how it would have been better for Trump to win narrowly in 2020? I think it would have been equally if not more psychologically devastating at the moment to Democrats to have lost the 2020 election, and Trump would have been able to conduct his civil servant purge and who knows what else besides.
Or are you arguing for the counterfactual with hindsight, where Trump second term presiding over inflation would have absolutely nuked his approval and the GOP would be demolished in 2024?
Trump has had four years to hone his message, strengthen his team and develop a plan. None of which he would have had in January 2020.
The onslaught of actions in the past week is the result of this interim period.
Addendum: Plus, the downside effects on the Democratic Brand from Biden's actions make coming back to cultural and electoral power more difficult now than in 2020.
Furthermore, so much of Trump's plan now is forged in vengeance for his enemies that he feels cost him 2020. If none of that happened its not that Trump would suddenly have the grace of Bush 41 but the direction of his second term would have been totally different. And democrats would have had the chance to regroup far faster and in a direction more of us are in agreement from. I think a trump win in 2020 would have genuinely killed the power of the Groups for good.
Your first sentence gets to the heart of it. If I had been able to look into the future, I would have voted Trump in 2020. Him winning would probably have been less damaging than what he did by claiming a stolen election.
If the GOP continued to lose every election, and the Dems were consistently reasonable, it wouldn't be quite so bad. There are several factors that make this really bad:
(1) the GOP gets quite unreasonable;
(2) their unreasonableness includes disrespect for norms, and even for laws and for refraining from political violence;
(3) the left has its own craziness (not originating from the top in the same way as it happens on the right), which alienates the median voter enough that a "laws constrain you, not me" GOP from step 2 can get elected.
Not being in the White House, Trump has had his chance to pick plenty of stooges and cronies. While in there he was trying to repair the plane while flying it, which meant using establishment Republicans like Bill Barr who would tell him to his face that the stolen election claims are bullshit.
Like his staff got bad by -10 each year, so the first administration was -10, -20, -30, -40. His next 4 years would have been -50, -60, -70, -80.
But he's not starting at -90 now. More like -160 because plenty of people have been auditioning for the role of #1 suck-up to Trump.
I think that's all true. I suppose another way to phrase my question is "would telling a Democrat in November of 2020 how the next four years would go convince them that it would be better for Biden to lose?"
Perhaps I'll be shuffling around the gulag in 2028 feeling that yeah, we definitely should have spiked the snap in 2020, but I'm not necessarily there yet. I think 2020 me would still have pressed the Biden wins button. The counterfactuals so far aren't imaginative enough in the "how could Trump have been maximally horrible in a 20-24 second term" to convince me that Biden losing in 20 is obviously better.
Somewhat missing from Matt’s analysis is the probable effect of Biden’s age and lack of energy making him more susceptible to influence from his staff and the “Groups”, leading in turn to a more leftish series of policies that were out of step with the edge case voters the party needed to attract. The confluence of age, appearance, and actual policies made for a toxic political environment that Harris could not overcome, “Joy” notwithstanding.
It’s definitely not *obviously* better. But we don’t know how much awfulness took four years of planning and how much could have happened during that term (especially with a pandemic raging).
I guess no January 6th is better for the country overall, but it’s better for the history books that Trump did it. We need to understand the consequences of reelecting evil personified.
Did we also need to understand the consequences of a global pandemic, or invading a country for made-up reasons? Sometimes things are just bad and it would be better if they hadn't happened.
We would not be facing another Republican trifecta and there might be a Dem senate at least. Trump would now be gone, likely much reduced, and our "institutions" battered but not out.
To be fair, we would have been *much* better off had Biden been the 2016 nominee and Trump were a fading memory by now. It's not just Biden who fumbled this moment in history.
Maybe? I'm just trying to imagine what I'd have to do to convince November 2020 me to believe that "no really, it's better that Biden narrowly lost". Even if we played the 2020-2024 tape, I'm not sure November 2020 me would prefer the counterfactual here.
Matt has just repeated the "it would have been better if Biden lost narrowly in 2020" a few times like it's obvious, and it's not obvious. Curious what his reasoning is.
Well, that is MY reasoning on it. Matt will have to speak for himself.
My bigger issue is that Democrats have *utterly* mishandled this last few years, completely unable to read the room. The only reason Hillary Clinton was even *competitve* in 2016 is that she was running against a lunatic, yet she was shoved down our threats anyway, and then there was a repeat of that with Harris in 2024. I'm beyond disgusted with this crew, and I can really see why anyone not steeped in party politics is contemptuous of them.
"To the extent Democratic primary voters feel like they were denied a broad range of candidates in 2016, and that party officials tried to clear the field to coronate Clinton, well, they're right."
The other issue choking Dems IMO is that they have become the de facto protectors of the status quo, which admittedly has been somewhat forced on them, in an era where most people are very distrusting, and frankly not without good reason. I've always said Republicans are crazy but Democrats are wussy, and when that is your choice people will nearly always choose crazy.
Look at how much more efficient Trump is this time around*. I'll admit, I was one who pushed back on some of the fears by pointing to 2017-2021, but it's clear Trump actually learned from his experience.
*So far. I think he is starting to get pushback, and things will settle into a new equilibrium (still worse) soon.
It’s definitely not obvious. But the strongest case is that everything he’s doing this past week is the result of several years of planning by many people who have thought carefully about what might or might not stick. It’s more effectively destructive than anything he did in his first term, or would likely have done in a second term continuing that first term, even if a chunk of it is still not sticking.
I think there’s a good chance there would have been some idiosyncratic vaccine refusal in both parties, that might have remained fringe and non-partisan, which might have been a better result. No RFK-centering.
Democrats absolutely would have questioned and attacked "The Trump Vaccine." Which would have led to more information being shared, more evidence being public, probably no mandates, and ultimately, greater trust in the process and in vaccines generally.
If Trump had won in 2020 it would almost certainly have been with a huge popular vote deficit (indeed, giving him the closest tipping point states might have led to an election decided by the house of Reps?). And all of that campaign he didn't have anything like the cultural cachet he built up during the Biden years. I think this second Trump term will differ from the first a lot more than if the second term came in 2020
Also, I'm guessing there's a much earlier reckoning on the Dem side with the excesses of the left in 2020 re: defund and Covid hawkishness and we get significant moderation in advance of the 2022 midterms. Given those would likely have gone well for Dems (particularly with inflation in the state it was globally at the time) I think we probably see more candidates staking out a moderate lane in the 2024 primaries.
Maybe, but there were definitely recriminations in the House after the elections - Abigail Spanberger saying "Defund the police killed us." Those would have been amplified after a loss.
The actual best 2020 outcome would have been Trump winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote, so the 2024 election (and all future ones) would be decided under the new Constitutional amendment for direct election of the President by nationwide popular vote. Of course, the Republican winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote would have been even better in 1968, 1976, 2000, 2004, and 2016.
Would he? Democrats won the Senate because Trump wouldn't shut up about election fraud and they kind of miraculously picked up two seats in Georgia, which even then only gave them a majority with Harris as tiebreaker.
Maybe in 2022 Dems do very well, sure. But not sure what that nets us in terms of the civil service.
Loeffler might have lost (she was both the weaker of the two Rs and facing the stronger of the two Ds) but Perdue wasn't going to lose. Heck if we imagine Trump winning 2020, that means he narrowly wins Georgia, and that means Perdue-Ossoff doesn't even go to a runoff.
What the others said below, plus the House and Senate were both controlled by Democrats from 2021 to 2023, so that would have further limited the damage he could have done, while inflation would have still raged because it doesn't care who controls which branches of government.
Needs to be said (in a strategically unpaywalled manner). I usually come to SB for the cool, unemotional analysis; considering the chaos swirling around us for the past week, I’m glad Matt is taking this tone. This was a monumental f*** up that will be hard to fix.
Was it a f***-up (“He can run again, win, and do the job. He just needs the right support & great execution.”)? Or was it a deliberate fraud (“If we don’t let the American people see how bad he is, we might be able to hold on to the White House.”)?
The Bush/Iraq comparison continues to resonate.
As with Bush/Iraq, I suspect we'll never fully know.
Know *what*? We found out all we needed to know at the end of June, and good on the Biden team for forcing the early debate.
For those who think the Democrats would have been better off had Biden not so delayed his eventual dropping out, you are simply wrong. There's a simplistic view that a long and open primary process would have delivered a strong candidate, a unified party, and a moderate message that would have resonated with the American people. That view simply doesn't understand the dynamics of the party and the course of events (e.g., what Oct. 7 would have done to the primary debate and party cohesion).
The real mistake was Biden treating the 22 midterms as a mandate to run as an octogenarian POTUS. He kept at it even as his poll numbers became dismal.
Would it have been better to have had a normal primary process vs the rushed one? Yes. Would a rushed one been better than what happened, I donno? But Biden delaying the inevitable didn’t help if Harris was to take over, and I don’t think Biden really gave Harris the support or room to campaign she deserved.
No, a full primary would have been a disaster for the Democrats.
Two reasons:
1) The progressive Left had not been discredited and remained the dominant force in the party and, just like in 2016 and 2020, they would have forced the candidates and the eventual nominee to take unpopular stands. This is especially so given the surprising strength of the party in the midterms
2) Oct. 7 and the course of the war would have been the dominant issue in the heat of the primary campaign and would have torn the party apart. The eventual “winner” would have been a bleeding wreck and spent all his/her time trying to repair the intense divisions in the party rather than turning full force on Trump and the Republicans. Shortcircuiting the primary let Biden take all the heat of that anger and kept it out of the presidential race.
Obviously, in the end Trump won but I firmly believe the defeat would have been much worse, at the top and down the ballot, with a full primary.
The lesson is that primaries are dangerous for Democrats and we need to fix that problem for 2028, not just blame all our problems on Biden hanging around too long. That kind of thinking will lead us to disaster.
"not just blame all our problems on Biden hanging around too long"
Oh, I don't think you'll find anyone saying Biden was the *sole* source of the Democratic Party's problems. But how people, including Biden, behaved between the start of 2024 and his resignation, reveals a lot about how they think and operate, and that's useful knowledge.
At a minimum, it reveals that Democrats do not believe their own messaging about transparency, honor, and integrity if it gets in the way of what elected officials and party operatives think is best for them and their careers. If this is how the party's going to behave, then they need to make a much more compelling policy argument, because the difference between them and the Republicans on "good government" and "public virtue" is smaller - definitely there, but smaller - then they led the public to believe.
It would have probably been best for Biden to resign around February and for Harris to be running as a competent incumbent president.
Since we are debating a counter-factual, I offer the following reasons to suspect an open primary would not have been a disaster, esp. relative to the factual reality:
1) It would have obviated or undercut the GOP talking points that Harris was simply "anointed" as a "diversity hire", and that Dems operate through "corrupt" and "rigged" processes.
2) It would have forced Harris to address - and hopefully disavow - her circa-2019/2020 woke-sounding comments.
3) Was October 7 and Gaza really destined to be the dominant issue for Dems as of the summer of 2024? I wonder if this is where the progressive/Groups bias of party elites misleads or obscures what was important to the median Democratic voter. According to an October 2024 Gallup poll, it was pretty far down the list: https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx
4) No doubt, some progressive primary challengers would have played the Gaza card against Harris and other would-be centrists. But why is this so daunting compared to other hot button topics that excite progressives but are less important to low-info or moderate voters?
I could not agree more. The progressive left had to be thoroughly discredited, and hopefully this loss may have achieved that.
The progressive left had been discredited long before an open Democratic party would have gotten going. Losing in 2020 by more than they had lost in 2016 broke the back of the movement, or at least convinced it's members that they couldn't win at the ballot box anytime soon. And by early 2024, the vibe shift to the right was already well underway, and most Democratic voters already thought their own party had shifted too far left.
Moreover, it would be crazy to think that distinguishing themselves from the moderates on Gaza and trans issues--which would be the main places where they could distinguish themselves from the moderates--would help progressive left candidates in an open 2024 primary. This was never going to be a cycle where they had a real chance. That's before you consider the relative paucity of decent progressive candidates, especially as compared to the exceptionally deep bench of moderates we had.
The worst outcome of an open primary would have been losing a few crazy pro-Hamas voters. We would have more than made up that ground with normies just by not seeming to anoint someone nobody liked that much. When you add in the fact that an open primary would have selected for somebody who was actually a decent candidate (i.e. Buttigieg, Shapiro, Whitmer, Moore, etc...), it seems very likely we would have won.
I will say that, at the time, I thought the 2022 midterm results were genuinely stunning and it had a real impact on how I viewed the state of American politics. Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back it's clear that this was the beginning of a series of mistakes that led us to the present moment. But I see how people got there.
A full primary starting in July would have had the same outcome -- Harris -- since imho none of the likely candidates would have been able to go out on a serious anti-Biden limb and garner a majority consensus around D primary voters. D voters, btw, might not have wanted a decent afro-asian woman candidates for... exactly whom? Kamala proved to be a much better campaigner than the Biden folks thought of, but not a great strategist (*she could* have put some daylight between her and Biden and did not, chose another non-strategist for VP). But her faults such as they might have been were completely aligned with the party at large.
What party cohesion was attained by not holding a primary? Democrats put up its worst performance among women, minorities, and young people in the 21st century. Harris got something like only 36% of the vote in Dearborn, MI, and was the first Democrat to lose in South Texas in over a century.
Maybe she united the staffers, activists, consultants, and donors, but who really cares. She obviously didn't united the actual rank-and-file voters that have reliably voted for Democrats in the past
Losing is bad and always is, but let’s not catastrophize. She lost by 1.5 percentage points — a narrow outcome historically — when people were outraged by (now mostly moderate) inflation and incumbents around the world were being tossed from office.
And I’m old enough to remember the early joy, enthusiasm, and unity that followed her taking charge after Biden dropped out. She certainly gave our party its best shot and far more of a chance than a bloody, destructive primary would have yielded.
But my point is that the joy, enthusiasm, and unity you refer to came from hyperpartisan liberal Democrats who would've been joyful, enthusiastic, and united around the winner of a bloody, destructive primary.
The many previously loyal Democrats who pulled the lever for Trump, especially those who still voted Democrat down ballot, obviously weren't very joyful, enthusiastic, and united behind Harris.
I'm a Democrat who was never enthusiastic about Harris and really only voted for her because the alternative was Trump.
I'm curious to know who you think would have run in the 2024 Democratic Primaries and how they would have done. I also don't understand what you think would have been so "bloody" about it.
Nobody serious was going to run on the Columbia quad / Hamas platform, so the Gaza issue would have been a fight about how hard to press for a cease-fire, how urgently to call for a two-state solution, and how stridently to criticize Netanyahu for being an opportunistic asshole.
The rest of it would have been a more-or-less respectful debate over Biden's choices, missed opportunities and priorities... but with more candidates able to speak in complete sentences with fewer malapropisms and confusing anachronisms. Who would have been the moderate Dem candidates trying to "bloody" Biden or Harris and what do you think they would have said?
I originally agreed with this, but Matt's continued discussion around how Harris did not separate herself from Biden has changed my mind. I don't think there was a way for her to do that effectively. A new candidate who hadn't been part of the administration would have been able to do that more effectively. They could have talked about the good that Biden did, while being much more forthright about the bad as well.
Possibly. Harris couldn’t throw Biden under the bus because that would have backfired on her (disloyalty, where were you, all that kind of stuff). Could Whitmer have trashed Biden? Maybe. But he was still her President and the party’s leader. It’s a really fine line to draw and an unpopular Presidency is an albatross that would probably have hurt any candidate.
Biden definitely was an albatross around any Democratic candidate. But the line that you are pushing is that this is best that Democrats could have done in this situation means that there was no way to beat Trump. I'm unwilling to accept that conclusion.
edit - I acknowledge that this might be willful obtuseness on my part.
One lesson is that the party in power will be judged by voters for their assessed performance of its incumbent president, even if said incumbent is not running for reelection. People voted in 2000 based on Clinton. Senior Bush won Reagan's third term. Hubert Humphrey couldn't get out of LBJ's shadow. You can bear hug your party's sitting president or kick him in the balls, and it really won't make a difference to your campaign either way.
"...where were you..."
Damned by the president's advisors, she later had to rely on the usual suspects in the media - fact-checkers and other types of friendly but feckless flunkies - to 'splain to us all that, no, actually she wasn't formally named a "border czar."
I don't think it was possible for Harris to do that in the time Biden gave her.
The only way that it could have happened was for Biden to agree to accept significant criticism from her and still support her. But as is evident throughout this discussion, Biden was more about Biden and less about country/Democratic party success than people thought.
Would a primary process have been worse than the erosion of trust not only in Joe Biden, but everyone around him, including Kamala Harris, and his party, because they were complicit in trying to Weekend-at-Bernie's Biden over the finish line as the pretense that he was in great shape and ready for another four years got thinner day by day?
This is the salient point, I think. Was the Democratic party of 2023 capable of recognizing the threat posed by Biden's record and age and course-correcting with a new candidate who would have been critical of Biden and spoken more directly and convincingly to median voter concerns about inflation, immigration and social issues? Would the average Democratic primary voter have understood the threat and supported an explicitly "not-Biden" candidate? Would a winning lefty candidate (like Harris) have tried to reach out and consolidate support from Not-Biden voters the way Biden reached out to the lefties after 2020?
I think Harris probably would've just won the nomination anyway, but the party wouldn't have been weighed down in 2024 after spending a year and half pretending Biden wasn't in mental decline. Even if you think Biden's administration was fine, it still would've been better for Biden to resign sometime after January 2023, hand things over to Harris, and for her to run a sort of "let us continue" campaign. That way you don't have the Biden age/mental acuity scandal at all.
October 7 would have made any Democratic primary* absolutely ruinous. I don't think people appreciate how bad it would have gotten.
Like, guys, we're talking about a primary where the "Zionist" would have been one of the biggest words in the world cloud of the discourse. That probably wouldn't have worked well in any respect.
You can say, well, Whitmer and Pritzker and Buttigieg, et al, wouldn't have fallen into that trap... forget it. The trap comes and finds you. Democrats didn't want the 2024 election to be about transgender issues, either.
Given that the push to remove Biden clearly predated June by a good amount**, I would guess that there were people who were advocating hard for a primary who lost the argument, once the reality of what that primary would be became apparent.
* Thank you to the respondent who pointed out my possibly Freudian typo, "Democratic party"
** (I would say previous pushes were 1:1 correlated with NYT opinion page Biden-age outbursts, so one in April of '23 around when Biden announced, and another in October around the filing deadline for primaries.)
I assume you meant to write "primary" in your first sentence so yes absolutely. I'm not sure the people early on pushing for Biden to drop out changed their mind lost the argument as people realized how ruinous a primary would have been. I'm still not sure people understand that.
Ha, yes. I did mean primary. Thanks for catching that. (Enough people, left and right, DO consider the party itself "absolutely ruinous" that I don't want to even accidentally draw that association.)
insert *This, all of this* meme here
As with Bush/Iraq, ultimately it doesn’t matter—the disaster happened, and we have to find a way out of it.
I think it was pretty clearly a screwup. If his aids were covering up how frail and infirm Biden was, and they knew he was unable to be President then they would never have let him on the debate stage. If this was a conspiracy they would have ran the campaign even more controlled than they did. No: the simplest explanation with the most evidence is that Biden is an arrogant and proud man who really thought he could win, and that he pushed his team to do as he asked.
Biden has been in politics for decades, has a very loyal team, built a solid administration, and when he said 'go' they went and they did what they could to put him across the finish line.
To be clear: neither explanation absolves Biden, who should have known that he couldn't do it and should have retired either way. I do not believe he is senile, and I do not believe he lacks agency. He could have, and should have, chose not to run. Not for any other reason than: he was too old to do the job, or at least was too old to convince people he can do the job (they're the same question at the end of the day).
The last year has revealed Biden as a selfish man who despite all his lofty rhetoric, was in it for himself and the people he personally knew. There were glimpses of that in the past, like how he lied about the circumstances of his first wife's car accident to make himself seem more sympathetic, but the scale and consequences of him clinging to power and then metaphorically shitting on the carpet on his way out the door should make that clear.
People should feel absolved of any obligation to defend the man himself, separate from his policies.
...
(And he couldn't even be bothered to keep his dogs from biting the people assigned to take a bullet for him!)
Attacking Biden personally does no good, and bluntly I still appreciate the man’s service and his presidency. The sin of hubris and arrogance is a very common one among politicians and I don’t think any President (except maybe George HW Bush) would have willingly stepped aside either. LBJ only did it, if my memory serves, because he was shoved aside.
I have more anger over the party. They knew or should have known what would happen and they let it happen. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have their own blame in this too
"Attacking Biden personally does no good"
I personally find it cathartic! And Biden also only did it because he was shoved aside.
Sure, and that's my point. The Democratic Party worked to shove LBJ aside a lot sooner than they did Biden. They had agency too.
I don't actually think he "lied" about his wife's car accident. Words mean things, and "lie" means "a conscious telling of an untruth." A mistake or error or false belief is not a lie. Now, in truth, his first wife was in a car with screaming kids and she below a stoplight at the absolutely worst time. People blow stoplights -- I've blown stoplights! It was her fault. This doesn't demonstrate moral turpitude; she made a mistake.
But it's hard for Joe Biden the man to accept that his wife caused her own death and death of his infant daughter. I think over the years Biden convinced himself that, in fact, the driver of the truck was drunk and that caused the accident. I think he really believed that story.
It doesn't matter if Biden finds it hard to accept that his wife's death was not the fault of the truck driver that hit her - he used his public platform to slander that truck driver, and that is a messed up thing to do.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/driver-in-biden-crash-wanted-name-cleared/
That I do agree with.
I hope if I ever get caught in a lie I have someone like you to vouch for me.
Is saying that someone talks himself into delusional beliefs really vouching?
Agree. I also don’t believe he is senile, which made this harder - good days, bad days, rapid deterioration over the past few years in terms of endurance and verbal dexterity but still able to make reasonable decisions. Not a conspiracy, just impossible accumulating choices and very hard to draw the line when you’re watching it happen in real time.
> No: the simplest explanation with the most evidence is that Biden is an arrogant and proud man who really thought he could win, and that he pushed his team to do as he asked.
Honestly this is my take away as well, especially given his post debate interviews, and even his post election comments. Scranton Joe is a stubborn SOB and while he did some good things, his legacy like RBG's will be judged by the mess they left behind instead of some of the good they did.
Yea. It’s infuriating and sad. Biden was not a bad president. He wasn’t Jimmy Carter (in office) but his big mistakes are going to outweigh his sound judgment. I have no regrets voting for him, but I’m disappointed in how he left office. I’m particularly mad he pardoned his son
Likewise...
My theory is that they knew the odds of a disaster were significant. However, *not* having a debate would be conceding the issue.
So they rolled the dice. I don't know if the odds of him having a bad night were 25%, or 50%, or 80%, but even at 80%, that leaves a 20% chance of victory.
The decision to not have a Super Bowl interview is obvious in retrospect.
I mean that’s possible. But all the reporting I’ve seen is that they spent a ton of time preparing him, and they were surprised.
I think there were three things.
One, even if they knew he was losing it, they probably had some denial about how much.
Two, Trump was so horrible in the 2020 debates, they kind of thought Biden could stand there and just watch Trump be horrible. Paradoxically, I think the rules they imposed actually helped Trump, who was shockingly disciplined, for Trump.
Third, I think Biden was in fact incompetent for his last year or so in office -- I mean he was as bad as my dad was when I took over managing his finances. But I also think he had a genuinely bad day in the debate.
It could be both - a fraud on the part of the White House, and a f*** up at the party level for letting things get to the point where they're *so bad* that the nation unequivocally chooses *this.* I know that theoretically Biden was the party leader, but so much of the party apparatus seems to have been living in a parallel fantasy universe in which people love to be scolded, I'm apportioning my blame widely.
I just walked to work listening to Josh Barro's "centrist take" podcast, and I'm even more pissed off at "our side" now.
Finally, for reasons having to do with my job at the time, I agree with your take on Bush/Iraq.
The politics of the 2010s was so joyless. Covid happened and Democrats when handed a win continued to push that contrarian joylessness we see coming from progressives and sought to appease the insatiable Groups.
Joe Biden had one job, keep Trump from power and he laid the groundwork for Trump’s return. You have multiple obvious felonies and never could be bothered to indict him. We got DEIA HR reps, gamed the social cost of carbon, and hamstringed all your infrastructure funding with adjective-justice red tape. What an abject failure.
And yet manufacturing is surging due to Biden investments. Somehow the requirement for a daycare facility didn't stop the TSMC Arizona fab dead in its tracks but instead is zooming like a race car.
That's great, but because Biden completely fucked up his one job of preventing Trump from being in power, Trump will now be in office to reap the benefits from what Biden sowed.
I mean, Trump and also America... cold comfort, but still comfort.
My angst is more at IRA and BEV subsidies than the CHIPS Act (the bipartisan stuff stripped a lot of the everything bagelness he had. God BBB was a mess.)
BBB was terrible and revealed the continuing strength of the progressives in the party, to its and our detriment. But all it did was waste precious time (bad enough!) rather than result in terrible law. Instead we got the IRA which is fantastic.
I'm sorry; what's "BEV"?
It's my understanding that Biden wasn't on the ballot on Nov. 5 and had dropped out.
I'm open to correction.
His stench was on the ballot.
Well, John McCain didn't run as an anti-war candidate. So far as I could tell at the time, his critique of Bush is that he didn't invade enough countries. McCain wanted American War for Georgia (the Eurasian Georgia, not the one where we burned Atlanta in the prior War for Georgia) and American invasion of Syria.
The least popular part of the Bush legacy he didn't repudiate; he doubled down.
The "fraud" thesis strikes me as being pretty weak. Basically we didn't get any stories about Biden not being able to do the job from people in meetings with him like the GOP leadership in the Congress in 2021-2023. Same if you bother to go watch old interviews with him on YouTube, the decline was pretty quick and seemed to have happened in early 2024.
Yeah. I think people in general are way underestimating the capacity of our species for sincere self-deception. This is especially true in cases of cognitive decline (I have a bit of experience with this in my own family, as I'm sure other SB readers do, too). It's hard to face facts sometimes when people we love are in decline.
Mind you, the folks running executive branch operations should be cooly rational actors constantly thinking of the national interest, and they should be capable of clear-eyed objectivity at all times. Key word being "should."
I strongly suspect (and yes, I've read the famous WSJ article) a lot of White House staffers and campaign people were saying to themselves (and believing) something along the lines of "Yeah, the president looks and sounds really old these days, so too much public exposure will hurt our chances! But dolgurnit the results—great job market, great stock market, declining inflation,, plunging overdose deaths and homicide, a stabilizing border situation, restored relations with our allies, the end of the Afghanistan quagmire, the end of Covid, tons of legislative achievements, record oil production, surging industrial output—speak for themselves. And we dare not give up the incumbency advantage."
It was a fuckup (although I continue to believe the biggest fuck up was nominating a 77 year old in the first place, back in 2020), sure. But it's far from clear the fuckup was mainly conspiratorial in nature.
The lede in this WSJ article says otherwise: https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/joe-biden-age-condition-before-election-drop-out-c9fc46ef
You only need a few insiders engaged in the fraud. Then they can lead everyone else to fucking up. But it does become a kind of Ponzi scheme where Matt’s a fuckup for accepting the fraud but then unwittingly commits the fraud as he leads others to swallowing it and being fuck ups.
It’s okay, I agree that now is the time to say let’s be more honest and better next time. Let’s see if some Dems have it in them.
Matt has been great on the honesty front since the election.
Chapelle made an interesting distinction on a SNL appearance where he called Trump an honest liar. There is some difference between honesty and truthfulness.
Honesty seems both more general and more encompassing of the person. To be honest you must be open. Truthfulness seems more specific. Smart people are often very good at being truthful and kind of dishonest at the same time. I think Kamala Harris landed this way with many voters.
The most honest public intellectual I read is Nate Silver. I like Sam Harris too. He is throughly truthful and highly honest but does pull his punches if he thinks there are larger narratives to be concerned about. Nate seems to just say honestly what he believes in the moment.
As Matt frees himself from institutional constraints he becomes more honest. I am sure there are other social pressures to be less so. I hope this trend continues in those headwinds.
And here I was thinking that up to around the end of 2023 Biden was a damn good President.
Silly me.
I don’t see any disagreement here. He was a pretty good president into late 2023. But he made some fundamentally bad decisions that ended up being so bad that we may well have been better off letting Trump flail for eight consecutive years.
I will never believe that Trump winning in 2020 would have been good for the nation and the world.
Not saying I disagree, Kenny, but what were those "fundamentally bad decisions"? I have plenty of disagreements with Biden (dangling weapons in front of Ukraine, student debt relief, letting BBB drag on so long, taking four weeks instead of two weeks to drop out after the debate, etc.) but I'm not aware of anything that was 'fundamentally bad.'
Most of his decision around Harris were bad. He set her up for failure. Including by picking her in the first place, but if Harris had been given hard tasks to do that were still achievable, she could have run on a record.
Instead she was tied to the border, one of the two very unpopular parts of the 46th administration. And all the "Not The Border Czar" pieces confirm that it was something they wanted no affiliation with. Had the border somehow been cleaned up she'd have run on "Border Czar In Chief."
The main "fundamentally bad" decisions were not taking the border / asylum issue seriously until early 24 and not pivoting on the economy to going all in on fighting inflation. More generally, shifting to the left after winning the primary and handing over control of hiring for the administration to the left was also "fundamentally bad".
The biggest ones are around the re-election campaign (and setting Harris up for failure from early on), but I think several of the late term decisions, particularly the questionable pardons and constitutional interpretations at the transition, may have made things worse.
Well, there is one way Trump winning in 2020 would have been better. A voter on Sarah Longwell's "The Focus Group" explained that he was voting for Trump because that way we wouldn't have "another Jan. 6."
So as long as Republicans always and must always win the election, we can always have "peaceful transfers of power." (Not the other way, of course.) Yay.
That's one of the most depressing things I've ever heard.
I'm not sure he was "a good president into late 2023". MY linked to a good piece that documents Biden's problems (indecision in particular, and its downstream effects) basically from the get go [1].
Plus, Biden was so reclusive that how is possible to say he was a good president until ____? He was reclusive the entire time, so even if he was totally fine at the beginning, how do you know when things went south? There's a reason that people like MY were fooled until the curtains were dramatically ripped back.
[1] https://www.vox.com/politics/394712/joe-biden-president-legacy-inflation-manchin
I would argue that he was “good” in the sense of advancing partisan Democrat objectives (something that most of the swing voters who put him powers disagree with) but almost from the minute he took power he was damaging the Dem brand. The Dems had a chance to co-opt swing voters and liberal leaning Republicans basically creating a long term majority. All Biden had to do was govern from the center, not try to be the next FDR, and serve one term while leaving a competent successor. All thing he promised while campaigning. This would have give Dems a serious edge for several electoral cycles and possibly cemented swing voters into Dems.
His choice to embrace the Warren wing and the Groups, basically trying to use Trump’s insanity to leverage push a bunch of fringe economic and social issues along with his inability to relinquish power causes the opposite. Instead of a saner and better government, we are left with a very damaged Dem brand and a vastly empowered Trump regime.
I think Matt under estimates his failure because all he has to do was broadly follow his own campaign and he could have left the country much better off.
Basically he tried to be a damn good Democrat president and failed. Leaving a person he claimed was a threat to democracy more empowered than before. Had he simply acted like Trump was a threat and governed like a Clinton or Obama (or like he governed as a senator and VP) he would have left us all better off.
That said, it appears that Trump will act like himself (I.e., an idiot) and just create chaos. Bad but unlikely to result in any long term electoral success.
It was crazy to me that Biden had a 50/50 Senate and a tiny majority in the House and somehow decided he was FDR. Did he not look at how big the Democratic majorities were in 1932?
This set the Democrats back, but luckily they didn’t pass dumb legislation and Manchin helped them pass some smart bills.
Obviously, it wasn’t enough.
*Democratic objectives/Democratic president, please
I think the problem here is that Matt is saying he was a good President and a terrible politician. It would probably help for Matt to make this more explicit.
How is it possible to be a good president but a terrible politician? Being a politician is a major part of the job!
But it is also only *part* of the job!
When I saw Wicked on stage 15 years ago, I thought it was a great show, despite having no good music - even though having good music is usually a major part of being a good musical!
Many plays have no music at all, so a musical without good music can work fine—just as non-musical plays do. There’s no equivalent for a president who’s a crummy politician.
Like, no one would say that a brain surgeon who sucks at brain surgery is actually a great brain surgeon because they’re a great administrator.
Sure there is. You can have a President who is excellent at doing the job of being an executive, but is simultaneously poor at advertising himself and his accomplishments to the public. The result is that this President might have excellent policy accomplishments during the four years of his term, and then won't win re-election at the end of it. And that's a pretty accurate description of what happened.
This is my view - for 2.5 to 3 years he was a strong contender for the most accomplished president of my lifetime, and then sometime around the invasion of Gaza [1] and the completion of the soft landing from inflation it just all went to hell, 21-3 in the Super Bowl style. And his behavior post-election did significant damage to his already imperiled legacy.
(This is also why I have trouble faulting Kamala Harris for not breaking harder with Biden - where exactly did he misstep policy-wise in those first three years? You can argue he should have gone it alone with executive actions on asylum seekers earlier rather than try to work with Republicans, and maybe that there should have been less COVID relief to prevent future inflation. But I don't think "We shouldn't have sent the American taxpayer another stimulus check," is an electoral winner. Low-information voters are hoping Trump restores stimulus payments!)
[1] I also think Gaza was a no-win situation for Biden that he played pretty well; Netanyahu was always going to wait out the 2024 election in the hopes of getting a better deal from the Republicans he's so assiduously courted.
I have never understood the "most accomplished president of my lifetime" view. What did he achieve that was lasting? Surely the ACA, alone, outweighs anything Biden managed to achieve?
I don’t understand it either. He certainly passed a bunch of bills that spent a lot of money—partly a consequence of his inability to say “no”, and maybe some people mistake spending money for accomplishments?
If he had managed to make the child tax credit permanent, that would rival the ACA, just as his other big bills rivaled the ARRA.
It would have been a big deal, maybe even a "big f*ing deal", but it would not have rivaled the ACA.
Passed a lot of bills and spent a lot of money, despite not having large legislative majorities.
We are definitely out of Afghanistan. That is likely to be lasting for any reasonable definition of lasting.
He left on a timeline negotiated by Trump. Props for Biden for following thru, but Trump may well have left too. In contrast, the ACA would not have happened if McCain won.
Props for following through, but also he kinda fucked it up. The pullout was chaotic, lots of promises to local allies were broken, people died as a result.
I guess, although I think this likely would have happened anyway and isn’t much of a historical pivot point. I also don’t know if I’d call the retreat an accomplishment in the first place? I don’t see withdrawal from Vietnam as an accomplishment of Nixon’s, even if it was better than the alternative.
Immigration and too much stimulus were substantial missteps that started early in his presidency.
If he had been more moderate on those two issues it would have substantially improved the odds for the Democrats in 2024.
US Inflation seems in line with most Western countries, including ones like Germany that did not provided stimulus. Now I'm open to the possibility the US is large enough and Western economies are so closely linked that the Biden stimulus drove inflation everywhere, but I haven't seen a lot of economists argue that case. Regardless, in the context of "How could Harris distance herself from Biden?" the response "I wouldn't have provided stimulus he did," seems a nonstarter.
Dealing with asylum seekers was both a Biden misstep and the most promising place for Harris to show daylight, but the Trump campaign did a very good job of associating her with "being in charge of the border" before she had a chance to explain her role in the initial policy.
We are far less exposed to Ukraine induced inflation than Europe. if our inflation isn’t lower than Europe’s we screwed up
As I understand it, economists have argued that Biden's stimulus added 2 percentage points to inflation's peak, certainly a minority part, but a big deal nonetheless. Afterwards, there were lots of small things that were slightly inflationary but the left preferred and he consistently sided with the left. He also could have dropped Trump's terrifs to lower some prices.
You can think he was a good President while understanding that he was unpopular and behind in head-to-head polling with his likely rival, so unlikely to win re-election. We faced this in 1980 with Jimmy Carter, who was a great man and a good President (smart, engaged, detail-oriented, reform-minded, unafraid to grapple with tough issues), but who was handed a pile of feces by history and thus was doomed to failure. This was evident in late '79, so we had primaries and Ted Kennedy lost to Carter, but they engaged, debated, etc. I think it's pretty clear that Biden would NOT have survived a primary season with his reputation for cognitive competence intact. We might have nominated him anyway because his weakness was the key to maintaining the coalition of moderates and lefties that went on to support Harris, but I think the more likely outcome would have been one or more incidents like the June debate, which would have forced him to drop out earlier, but with a few alternatives already actively engaged in a campaign for the hearts and minds of Democratic primary voters.
In 1980 we had an alternative candidate with enough bravado, conviction, name recognition and money to challenge a weak incumbent from the left. In 2024, we had crickets. Nobody from the moderate/common sense/abundance Democrats wing willing to fight Biden from the center. Why? If the answer is the mopey "the nasty lefties had too much power in the incumbent administration", then that's a failure of the party faction most of us believe in.
Should he have stayed in the race after the debate?
Oh good lord no. He had to get out. I was besides myself calling for him to get out and I am clearly the biggest Biden supporter here on SB. The following four weeks after the debate were an agony.
But in the end he *did* get out and I will go to my grave believing that him getting out around that time (though a little earlier would have been better) happened to put the Democrats in a far better electoral situation than had there been a full, long open primary.
I remember this is how I felt as well, I even thought he did a great State of the Union address even when the Republicans were trying to interrupt him and trip him up. That was not the same Biden that showed up in the months following and the debate stage. Him also slow walking the administration response to immigration was a bad move that hurt Dems up and down the ballot imo.
Many believe that even if the candidacy itself was a f***up, the decisive f***up was the meltdown following the debate, when the party spent a month of prime election season eating itself instead of campaigning for its candidate.
That establishment-leaning coastal liberals, who clearly understand American politics worse than literally anybody, given who DID win the election, say that there's no way Biden could have won, if the party had supported him, is just as arrogant as saying that he would have been likely to win.
I've seen conservatives say that the staffers around Biden hiding the extent of his senility is a bigger scandal than Watergate. As a Democrat, my first response was to dismiss this as crazy, but I might be coming around to that position.
What's worse, covering up a break-in to help win an election that was already a historic landslide, or having the country secretly be run by unelected staffers for several years?
It’d probably be good politics for the GOP to call in senior level dem staffers to do a hearing on this…
I still buy the argument that Biden was still competent behind the scenes, but his public image completely destroyed the party. It’s actually insane Sanders and AOC stuck by him until the end.
I don't know, Ben. The NYTimes article from last week (the first of many, I suspect) shows some real diminished capacity, as did last month's WSJ article.
Open articles follow for those who don't subscribe:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/us/politics/biden-age.html?unlocked_article_code=1.s04.yrKs.nGothP56StBr&smid=url-share
https://www.wsj.com/politics/biden-white-house-age-function-diminished-3906a839?st=dFeR9r&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I agree diminished capacity. But I still think with advisors, you get someone who is competent. If you sparingly watch him speak in public, it's easy to just see a guy who is totally out to lunch.
I mean, part of this article is about his infirmity preventing him from seeing the most basic of realities: that he would not have beaten Trump, that in fact his aura was so bad it spread from him to befoul the rest of the party.
You can chalk up thinking that to old-guy hubris, but a competently minded politician wouldn't have said it publicly on the way out the door.
True true, I'm open to bending on this.
A ton of politicians believe absurd things about their own capacity. We literally just elected one in Donald Trump, and nobody thinks his arrogance is a sign of senility.
1. Trump's style of arrogance is one symptom of his larger personality disorder. 2. All politicians have an exaggerated sense of their own capacity, but expressing it so destructively for Harris was a weird, pathological move.
He dropped out! What Presidents do that?
Johnson refused to seek nomination, Nixon resigned when the writing was on the wall. These were extraordinary cases, just as now. But if Trump was really as big of a threat as he is plainly proving himself to be now, in real time, then giving Biden credit for doing what obviously had to be done is cold comfort.
It's easy to Monday morning quarterback, of course. But there were people, like Ezra Klein, who were floating bolder strategies last summer, when we needed to take bold action. That was the time to take a stand, and if more had done so, maybe we wouldn't be currently eating this shit-sandwich.
Ones whose party abandons them because they're so obviously unfit to try and be President for another four years.
So Ben, if you were a criminal defendant, would you have hired Biden to represent you at trial for your life last year? Assume for these purposes that he went into criminal law and had a good track record as a trial lawyer in his 40s, 50s, and even 60s.
I think his advisors, similar to yourself and Matt Yglesias, were determined to see the best possible scenario. I also think it became intensely personal for both the professional advisors and Biden's family, and that led to compromised judgement.
The Hur report should have been the wake up call. It's one on one with a neutral investigator, someone appointed by Biden's DOJ. Given more recent revelations of how the prep work for those meetings went, Hur's description of how that prosecution would have ended should not have come as such a surprise.
The debate was when everyone who wasn't actively convincing themselves of his competence saw his condition.
And what good did that mocking do the Democrats? None that I can tell.
I suspect Republicans can't hold those hearings because Trump is just as old as Biden was when he was elected and we're going to see some of the same problems in the next 4 years.
Hypocrisy hasn't stopped them yet!
The issue isn't hypocrisy; it's that the Democrats would have a right to speak at those hearings and present evidence, and they could use it to turn it around on Trump.
If they were smarter, the Dems would angrily turn those hearings on Biden staffers. Full on "what did you know and when did you know it" career-enders, with a side of "Yeah, these guys fucked up operatically. They organized not just a shit-show, but a full-on turd circus. Since we probably can't prosecute them for it, this is what they get instead". The kind of humiliation that somehow makes you seem like the dumbest guy in town, in spite of the fact that Tom Tuberville and Mazie Hirono are right there in the room with you.
What evidence do we have that Hirono is a particularly unintelligent senator? When I think of members of Congress that are notably unintelligent, I think of Tuberville, MTG, Boebert, and Hank Johnson.
Do they? The right of Democrats to do anything in the House, other than participate in floor votes exists only by permission of Republicans. If Republicans wanted to hold a party line vote to kick all Democrats off the committee that would be doing the questioning, there would be nothing to stop them, other than the court of public opinion and the next election.
That doesn't really work. There's a reason nobody does that.
Well Biden's White House was being run by progressive activists and making constant policy concessions to appease them. Kind of weird to see them attack him when he was ostensibly governing as one of them.
He was obviously diminished in the 2020 election. It was so obvious comedians were ripping on him and building web series based on it. I can't believe anyone was "surprised" by the 2024 debate.
It depends what the actual truth of the situation is!
"It depends what the actual truth of the situation is!"
I wish I could tell which comment you are replying to -- given how the threads work here, you either have to quote what you are replying to, or leave your readers with the impression that something or other depends on the truth of some situation or another, but who knows what.
Of course, Matt's comment would be apt in reply to every single comment ever posted on Slow Boring so no biggee.
"...Matt's comment would be apt in reply to every single comment...."
Well, I'm not sure it would be apt or not -- it depends what the actual truth of the situation is.
The country is always predominately run by unelected staffers. What we as voters get to choose is WHICH staffers.
I think that the American people, in their naïveté, believe they’re electing an individual to be in charge.
Besides, who do you think has a better chance at being elected right now: Buttigieg, Shapiro (as examples) or “Democratic staffers”? I submit that going around saying “no matter who wins, Democratic staffers will run the country” is bad for winning elections.
Getting a senile figurehead elected so you can stay in power actually is scandalous.
And BTW, we poo-poo the idea that there are emergencies and think everything is taken care of, but if you read up on the Cuban Missile Crisis, it actually kind of mattered that the President was a pretty young guy who could stay up late, keep a clear head, and exercise leadership. We might have gotten a war if the staffers had been running things.
I don't even like Kennedy's presidency that much, but that seems obviously true. If you look at other democracies they tend to put in power people in their 40's and 50's (often women in this day and age) and the fact we insist on electing Methuselah every 4 years creates a long-tail risk for the country and the world.
If the choice is between Democratic staffers and a team of Heritage Foundation staffers and Elon Musk staffers, I think that's a pretty clear choice. If the voters don't get that, you're right, they're naive, and I don't know how to address that.
I also note you haven't identified anything that differentiates Trump and Biden. If Biden is a senile figurehead, then Trump certainly is as well.
Voters are "naive"? I can't believe that anyone in a democratic country would choose to criticize the voters. You're supposed to criticize the opposition. This attitude is why the Democrats lost, and the voters elected a wrecking ball instead. I think they are dead serious about it.
It’s not just generic democratic staffers though - it’s either a team selected by Buttigieg or a team selected by Shapiro or a team selected by Whitmer or …
Those are different teams, and people’s beliefs about individuals are often really based on their teams, so it’s probably ok that people mistake the team for the individual.
It’s fine that we say Magellan circumnavigated the world, even though it was mostly his team, and he even died halfway through.
"...and he even died halfway through.
Oh, so *that's* why he refused to sit down with the NYT editorial board.
To be fair, all those haughty journalists at the Times were asking him to sit, and not to lie still with his eyes closed and his hands folded neatly over his chest.
I don't think that's true. It's the elected President who gets to choose WHICH staffers, not the voters directly. I think that Obama's staffing decisions would have been very different and much better than Biden's.
Ok, sure. We get to choose the POTUS that picks the staffers. But it's usually clear what type of staffers the candidates will choose respectively.
I have to disagree with that, as the debacle around Obamacare proved I think.
By "debacle around Obamacare" do you mean the webpage rollout? Wasn't that fixed?
Did Biden after the 2024 election leave the Party in better shape then when he took office? Really insulting how Biden marginalized Harris then after the election had his team continue to float the idea he should have run and could have won. How any Democrat can defend Biden by using the low bar of Trump is delusional.
Biden has really turned out to just be an incredible asshole.
My experience working with executives is that they assert themselves and engage in policy decisions. Bill Clinton and Obama were both putting in long hours and engaging on policy and priorities. Even Trump who is not engaged in the day to day will fire or otherwise humiliate a staffer who was out of line.
Again in corporate situations I've seen weak leaders who's staff run them. There is a major difference.
This is what I don't get about the idea that the left would've triumphed in a primary - besides an invasion of Israel, what did the left want from Biden that it didn't get?
"...or having the country secretly be run by unelected staffers for several years?"
There is a big difference between
"Biden was not at the top of his game and he tried to hide that,"
and
"The country was secretly run by unelected staffers."
The country was still being run by Biden -- I have seen no evidence that he was so compromised that he was not involved in the day-to-day decisions made in the WH. He was slower, stupider, and less articulate than when he was a younger man. But he was still doing his job, and running the country, and doing it worse than he would have done ten years previous.
There is plenty to criticize in all of that, without pretending that he was in Woodrow Wilson's condition. He was not.
I dunno. After that debate performance, I would need to see evidence that he actually was involved in day to day decision making, because my assumption is that he was not.
The fact that he avoided formal press conferences and then declining the SB interview was the tell.
Anyone who declines a Slow Boring interview clearly has something wrong with them.
Anyone who declines an SB interview is automatically unfit to lead. By SB you meant Slow Boring, right?
Anyone who does not participate in the comments at SB is unfit to lead, clearly.
But then a few weeks after that, we had that massive multi country hostage release that they all claim he helped negotiate to get citizens back from Russia? Like maybe Biden is just much better one on one? Or maybe people who worked for him really just love him and always saw the best of him? I don't know if we'll ever get an honest answer. It's possible that he just hired a bunch of good people in the administration, but I agree I almost didn't recognize the Joe Biden that showed up to that debate.
The problem with this is the country is never actually run by a single person. What we depend on is that the president hires good people and has the ability to identify situations where staff is potentially wrong. In short, a president needs to be able to know when staff is BSing.
I don’t think Biden was actually incompetent in the sense of not knowing what’s going on around him, etc. But he plainly was a shell of himself who no longer had the ability or endurance to do the job. He was no longer managing his staff-his staff was managing the circumstances around him, and in effect, were managing Biden himself.
This *feels* like the same willful ignorance that Matt talks about in the article that partisan Democrats had about Biden's age generally.
Case in point - we assume that the debate might was a bad night for Biden, but are we sure that wasn't an average or good night for him?
You might think, no one would let him continue if that was a good night for him, but it's beyond me to believe anyone let him continue with those kind of nights at all.
We're all ignorant of the facts now, and with luck we'll all learn more of the facts later. I have no stock in defending the guy -- I agree that he screwed up, big time, and I agree that he was impaired.
But I don't think we have anything like enough evidence to say that "the country secretly [was] run by unelected staffers for several years." That's a conspiracy theory that would require more evidence than any of us have.
Do we have conclusive proof of it - no.
But the saying "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me" exists for a reason. We were fooled once by Biden and staff into thinking he was capable of running for re-election. Having been fooled on that, I think the onus is now to prove he actually was firmly in control of his administration.
But I see the preponderance of the evidence saying he wasn't. Both in his indecisiveness that Matt talks about. The lack of communication and interaction with his cabinet and people on the Hill and how much of that was run through his staff with almost no direct Biden involvement. He didn't even have direct interaction with his own pollsters when running his campaign! Can you see any other politician running a campaign and not doing that?
>Case in point - we assume that the debate might was a bad night for Biden, but are we sure that wasn't an average or good night for him?<
We're not sure it wasn't an average or good night for him, true. Just like we're not sure it was a bad night for him. The outcomes the country had been experiencing for three plus years at that point substantially suggested his administration was a pretty effective one. The President's own public appearances, age, and a number of other things suggested just the opposite.
Democrat shouldn't have nominated a 77 year old in 2020. Biden shouldn't have started out running for a second term. Once he did start running in early 2024, the best course of action for the country wasn't crystal clear, at least not to the key players (maybe it should have been, but it wasn't). All three things can be true.
"The outcomes the country had been experiencing for three plus years at that point substantially suggested his administration was a pretty effective one."
The American public just demonstrated they disagree with this. They might be wrong, but I think that losing a race to be re-elected (or in his case, not even making it that far and dragging down your VP replacement) is a strong signal of failure.
The "he's only got 4 good hours a day" reports do suggest that he was not really running the country most of the time.
"The "he's only got 4 good hours a day" reports...."
Do they support the claim that his staffers were secretly running the country in a conspiracy that's bigger than Watergate? I'm still not hearing that. There are lots of effective executives that make a lot of decisions in 4 hours.
As I said to John E. -- I don't know his condition. He may have been severely impaired, or he may have just tired easily. But I think conspiracy-talk in this context is silly.
I don't think it was a "conspiracy bigger than Watergate". That's right wing spin.
But I think Biden is very much gone in the head. I wouldn't have hired him to run a McDonalds and he had no business being President. His mental incompetence is far, far greater than Democrats are willing to admit. We dodged a bullet, and we're going to have to dodge more bullets with Trump being as old as he is.
And, as unpalatable as this will sound, there's nothing in the constitution that spells out how little or how much the President may rely on his staff. I mean, the country has been *substantially* run by "unelected staffers" for decades. The government is far too sprawling an operation for the President to be engaged in much more than top-level decision making and priority-setting.
Lol , stilling hanging on to hope .. huh?
Here's how Biden can still win
Here's the bit of hope I'm clinging to: Trump has the worst approval ratings of any new President since World War 2:
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/trumps-near-record-low-approval-rating-worse-than-any-new-president-since-world-war-ii-43-americans-disapprove-101738141112623.html
I wonder why that might be with all his wonderful illegal policies?
At the very least, Ron Klain, Jeff Zients, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and other top Biden admin officials should testify to what they knew about Biden's condition and when they knew it.
While Biden was always old and not at 100%, I still think it's possible that Biden's condition took a turn for the worst just in the past year or so. But these people owe the Democratic Party, and more importantly the country, an explanation.
The people in the hot seat, I believe, are Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini. They both had formal jobs that were senior-but-not-that-senior but involved a lot of direct contact with the president and First Lady (they would travel to Delaware over the weekend for example).
Good point, would make sense to hear from people interacting with the Bidens in a more informal capacity. Would also be interesting to hear from the White House Physician and the Bidens' Secret Service detail
It genuinely does seem like things went to shit in the final year-18 months, Whether that was Biden's incapacity kicking up a notch or it was there all along but Ron Klain was actually just shockingly good at being "Prime Minister" and actually running the country and Zients wasn't its hard to tell. But it seemed like there was a big diminution after Klain left.
I hadn't thought of connecting it to Klain's departure, but certainly seems plausible
Harris sealed her defeat when she kept on O’Malley Dillion.
I think it's very plausible that part of the agreement, explicit or not, was "Harris, you keep my people around, or we will spend the rest of the campaign undermining you."
"Harris, you keep my people around, or we will spend the rest of the campaign undermining you."
More reason to condemn Biden, if so.
Yes!
I think it’s a cop out. Most Americans thought he was too old by a large margin and most Democrats when polled would have preferred someone else. So Democrats, I think, knew there was a problem but operated on a “dance with the one that brung you” mentality.
Then, tribal partisanship kicked in and caused Democrats to vigorously defend against the notion that Biden was too old. Not just professional political people, but Democrats debating online, many of whom were belittling when the question of age or ability was brought up, or, for example, leaped immediately to the conclusion that the Hur report was a political hit job.
In short there was a high degree of self-deception going on which prevented pressure from being placed on Biden until his problems couldn’t be papered over anymore.
Now the narrative is that Biden or his staff are solely to blame for that, when in reality the only people who were really fooled were Democrats who fooled themselves.
Finally, I don’t blame Biden too much. In my experience, especially as the guardian for a family member with dementia, a lot of old people with declining cognitive issues are simply unable to see, much less assess, their own condition. They literally are unable to perceive that something is wrong with themselves and, like all humans, are able to rationalize things that do pop up away. If there is a villain here when it comes to attempts to hide Biden’s health, it’s more likely to be Jill Biden than Joe IMO.
I think the background problems here are:
1. Vice Presidents are bad presidential candidates and parties should refuse to nominate them for President.
2. Parties should create mechanisms to ruthlessly nominate the best possible presidential candidate and should not be built to protect unpopular incumbent Presidents who are going to lose reelection.
Do I know how to solve these two problems? No. But they are the electoral problems here.
All true, and part of the rationale for the self-deception that prevented anyone but Harris from being the alternative. But I think Harris did better than most expected which admittedly isn't saying much.
As for solving the problem, Democrats have been following the GoP into weak party land subject to the whims of fickle and unrepresentative primary voters and the "Groups", and I think they need to try to reverse that.
Why do you say that Vice Presidents are bad presidential candidates? I'm sixty. By my count there are seven Vice Presidents who ran for President in my lifetime.
LBJ and Ford both ran as President, after assuming the office of President due to death/resignation of the President, so they don't really count either way for your thesis. That leaves five.
Things didn't end well for Nixon, but he lost in 1960 and then won in 1968 and 1972.
Mondale lost in 1984, but Jesus Christ walking on water probably couldn't have beaten Reagan in 1984.
George HW Bush won in 1988. His loss in 1992 had to do with his own performance as President, not his being Vice President.
Al Gore lost in 2000, but he won the popular vote and was a few hanging chads away from being President.
Joe Biden won in 2020 and was forced out of the race in 2024.
So that's five Vice Presidents running for President in my lifetime. Three won; one lost a very close call, and the final lost a blowout that probably wasn't winnable for any candidate.
It seems to me that Vice Presidents who go on to get the nomination have a pretty good record.
One big reason for pick Harris as the de-facto replacement was money. According to the minutia of campaign finance law, Harris (by being Biden's VP) was the only candidate who could take over the campaign without having the funds held up by weeks of red tape.
The counter-argument, of course, is the huge amount of money that Harris raised within days of starting her campaign, which meant a huge pent-up appetite among Democratic donors to give to anyone other than Biden. So, access to money would not have been a problem, even for a non-Harris candidate.
History textbooks still talk about the Woodrow Wilson stroke a hundred years later and the Biden situation seems worse. So many more people were involved, over a longer time, and the staffers changed policy to a huge degree.
Edith Wilson actually fits the "I committed a little light treason" meme. I love the idea of subjecting top Biden staffers to Congressional hearings on this, and I'd love the worst of grilling to come from clearly pissed-off Dems. Throwing Biden under the bus may make good tactical sense, whether you think it's actually deserved or not. Throwing his enablers so far under the bus that they end up publicly disgraced teaching high school social studies in Oklahoma is both good tactics and well merited.
"unelected" is such a weak sauce criticism. They were picked by rhe guy who was elected and helped enact the policies he was promised to enact. Say what you actually mean because just listing who is and isn't directly on the ballot is nonsensical as a criticism.
There is a difference between having staffers who help focus on details, and plausibly not even being aware of anything that's going on (and, unlike Trump, not doing any media to disavow that notion).
If you're incapable of doing a friendly super bowl interview to show America that you're awake at the wheel, then you're probably not awake at the wheel.
IDK, anyone's who's had a parent decline mentally knows you don't need a conspiracy to wait too long to take away the car keys.
Nixon didn't ratfuck his own campaign, though.
Even if staffers were covering up for him, so what? Isn't protecting their boss part of their job? And, part of the deal in voting for Biden given his age was the knowledge that he would hire competent people, so even if they do end up running the country for him, the country still functions.
I think the idea that Biden's top aides were supposed to throw their boss under the bus, and that they didn't is this huge scandal, this just feels like typical Republican B.S. And, it's not like staffers of a senile Republican president would be any less protective of their boss. A quick Google search shows that Ronald Reagan likely had Alzheimer's while president, for example.
Several years? Lots of good things got done over the past several years.
Was he clearly declining over the past year? Yep. Did it take him a bit longer to drop out than might have been optimal. Arguable, but sure maybe I guess.
Someone sometime has to explain to me how his dropping out in, say, December 2022 would have left the party and the nation better off. Someone sometime has to explain to me how his increasing problems with age led to palpable problems in policy and managing the country (i.e., *not* campaigning).
"how his dropping out in, say, December 2022 would have left the party and the nation better off"
The party wouldn't been revealed as being full of people so craven and/or cowardly that they felt like they had to go out and pretend Biden was totally up to be President until January 2029 as his declining mental ability became more and more obvious, culminating in one of the most alarming debate performances by any presidential candidate in the TV era.
So instead we got a young, strong candidate who ran a good (if far from perfect) campaign.
And we also learned on Nov. 5 that in the end the American electorate isn't really bothered by the idea of electing an old guy who is clearly declining mentally.
But we didn’t get that younger, stronger candidate — we got the very old president flailing around until his incapacity became obvious, and then a pivot. I think she did a pretty good job handling the pivot, but it was a bad situation.
If he had voluntarily quit in, idk, March, endorsed Harris, resigned from office, we’d have been in a better spot and still avoided the race-to-the-left primary.
Perhaps relative to Biden, but I would not characterize Harris as a young and/or strong candidate.
But that candidate also effectively said, "I approve of everything the current president, who two-thirds of people disapprove of, has done" - and before she was the candidate she was totally behind Biden, as it became ever more obvious that he wasn't up to the job.
I think the good of that outcome would likely have come with a 2022 dropout, and the bad might have turned out differently.
I'm sorry, Kenny, I don't understand what you're saying.
A young, strong candidate who ran a fairly good campaign was pretty likely if Biden dropped out of the race in 2022. Trump’s win was clearly much more contingent.
In retrospect, Biden should have made a very explicit pledge during the 2020 campaign that he would be a one-term president, and made consistent statements to the press throughout his presidency that he was sticking to that. No need to keep people guessing even until 2022.
Well, they would have had a normal primary season and the nominee would have been the person who performed the best.
I think it absolutely is (or should be) a bigger scandal than Watergate.
The problem is that by the standards of, er, the contemporary moment, being worse than Watergate isn't all that notable.
I think Biden's presidency revealed to many Americans what the Democratic Party has become: "hahaha, you have to vote for us because your only other option is Trump!" 10-20 years ago, would the party/sympathetic media *ever* have put up with
1. A bizarre presidency-by-committee situation where it's unclear who's accountable for decisions?
2. The president unilaterally declaring amendments ratified?
3. Pardons for family members who haven't been accused of anything?
4. Flagrantly illegal executive orders (e.g. student debt cancellation)?
Of course Trump is worse. But it's infuriating that Democrats have responded to a weak candidate like Trump not by trying to win, but by taking advantage of the situation to become worse themselves! While the Trump years have made me more resolute in voting for Democrats, Democrats' conduct has also definitely pushed me to the right intellectually.
I'm not sure that better "position-taking" is going to quickly solve the problem. There's a well-earned lack of trust that won't be easy to solve. I don't think anyone believes, at this point, that any Democratic president *won't* effectively be running the Warren administration.
Trump's rebranding of the GOP happened not just because he took a few heterodox positions. He humiliated the entire party leadership and got them to kowtow to him anyway. Is there any Democrat who can do this? I guess we'll see, but I'm a little skeptical.
Bill Clinton had "the era of big government is over". Democrats need a "America isn't a racist, borderline-genocidal monster where workers subsist on starvation wages*". Obviously it needs to be pithier than that. But it is very difficult to win elections when leading voices in your coalition are so scathing about the country. Didn't work for Labour in Britain, hasn't worked for Democrats in America.
* Assuming Trump doesn't actually wreck the country so badly as to make that description accurate
"While the Trump years have made me more resolute in voting for Democrats, Democrats' conduct has also definitely pushed me to the right intellectually."
I've had a hard time articulating my current political leanings, but this hits the nail on the head for me. Thank you.
100%
And it’s the most aggravating outcome. Like, I’m happy to see federal DEI programs get shredded, but why can’t this be done by a better person?!?
I've been wondering about this myself. Maybe it's because only a Trump 2.0 can just run roughshod over the entrenched interests (and not worry about the unfortunate collateral damage)? I bet even anti-DEI DeSantis would have taken years to do even half of what Trump has already done.
I wish I could like this twice.
May I introduce you to the “superlike™️?”
I am more convinced in the centre left. In a choice between the “progressive” left and Trump, I’d opt for Trump.
They ran on being the "Adults". they absolutely were not the adults.
Their strategy is somehow the worst of both worlds. They run as the party that believes rules and norms are good as a matter of principle. Then they break the rules and norms, making them seem hypocritical and nullifying the value of the brand. But they don’t break them enough to achieve anything.
Exactly, they wanted credit for purporting to believe in norms and the threat Trump posed, but they neither wanted those norms to constrain themselves nor actually take the actions that the purported threat implied.
Excellently succinct.
They should have just broke with norms and rules to begin with, stacked the deck in their favor, and actually indicted Trump.
When push came to shove, Biden didn’t see Trump as a legitimate threat.
This is the depressing conclusion I have reached as well. Elected Democrats mostly chose the rhetoric of being the vanguard of democracy at a moment of mortal threat but never once believed it was literally true. None of their other choices make sense if you legitimately think failure ends in 1933 Germany! The only moment they arguably acted as such was coalescing to block Bernie from winning, but even that now appears less about preserving democracy and more about not losing so they can achieve all their positional policy goals rather. It was purely instrumental.
I don't understand why people are conspiratorial about Bernie and the 2020 primary, it was clear that Bernie only had a plurality of support and most voters wanted a non-Bernie candidate. Once the party did the job of identifying that candidate voters consolidated on the choice. Did the party make the mistake of picking Biden instead of Bullock, yes but the will of the voters was not-Bernie
They did indict Trump. If you think lawfare was the right strategy, they should have indicted him in 2021.
Well, to be fair, compared to Trump's administration they absolutely were adults.
"Pardons for family members who haven't been accused of anything?"
This one I give Biden a pass on, because it was clearly in response to Trump threatening to use the DOJ for petty revenge.
Matt's point that this basically ratified republicans not utterly specious arguments about democratic Lawfare though are just immensely damaging. Mostly referring to the NY and GA cases, the documents case was basically iron clad, the J6 case while aggressive, never got off the ground more or less because it started so late. Regardless, Biden has done just as much to torch belief in the sanctity of rule of law as trump did.
"Biden has done just as much to torch belief in the sanctity of rule of law as trump did"
This is not true - the blanket pardon of everyone involved in January 6th is much worse than anything Biden did. Biden's pardons gave conservative rags the ability to write technically true things like "Biden did bad pardons before Trump did his bad pardons" that deliberately look only at similarities in kind and not enormous differences in degree, but the idea that Trump wouldn't be breaking norms and bending laws without Biden's actions is ridiculous.
I think this goes back to Matt's analogy on the Politix pod about kids in a restaurant. If Democrats ran on "we are the party that controls our children, and we are mad at rancorous restaurant guests and will stop that," then let their kids be disruptive, it matters much less to voters who desire a chaos free environment to dine who was whining and who was turning over pots and pans in the kitchen. In absolute terms you are correct, they are not comparable. But in terms of how people view the importance of these norms, it is democrats failure to enforce and uphold them that does greater marginal damage to the project itself.
Let's not blame the voters here, in part because we really don't know how they think. What do *you* think?
I genuinely honest to god believe a President announcing that there is a 28th Amendment and that it is "the law of the land" is absolutely fucking insane and would be the most unbelievable abuse of constitutional authority we have ever seen if carried to fruition. That it had incredibly little impact in reality does not negate that the method if carried out would essentially end the united states as we understand it and ought not be countenanced in any form.
Because the Archivist mercifully didn't want to light the republic on fire, we didn't get a constitutional change by fiat but the method employed here is vastly more damaging than a malice application of an indisputably constitutional power. Imagine if Trump declared tomorrow he was enacting a 29th amendment to ban abortion and would fire every archivist until someone agreed with him. Obviously the courts would stop him but we are full bore crisis at that moment.
But Biden would never have done what you imagine (with reason!) Trump doing. The ERA thing was such a big nothing that it won't even rise to the level of a minor trivia question in a year.
I'm proud of a country where the archivist can tell the President, "No way, sir." I want to retain that. I fear that disappearing under Trump. Who will stand against him?
My new rule is that any time I come across "Biden and Trump both did bad pardons" I immediately stop reading or listening and go on about my day.
E.g., the most recent "Matter of Opinion." It finally got me off my duff to cancel my subscription to it.
"The Economist" had a "Biden and Trump pardons both baaad" in their most recent issue, as one example.
Anticipating that, I stopped reading the Economist about thirty years ago.
I believe those were commutations of Federal death sentences , not pardons, because Biden does not believe in the death penalty. They will continue to be imprisoned for life. J6 pardons let loose a bunch of violent seditionists to do more crime and run for office if they want.
That makes no sense. Biden torched trust by not intervening in state prosecutions of Trump? Trump promising to weaponize the DOJ against people who plainly didn't commit crimes isn't what damaged the trust, it was Biden trying to prevent that?
Have you met voters? They aren't that rigorous. I'm not blaming Biden for Alvin Bragg or Fani William's adventurism, but the Dem line all along was basically trust the courts, trust the rule of law, it will work itself out correctly. If that was true, then there was no reason to fear Trump's fake charges against people who did not commit crimes. Pardoning them preemptively was a tell to voters that they do not believe this is how courts work, they believe they are just venues for partisan retribution, hence the need for a preemptive remedy if you will.
Vindictive prosecutors and FBI agents can destroy people long before a case goes to a jury.
Can't you see that you are saying the exact same things a Trump supporter would say when describing the FBI under Comey and the actions of Robert Mueller?
Each side using "look at THEM" as a justification for their leader's terrible actions.
"Biden has done just as much to torch belief in the sanctity of rule of law as trump did."
For the love of all that is holy and good, I beg you to examine the thinking that led you to write such a sentence.
The documents case was arguably complicated by the Biden documents next to the Corvette. Don't get me wrong; I don't think any former President or Vice President should be carrying classified documents home. And for the life of me I don't know why Trump didn't just say it was inadvertent and give them back. I mean, he did it, but when everybody does it, it seems like selective prosecution.
The New York case was a bogus legal theory, and I suspect it will be overturned on appeal.
I actually supported that because I think the threat of jail for Hunter would have him rolling on Joe within five minutes, and the resulting exposure would have been catastrophic for the whole country.
There are some weirdos on this board, but “person who believes every right-wing conspiracy about the Bidens” might take the cake.
Eh, I assume KateLE does not mean 'roll and reveal Biden's secret nefarious dealings with X' but 'roll and say whatever he was told to say to get out of trouble.'
I've never seen a person use "roll" that way. And also, Hunter was not being threatened with jail over anything implicated Joe anyway. How's he gonna get out of the gun charge by "rolling" on Joe?
So, the usual way someone rolls to get out of trouble is they give up someone else, a bigger fish, either on the same crime they were caught on or another crime they are aware of.
This could be honest, or not.
There's an amusing scene in Brooklyn 99, where having caught the extremely prolific car thief, the Pontiac Bandit, he offers information on various other criminals, in exchange for a reduced sentence, or immunity from prosecution.
This has obvious potential upsides as well as obvious incentives to lie.
You need to watch more film noire, police procedurals, crime dramas, etc.: https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/254861/what-does-i-am-not-the-kind-of-dude-who-rolls-mean
Exactly this! I can understand the temptation to exploit the situation when your opponent gives you a gift in nominating a uniquely unpopular nominee. But when that nominee is also uniquely unfit and dangerous, it is unforgiveably irresponsible to do so.
I think Joe fully believed the hype that he was the only one who could beat Trump.
"3. Pardons for family members who haven't been accused of anything?"
If I'm the outgoing President, and I'm facing Trump/Bondi/Kash Patel, you're damn straight I'm pardoning my family "who haven't (YET) been accused of anything."
Anyone who thinks that trio won't release the hounds of hell on anyone they choose has not been paying attention.
I would tried Plan B: Not allowed my shiftless son and brother to corruptly trade on my name and office.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Relatives, man; whatcha gonna do.
Not sure if you're replying to me, as I don't see how this refutes or elaborates on my point: Biden shouldn't have allowed the corruption his family members seem to have engaged in. If he'd done that, there wouldn't have been any crimes, investigations, or pardons.
That said, I take no issue with your point.
Yeah, I get that it's mildly damaging in actual reality and more damaging in the public's eye, but blaming it on Biden is tough for me -- his hand was really forced, and was forced because of Trump specifically. He wouldn't have been pardoning with an incoming Romney or GWB presidency.
If the American people are outraged by the norm breaking of the Joe Biden pardons, then they should look in the mirror to see the source of that regrettable behavior: their decision to put Trump back in the White House.
The first line of defense against Trump remains the courts and the standards of evidence enforced in our courtrooms. If Biden had any confidence in our system of justice, that is a fight he should have allowed to proceed. Instead, he abandoned that fight before letting it go forward. He conceded what those unfairly targeted had the right to contest. It could have been a fight that many of us would have rallied to support, through legal defense donations and cheering on articulate advocates defending the accused in their days in court. History is made in such contests.nIt was a fight we should have relished, not shirked.
If you think that the courts would not have delivered justice, how do you know that? And what other battleground would you choose for fighting back against any Trumped-up prosecutions in the days ahead? There may yet be politically-motivated prosecutions to contest, but Biden undercut the presumption of innocence and the norms that would have otherwise put such prosecutions in a dark light.
In my opinion, Biden's pardons were the worst decision he ever made.
Everyone Trump targets is innocent. We don’t need a fraudulent prosecution, even when we win in court, to prove that.
To fight this desperate battle against the oncoming evils of the Trump administration, we have to be ready to use every tool at our disposal. And yes that includes pardons. Trump doesn’t deserve the dignity of our people being forced into a courtroom showdown. Screw him. Take away that particular noxious tool.
Nothing that Trump has shown to date indicates that he deserves the benefit of the doubt or the right to be treated as a worthy foe. Pardons are totally legal. Use them. Use them!
I think the verdicts of juries, and the process that delivers those verdicts, would carry more weight and command more attention from the public than any individual's opinion on this post. If we're picking our fights to counter and rein in Trump, I'd pick the courts and juries weighing the evidence and delivering justice in response to any prosecutions of the kind we're talking about here as one of the best ways to do so.
While #2 and #3 are definitely bad, they also completely postdated the election results.
“Trump's rebranding of the GOP happened not just because he took a few heterodox positions. He humiliated the entire party leadership and got them to kowtow to him anyway. Is there any Democrat who can do this?”
Why is this something you want a Democrat to do? It seems bad.
Since the party leadership seems totally incompetent and worthy of humiliation, idk?
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009
Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act 2010 (including creation of the CFPB)
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010
Free Trade agreements with South Korea (2010) and Colombia (2012)
Full withdrawal of US Troops from Iraq 2011
Normalization of relations with Cuba 2015
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act 2021
Inflation Reduction Act 2022
CHIPS and Science Act 2022
All due substantially to "party leadership". They are legislators, and their function is to legislate.
And this is just in the last 15 years. If this is incompetence, I'd love more of it.
Definitely some strong achievements there. I would argue that their function is also to win elections and build the Democratic brand (in order to pass more legislation) and in my view the Democratic brand has crumbled across large swaths of the country. According to the chart, we've lost 7 points of party ID between 2008 and 2024, with the GOP gaining 6 points in the same time period.
I think its dramatically underrated in public discourse how badly Obama going to a friggin' baseball game with Castro and then the Dems immediately almost nominating a literal self proclaimed socialist absolutely nuked the party's competitiveness with huge swaths of Latino voters, particularly in Florida. And for what gain exactly? Does the Cuban embargo make sense as a national security matter in 2025? definitely not. But did so publicly embracing Cuba help achieve any tangible political goal whatsoever or did we just end up with much worse politics at home and worse treatment for suffering Cubans for that matter? Absolutely yes.
Underrated comment.
Great comment.
This criticism is going to age horrifically in under a year and is only going to be looked at worse. Pointing out that Trump is a corrupt fascist is not a bad argument. It also isn't true because you have to ignore the entire Dem policy platform to make it, but the fascism part is the part that will be unthinkable in the wake of how much suffering Trump causes.
The more you are worried about how bad Trump is, the more you need to hold yourself to a high standard governing and campaigning. While the Democrats did some good things, they largely handed Trump the victory with huge blunders on illegal immigration, inflation, candidates, and campaign strategy. Fine, Trump is a corrupt fascist. How bad do you have to be at politics for voters to elect him anyway?
I agree that Trump is a corrupt fascist but I don’t see where OP said he wasn’t or that it was a bad argument to say he is? He said that “SINCE Trump is a corrupt fascist the quality of our candidates is irrelevant” is a bad (implicit) argument.
It was truly heartbreaking to watch all the people who called Biden a selfish, self dealing, corrupt, DC insider, crypt keeper, secret progressive, out of touch weirdo be proven mostly right by the end of the administration through a data point chart so clear that when you connect the dots it spells out “fuck you”.
I too am angry at Biden, angry at those who defended him when they knew the truth, and angry at myself for being fooled by that miserable old man.
I hope his funeral is an hour long and they only show it on cspan.
Jennifer o’Malley and her team of stooges betrayed the Party and Country.
They will be rewarded with more jobs and access.
You'll probably get your wish, I don't think Biden will make it until 2029, and given how pissy Trump was about flags flying at half staff because of Carter, you know he'll do everything he can to make the farewell to Biden as short and low-key as possible.
Sorry, is this chart a figure of speech or there's some data/diagram/graph?
Also, is one hour too much or too little? (It could be a 60second TikTok, after all that's how most of the people will really get awareness of the fact.)
Just making a (bad) joke.
Seeing as most of these presidential funerals are day long affairs covered by all media, I think an hour on cspan would be the right fit.
To your point tho Bo, I can't think of any other Conservative Meme that went from fringe opinion (Sleepy joe accusations in 2019/2020) to essentially proven reality in a faster amount of time or more fervently from fringe to ubiquitous.
It was easy to ignore because it came from Trump and ... sure, old man speaks slow, who cares, he won! And of course 4 years later people were tired already, midterms, supreme court this, judge that, and the gap between the swing voter and the regular D voter is already an unfathomable chasm. (Hence the comments like "I would vote for a dead rat over Trump" and so on.)
It's good to distance yourself from catastrophe and failure. Trump did that retroactively with Bush's foreign policy (which he supported at the time) and Obama did it in real time, by opposing the Iraq War before it started. Obama's record of opposition let him say, after the fact, "I told you so," and this was part of why he beat Hillary for the nomination in 2008.
The new Trump administration is going to be a complete catastrophe -- they are riding high on a potent cocktail of hubris, ideology, and ketamine, and it is going to end in a monumental train wreck.
The smart Democratic play would be to start talking, now, about the illegality, the foolishness, the arrogance and overreach, so that when it crashes down they can convincingly say, "we told you so."
Instead, morons like Schumer are talking about bipartisanship. This is political malpractice -- it means owning the catastrophe when it comes, instead of being the honest forecaster who told it to you straight. Schumer should be parroting Obama's line: I'm not against all Republicans, just criminal ones.
Yes, we should distance ourselves from the Biden debacle. But the Trump crackup is going to be even bigger, and now is the time for Democrats to start distancing themselves from it, loudly.
"Instead, morons like Schumer are talking about bipartisanship. This is political malpractice -- it means owning the catastrophe when it comes, instead of being the honest forecaster who told it to you straight. Schumer should be parroting Obama's line: I'm not against all Republicans, just criminal ones."
I just don't think this is true. Democrats were swarming all day yesterday.
It's always smart to say you're open to bipartisanship, even while driving the knife in.
I'm glad to hear of the swarms. More swarms better.
Always pick zerg and single hatch rush
As we economists say “talk is cheap.” Democrats are letting Trump set up his own disaster and I don’t think they are going to help at all passing a new budget or CR.
The issue is that the public doesn't want to hear from Chuck Schumer or anyone who smells like the Biden administration, the ossified Democratic leadership, or the type of white person who would drape themselves in a Kente cloth.
They are all branded hysterical, cringe, and rubes -- and more importantly, losers -- and I don't think there's any coming back from it.
Only a guy like Fetterman, who is wisely keeping his powder dry, and (more important) seems tethered to reality, can be the public face of the party.
Thank you! I'm so tired of people saying "Dems are silent", "No one is fighting back", like come on, just because it didn't show up on your social media feed doesn't mean that Dems are just rolling over. People just making a comment, maybe people should think before they speak and look into it first.
Honestly, I can't wait until Schumer retires. The Dem party will be better for it.
"It's always smart to say you're open to bipartisanship, even while driving the knife in."
I don't agree with this at all -- if your message is "Trump and the GOP are a danger to Democracy and the country", you can't also be saying "but we'll try to work with them".
And, of course, Trump sure hasn't expressed any openness to bipartisanship, and he just won.
I also like Wes Moore's responsiveness and maturity right now. Ruben Gallego as well. The Dems have a deep bench with Whitmer and Shapiro as well, I think there is an opportunity for the young people to make some noise in the future.
I think a talented enough politician could split the baby and simultaneously argue 1) Against Biden, his catastrophic decision to stay in the race and the cover up, 2) Against the progressive hive mind and the Elizabeth Warren presidency in disguise while espousing the principles of the CSDM, and 3) Argue that trump and his cronies were monstrously bad *for trump voters*. The Rhetorical shift that Matt highlights that Trump struck in 2016 was he was dismissive of Bush and the fallout in his wake but not of Bush voters for their choices. He clearly drew the line that Bush failed, gave us Obama which was worse, and I will be a break from both of them, more in line with what you wanted a republican to be.
A more talented pol can argue against both Bidenism and Trump, but not against Biden voters and not against the getable share of marginal Trump voters who hated Biden but don't cultishly love DJT.
“ A more talented pol can argue against both Bidenism and Trump….”
I agree, it should not be impossible to find someone like this. And they should be staking out that independent position, now.
Who's a fresh face on the scene who made a little splash and is getting talked about as a possible VP candidate soon? That's where you'll find the next Obama at this point.
“ Who's a fresh face on the scene who made a little splash?”
More importantly:
Who is the man, who would risk his neck for his brother man?
He’s a complicated man, and no one understands him, but his woman.
You're damn right...
Can you dig it?
Mark Cuban? Maybe Wes Moore?
Best I can come up with is Andy Kim.
I'm from Jersey, I love that guy.
Can I ask a sidebar as a former Warren voter: why has it become trendy to say "Bidens administration was sabotaged by Warrenite staffers"?
Does it just boil down to failed student debt cancellation? Because many of her ideas that found a home in his administration were NOT the things that made him unpopular.
I think it is a useful shorthand for the worst exigencies of "The Groups" and hyper educated progressive activist group think. It crystalizes the ways in which Biden's admin was left in the Warrenite sense as opposed to the Sanders 2016 sense. More about Land Acknowledgements and the like than just visceral hatred of rich industrialists or whatever. This may not make sense to voters much to the right of this comment section but its the distinction between the Hard materialist Left and Progressives. In many ways this is the least popular variant of left politics, many voters at least credit Sanders for being an independent voice or whatever they like about him. Warren is seen as just the worst animation of liberal elitism. And voters saw this in things like Student Loan cancelation but also liberal opinions on immigration enforcement, crime, etc.
That's fair and makes sense. I think I'm just still bitter about her treatment in 2019-20 as I believed, and still believe, that her underlying focus on strong families, fostering competition and "a strong capitalism with rules," protecting consumers, and distributed growth are quite popular ideas, whereas she was popularly depicted as "extremist woman from Massachusetts." The fact that even today her name - and not Sanders who won far more votes, had a much larger campaign apparatus, is an avowed socialist, and was dominant among 20 something leftists - is shorthand for progressive staffers who undermined Biden just exemplifies my perception of how she was treated in that primary.
She certainly wasn't the loudest voice in the room campaigning on identity politics beyond pointing out that women should be able to both have kids and pursue a career.
I think its almost more about affect in the minds of voters than about their respective policies and motivations. To lean on an old Weeds turn of phrase from Jane Coaston, its the idea of Bernie Sanders vs Bernie the living senator and the Idea of Elizabeth Warren vs Warren the living law prof, academic and senator.
That makes sense - I appreciate you taking the time to explain even if it still grinds my gears a bit (a lot). In keeping with the theme of Matt's post: I'm very confident she'd have had a more successful administration!
I will always like and respect her for the reasons you say but she was not a strong campaigner (either in an appealing to voters sense or in a leading her organization sense) and let this other stuff take over way too much - unfortunately partly to distinguish herself from Sanders, when really they are very aligned on the bread and butter economics. Some of that came from his camp also.
Agreed with that. I also thought her strong alignment with teachers' unions and full-throated embrace of total aversion to school choice was both 1) A massive self-own in that campaign, and 2) A preview of a massive political issue for Dems in the years since. She could and should have stuck with her prior beliefs and carved out a niche as "school choice is a progressive value, as is prioritizing education over job engine as the key function of public schools" and I think it'd have helped her immensely. Perhaps to the point above, she may have been led astray by her own staffers on this.
She's always been full of baloney, and came across like an assistant principal.
My impression was that Warrenism led to Lina Khan, which led to pushing Big Tech out of the Dem coalition. That definitely cost us in 2024.
Neo-Brandeis anti-trust is a Warren thing, right? It means an FTC that isn’t focused on keeping consumer costs down at a time when inflation is political poison. It also makes tech your enemy, which has various negative political consequences.
Warren called for abolishing ICE, decriminalizing illegal immigration, “affirming asylum protections” and increasing the refugee admissions cap. I assume the Warrenites in the immigration field weren’t helping Biden to pursue politically sustainable policy.
I think those were both probably more politically impactful than the student loan stuff.
Fair points. I'll disagree about the positioning of her anti-trust efforts; the essential framing of it less about about "deconsolidate corporate / employer power" INSTEAD OF "keep consumer prices low," and more about both/and (as opposed to ignoring the former altogether). Warren was in fact probably the loudest voice on the left over the past 4 years harping on inflation - ironically, in a way I disagreed with.
The reality of Warren's stance on immigration is that most Dems, myself included, believed in most of that and still do; I suspect most of those stances would poll very, very highly among 2020 Sanders voters and even higher among his staffers. Among my many disappointments with Biden is that a total mismanagement of the border (stemming I think from heavy indecisiveness) and a perceived lack of caring about inflation swung popular opinion far right on immigration in a way that is already having tragic impacts.
The problem is, I don’t think it’s true that Trump and cronies (2017-2021 edition) were really bad for Trump voters. He just didn’t really get anything done because he’s lazy and was surrounded by people trying to bubble-wrap him away from power. And the economy continued chugging along. Toss in Covid, whose existence wasn’t his fault, and OWS, which was a genuine achievement, and you can see where the nostalgia came from.
This edition of Trump is very different and going to be an epic disaster, but I think the epic disaster has to actually happen before politicians can run on it.
Totally agree on the distinction here. The benefit now, unlike in 2024, is democrats can argue against this version of president Trump, which may provide easier footing.
I don't get this. Americans love talk of bipartisanship, and Schumer is out of power so it's the best tool he has to try and slow down Trump. Sitting back and doing nothing but criticism is fine if you think anything Trump does can be recovered. But if you think he could do truly terrible things, then you take any chance to influence him not to.
"Americans love talk of bipartisanship...."
I'm not sure any Americans love bipartisanship more than most Americans loved the idea of a crusade in the Middle East back in 2002-2003. So, Obama's stance at that time was not driven by his attempts to do what's popular.
"...if you think he could do truly terrible things, then you take any chance to influence him not to."
That's a good general policy, I agree. Perhaps Obama was freed up by the realization that his stance could have no influence on the Neo-Cons' obsession -- he was not trading away any chance to improve things by speaking his mind. Schumer may think he can still influence the decisions of the Heritage zealots: I think he's kidding himself. Democrats are not going to be given any meaningful say: they should simply stand back and tell the truth about the illegality and folly of it all.
I think you are conflating what Schumer (Senate *Minority* leader) should be doing with what a future Democratic presidential candidate should be doing. The latter should be doing exactly what you are saying. Schumer should be doing what he can to mitigate the damage that Trump is doing. Some of that will be condemning things Trump is doing, but other times it will be trying to exert what influence Democrats have over policy - including bipartisanship.
I agree, but there's also a difference between mitigating the damage and saving the Republicans and protecting Americans from understanding all the consequences of Republican rule.
That's why if the Republicans are hellbent on shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt ceiling, Democrats in Congress should say "Have at it" rather than providing the votes to prevent the Republican majority from carrying out its will.
"That's why if the Republicans are hellbent on shutting down the government and defaulting on the debt ceiling, Democrats in Congress should say "Have at it" rather than providing the votes to prevent the Republican majority from carrying out its will."
I disagree with this and I think you do too. Politics has become to similar to spouses going through a terrible divorce. Willing to burn the house down to spite the other side. But the actions government officials take or don't take have long reaching consequences. The government defaulting on its debt likely has severe economic consequences that would hurt a lot of ordinary people. To the extent that people are in government to help people, this is abandons that to feel good about being in the right and proving others were wrong to vote for them.
If Mike Johnson needs, say, 100 Democratic votes to keep the government open or extend the debt ceiling because most Republicans refuse to step up, I say let it rip. Unless the Democrats can extract truly painful concessions from the Republicans.
One reason Trump and the Republicans keep winning despite their stands is that people see no impact on their personal lives. In part because the Democrats stand ready to smooth the rough edges of the opposing party. Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans wreak horrific damage on things that don’t directly touch Americans.
It’s time for parliamentary-style government. If the ruling party refuses, say, to keep us from defaulting then let it be so.
Part of Schumer's audience is also Collins and Murkowski...they are very much Republicans but there is some non-zero amount of what they do that is influenced by whether they feel they are being treated respectfully by the D senators. Unfortunately they're no longer enough to swing a vote by themselves but it can still matter.
"Instead, morons like Schumer are talking about bipartisanship."
Ahem: https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/leader-schumer-statement-after-federal-judge-temporarily-blocked-trump-administration-cruel-and-chaotic-federal-funding-freeze
I'm glad to see some of this. But there's been too much of the other stuff.
Typically opposition reaction. Too little, too late.
What? The freeze went in effect yesterday and there’s an injunction against it right now lol do yall read the news
Yeah, I complain about Democrats all the time and this standard is bananas
As much as I've criticized Democrats like Schumer he's doing the right thing by mostly sitting back and letting Trump and the GOP hang themselves.
So far, it's working out okay. Trump's approval and Democrats pulled off an upset win in a special election in an Iowa district that voted for Trump by over 20 points.
After reading this, I feel like I need a cigarette.
And a blindfold?
I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
A big old glass of whiskey might get the job done!
Worse a joint.
I'm not American, so maybe I'm missing something, but my outside view is that Biden's pardons were really really bad. The fact that Trump tried one billion times to overturn the 2020 election and the courts told him no (including SCOTUS where Republican appointees have a 6/9 majority) was great for the image of US democracy. And now Biden tells us that these courts are not to be trusted.
PS: Given that I think everyone expected at least some pardons for the J6 rioters, which would have allowed the next Democrat to win the White House to also pardon a potentially convicted Fauci, I really really don't understand what happened here.
Trump is right now taking Secret Service protection and security clearances away from anyone who has been critical of him. Kash Patel has been threatening to go after Trump's critics and basically ruin their lives for criticizing Trump. This is why things like the Cheney pardon happened.
The Kash Patel nomination needs more attention. Patel seems every bit as crazy as RFK Jr., he signs books with some kind of QAnon slogan.
Biden never took Trump seriously. He didn’t care about Trump’s crimes or Jan 6. There was no indictment after 4 years. Actions speak louder than words. Biden won on a fluke due to Covid and acted like it was some mandate to enact a massive progressive agenda that was out of step with public opinion.
I'd like to think that Biden stayed as far away from the operations of the Department of Justice as possible. If the Trump indictment was delayed that almost certainly had absolutely nothing to do with Biden.
It's common wisdom that Garland dithered far too long in going after Trump. Harry Litman, in his Substack, makes the most compelling case that this is a bum rap: https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/merrick-garland-is-getting-a-bum
Biden wasn't the Attorney General. The multiple efforts to bring Trump to justice, while obviously ineffective in the end, were substantial and well-documented, and in large measure were stymied by Republican opposition (that is, Republican judges). Our system isn't designed to allow 50% of the polity to indict the leader of the other 50%.
If Biden had fired Merrick Garland ten months in because of insufficient aggressiveness in prosecuting Trump, he'd have been crucified. And even then it's not clear it would have made a difference.
> There was no indictment after 4 years
Huh? I assume you mean conviction, because Trump was indicted 4x over in 2023.
It's pretty clear the calculation here was "we have to do everything by the book or it won't stick". They just didn't count on Judge Cannon being explicitly in the tank.
The one thing it should have been clear to the DOJ though, and wasn't in retrospect, is that Trump is expert at slowing down court cases. They should have anticipated that and had a better strategy.
I object to the pardons, but here's my best argument for them.
The courts will ultimately exonerate whichever witch hunt victims Trump goes after assuming they're actually not guilty of the crime.
In the _meantime_ this is a lot of stress to put on people who are ultimately just having the kitchen sink thrown at them. By pre-pardoning he saves them from all of the _other_ effects of going to court.
I personally still object because while I think it's a good thing to protect them from that, but I don't think it's a good _enough_ thing to overcome the negatives.
That's a good comment, and I agree with you. However, I think (and, again, I'm not American so I can very easily be wrong!) that the Republicans can anyway drag even the pardoned people. For example, a pardon wouldn't have saved Hillary Clinton from the Benghazi committee, right? So, the threat of stress and sink throwing still exists.
PS: A lot of other commenters mention politicized actions of the DOJ or the FBI. I don't want to respond to everybody individually and make this thread huge, but my point is that I expect that the courts won't agree with whatever politicized prosecution Trump and his people do.
A pardon would have made her job much easier since would not have to worry about perjury vs incriminating herself. The issue is that it would have tainted both her image and Obama and I don't think even her supporters in the Democratic Party leadership would have been willing to try to run her for president. I think the Fauci pardon is probably good for this reason (he's old and doesn't have any future ambition to my knowledge and the justice department could easily ruin his life). I think Biden pardoning his relatives was particularly bad (especially his brother).
At least the Benghazi committee didn’t require her to hire a lawyer at personal expense.
It depends on the pardon. As of Jan20, he pardoned a lot of people and the vast majority were good. There are two other buckets: one he wouldn’t have to pardon if republicans were in any way normal people (think Fauci and Cheney); and the other ones are the problematic ones, like his brother.
I'm talking mostly about cases like Fauci and Cheney. The courts said no to Trump in 2020, and I think that sent a powerful message. Why would they say yes this time?
You could debate whether it was politically astute or necessary. (I don't think it was.)
But I don't think there's a reasonable argument that pardoning someone like Liz Cheney was a corrupt or immoral act.
The equivalency on this thread between the Jan 6 pardons--criminals convicted of trespassing, sedition, and aggravated violence in some cases--and that of Fauci or Cheney baffles me. (Not saying you. Just generally.)
A conspiracy theory that I'm willing to believe in is that Biden wanted to pardon people like his brother, and he added Liz Cheney to the list to draw the attention there. I think that's immoral. To clarify, I don't believe that Liz Cheney committed crimes, but I do believe that the J6 rioters committed crimes.
You're getting spun up about some strange things. None of this is particularly consequential.
Nah. Adding Liz Cheney to the list of pardonees does nothing to draw attention away from Biden's brother. I don't see it.
I have seen clearly more people mention Cheney than Biden's brother, when it comes to pardons.
The thing is, Trump complains about things being done to him that are not (political persecution), but that he fully intends to do to others. The "weaponization of the DOJ" was not a thing under Biden. Trump really is and was corrupt, and was caught and called out again and again, although the clock ran out before he was fully adjudicated. The prosecutions and investigations of him were legitimate. (There were some missteps along the way, but they were also discovered and corrected). A corrupt DOJ working at the behest of the president doesn't prosecute that president's own son, FFS.
Trump's intentions, made explicit throughout his campaign, were indeed to go after his political enemies, not for actual wrongdoing but because he can. The justice system depends not only on laws but on rules and norms. Trump breaks them all. There's a category difference. Democracy runs in part on the honor system, and Trump has no honor. So that's why Biden felt he had to pardon people who didn't actually do anything wrong.
IMO, the Hunter and other family pardons were a disgrace. Again, a category difference.
Trump is going to get four years to make judicial appointments to push the courts more in a Trump loyalist direction.
Pardons are an uncontroversial authority of American presidents. There have been bad pardons before. The pardon power should probably be restrained or done away with altogether, but no I don't think this is really bad. I'm saving really bad for things that threaten the continued existence of the American Republic. Everything else is meh
It’s difficult to calibrate what “really, really bad “ means in terms of American politics.
There’s been a lot of norm smashing in the last 10 years and Obama’s rise was norm smashing in a different way. However, political mistakes between from, say 1928 and to 1974 (not to mention the GWOT) killed alot more people.
>And now Biden tells us that these courts are not to be trusted.<
I think he was telling us Donald Trump's Justice Department is not to be trusted. And I fear he's right about that. Also, political prosecutions can bankrupt a person, even if, in the end, they're not convicted (or even charged).
He called the prosecution by his own Justice Department of Hunter Biden politically motivated. He voided the decision by a jury for the same reason. He said the system cannot be trusted to mete out justice if the person being charged is politically connected.
Hunter Biden's pardon is arguably the most immoral thing Biden did while in office.
> He called the prosecution by his own Justice Department
Hunter was prosecuted by a Special Counsel, which yes, in theory is "his own DOJ", but the whole point of the Special Counsel is that they're supposed to be independent. So it's not a contradiction to say that this prosecution was politically motivated while others were not.
What's happening here is that Trump and his minions are vicious and vindictive and will use all the powers in their control to hound people to hell so Biden said screw it, I'm going to throw what blanket of protection I have over them to try to keep the flesheating zombies of the new administration as far away from them as possible.
The great danger is normalizing Trump. Just look at his actions in the first week or so. My god, four years of this to come.
I am a contrarian on pardons. I think Biden was totally justified to issue those pardons and while Trump's pardons obviously included some people who shouldn't have been pardoned, too much is made of this. An unchecked presidential pardon power is good because prosecutors overcharge, overprosecute, and, with the help of judges, oversentence.
I strongly disagree. Prosecutors overcharge etc., sure, but why should the counter to that be one official who cancels the sentences of defendants close to himself? Favors for the friends, families, and allies of the country's highest official, and excessive punishments for the obscure and unknown, hardly seems like justice to me.
Because any other system will get captured by prosecutors and because of the President's limited bandwidth and political checks, it's not as though all the guilty people are ever getting out of prison.
Prosecutors are just a far bigger danger than presidents are in this situation. You care about what the President does because it gets publicity and is politically salient-- meanwhile people rot in prisons that you don't know about because of prosecutors.
My point is, people still rot in prisons that we don't know about because of prosecutors, even with the pardon. If the president doesn't individually know or care about these people, they will not be pardoned. The power of the pardon does not fix excessive prosecution, except for people who get the individual attention of the president.
Pardoning doesn't fix the problem of large numbers of little-known people suffering from prosecutors' excesses. It just creates a new problem that the president's associates get special privileges, and a corrupt president can organize a conspiracy to commit crimes with impunity. Worst of both worlds.
If we had some system of minor officials reviewing prosecutions by committee, and reversing the most unreasonable ones, that would be less easily corrupted, and might have higher bandwidth to deal with all the bad prosecutions. But it's a bad idea to give this power to a single official who has so much other power.
Presidents actually do pardon deserving people. All the time. There's an entire NGO bureaucracy dedicated to identifying those people and bringing them to the attention of the executive branch. So you are just wrong on that.
The problem with committees and the like is that they end up being dominated by prosecutors whose basic position is exemplified by the "DOJ pardon guidelines"-- nobody gets a pardon until they are out of prison for 5 years. Prosecutors highly dislike pardons because they tell the public what everyone knows, which is that prosecutors are often cruel and sometimes even convict innocent people.
So an unchecked presidential power is better. You can get upset at the political pardons, but a good thing to remember is that the political scores you want to settle are not the most important thing the government does. The normies who get out of prison because of pardons are simply more important than the politically charged people you care about.
That's an interesting perspective. But it seems safer to me to improve our justice system rather than going down our current path, which is an open invitation to a system whereby it becomes commonplace to see people committing crimes on behalf of a criminal president who has promised to pardon them.
This ignores that the worst abuses of prosecutorial discretion happens by often times elected *State* DA's and judges, for which the President has no pardon authority at all. The DOJ has infinite time and resources to bring a case and will not unless they generally speaking believe it is iron clad. The potential for a Federal Crime to be charged and convicted on a truly innocent defendant is just vanishingly smaller than a random DA in rural America somewhere. The positive case for Pardon power is simply dramatically weaker for a President than for a Governor, but it retains even more potential for corrupt abuse. We should abolish it for POTUS while generally retaining such powers for Governors, where it can be applied in its most high minded aspirational form of forgiveness and mercy.
Federal prosecutors can be very bad. State prosecutors might be worse, but there have been wrongful convictions on the federal level and more importantly, there is A TON of oversentencing and overpunishment by federal prosecutors.
Over sentencing and over punishment begs for clemency not pardons
Clemency is part of the same power as pardons.
And at any event, I don't mind pardons in such situations either. If anything we should do lots more pardons just because of prosecutors' abuse of supervised release and restitution provisions, which make it impossible for offenders to reintegrate into society. And much of that abuse happens on the federal level because parole has been abolished.
I liked the thread a few days ago about amendments to change the pardon power. The two ideas I really like are (1) requiring that all proposed pardons be published for some period of time, and (2) having congress review proposed pardons, either by a vote or by establishing some kind of pardon board.
I think most people underrate the importance of (1). Apparently Trump's blanket pardon of J6ers was in part due to Trump's personal frustration with having to sort through everything. (1) also might have prevented Biden's screw-up pardoning the criminal from the ACLU list who was apparently behind a child murder.
Eh.
Yes, Biden messed up, but not in any way that should have been meaningful when making the choice this election gave us. Not standing up to The Groups isn't great, but it's not nearly as bad as willingly letting the Heritage Foundation take over OPM.
This has been a pretty awful first week of the Trump administration. I've got plenty of anger, but I feel like it's far better directed towards the folks ACTUALLY DOING the bad things, and the voters who explicitly voted for them to do these things.
We've got plenty of problems, but Biden is no longer one of them. And if the voters had elected him, Trump/Musk wouldn't be a problem anymore either.
One thing it shows how important the bully pulpit is and how hamstrung Biden was by not being able to use it. As time goes on leaving the country with Trump and going down as one of the most unpopular presidents since WW2 will be the Biden legacy.
Yes
This whole thing reminds me of the polling from the 2012 election, where polled people just refused to believe the GOP’s actual positions and assumed the pollster was lying.
Harris told the electorate that Trump was going to implement Project 2025. Trump lied and said he wasn’t. The voters went “eh, he says lots of things”.
Now that Trump is doing exactly what Harris said he would do, we don’t need to really say much about Biden. Maybe there’s value in throwing him under the bus, I dunno, but “I told you so” is probably equally effective.
I think this overrates the maturity of our politics. Breaking with Biden would've gotten attention, doing it late is bad but better than never.
I have no doubt that Trump will pay some political price, but it's hard to say if it will be directly due to his actions or just ordinary thermostatic reaction. I genuinely think his supporters will continue to happily eat his shit sandwiches regardless of what he does, and we just have to hope that the people come out in 26 and 28 to flush the previous administration.
A large part of why we’ve had very stupid politics is that voters have been constantly saved from GOP policy by the courts, by John McCain, by staffers, whatever.
But I’ve seen reports of people having stuff canceled over the impoundment and that’s something they can feel. Democrats need to step aside, let the voters have what they wanted.
I get the emotional pull of "the voters deserve to get what they voted for, and hard." But too many innocent people are caught in the crossfire for that to be a tenable position.
The majority of Trump voters are not going to feel the most acute consequences of his actions. His most fervent supporters aren't the rural poor, but suburban Fox News viewers. People comfortable enough to spend all day consuming right-wing internet propaganda.
I would have thought that suburban economies are generally less directly relevant on federal grants than many urban, rural, or small town economies, where a university, a military base, or a federal program, might be more significant.
Why should voters have believed Harris? She had a history of flip-flopping on her own positions and was a major part of an administration that had seemingly covered up the condition of a senile, old president.
That would be a decent point if Trump wasn't already a known quantity who was President who also didn't flip flop and lie on everything.
I agree with you, but Americans seemingly have the memory of a goldfish and Trump is like a Teflon politician unlike any I've seen before in a Democracy. He simultaneously tells it like it is, but never means what he says and people never remember or think he is going to do any of the shitty things he promises to do.
Now from this we can take away a couple things. First, it's possible that Americans are entitled and just never think that good government programs would ever truly go away in what they view as a split government. Two, they like the Trump vibe but not the rhetoric. Three, the general populace is stupid and doesn't get any news that doesn't reinforce their bias. Four, a combination of all of the above.
That all said, it also reminds me a bit of people who like Democrat policy positions on polls until they found out they are Dem policies. Maybe politics is just like football at this point?
“Not as bad as,” while true, is not the right frame to view Biden’s administration relative to Trump’s second.
“Directly led to” is closer.
Exactly. Trump ran on an inflationary, anti-democractic platform, and people are acting surprised that he is trying to accomplish what he campaigned on. There was a substantial group of people who ignored all of his rhetoric and loudly exclaimed "everything's more expensive and the Democrats love trans people and illegals!" When the federal funding freeze affects their kids school lunch, when the price of a cell phone triples because of nonsensical tarrifs, and when grocery store price do the same because the underclass of workers who do all the shit jobs Americans can't have either went into hiding or been deported, will it still be Biden's fault? Can't we blame the voters?
The problem with these what-ifs is that they are not persuading anyone. Trump and his whole cult will find amazing new arguments, and the median voter will be exactly where they are right now, between a stone and a hard place.
If the Dems are trying to do a cultural influence victory (à la Civilization style) they do need to accumulate enough points *weighted* by the things that people care about. Like shoplifting. Spamming graphs and charts about how it's within normal variance is not that. Or perceived fairness in sports.
If they can't do this then they need to win the communication/persuasion game, but they are even worse at that. (Likely because it's much harder to penetrate the cult with communications than with basic facts.)
The thing is, blaming “the voters” doesn’t DO anything. If anything, it alienates them further. But holding people who made bad choices accountable so that future politicians don’t make those choices actually could change future events for the better.
This is an older article, but it estimates about an extra $100 to manufacture phones in the US.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/06/09/159456/the-all-american-iphone/
Not saying that we should manufacture phones here, but tariffs can make large differences in trade volumes without large differences in retail prices.
Specifically for iPhones, their price isn't set by the cost to Apple + reasonable markup. It's set by what the market will bear which has meant significant ~~consumer~~ supplier surplus for Apple.
A lot of industries (including non-apple smart phones) are competitive and will see inflation as there really isn't room to squeeze, but if Apple's costs suddenly went up it would mostly come out of their profits.
Well, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs and who can break eggs with the prices under Trump!
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us
If those same capital-gee Groups with all their fancy PhDs couldn't figure out that *they* are the problem, then they can go fuck themselves (or just wait until Trump's henchmen get to them).
Initially it was insightful and relaxing to read Matt, but it seems he's also a tad clueless about how incompetent the Dem/Biden team was (and of course still is) at internal and external positioning, and of course from that flows that they fucked up the message, all kinds of communication, their image, and so on. It was a misallocation of political capital on an epic scale. (Spending time and effort on student loans ... did not move the needle even one bit.) And of course they suck at selling. (Sure, Obama already maxed out their hope-it card, but then it's on them to figure out a new way to skin the proverbial cat. After all a 70-something convicted felon did figure it out.)
Schumer was loudly and publicly pushing Biden to do the student loan thing, arguing in part it would help Dems shore up support with young voters. It's not just the Groups, many prominent electeds (and not just fringe left ones) bought into Groupthink and were pressuring the administration.
Groupthink might have worked if the left publicly was willing to give Biden credit for student loans and the growth at the bottom of the wage scale. But instead we got "DoorDash is too expensive now" and then Gaza.
"pushing Biden to do the student loan thing, arguing in part it would help Dems shore up support with young voters"
If that's true, it's so stupid. Young people vote at much lower rates than older people, and the young people who went to college and have student loans are very likely already in blue states where their extra votes would be wasted. There's no way student loan forgiveness packs a big positive punch as an issue in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania.
Did the student loan thing really harm him? It's horrible populist policy, but so many of the things Trump ran on were just as dumb, yet politically popular.
The Democrats need a Trump.
Not a demagogue. Not a lunatic. Not a clown.
But someone willing and capable of burning their party to the ground. And unlike Trump, it would be great if this person actually rebuilt the party around principle, and not a monument to his own golden idol.
I liked your comment but I want you to know that I really liked your comment
I just don’t think appealing to this sense that there is a higher set of rules that the voters should abide by is a great way to think about politics anymore. The teacher is not coming to weigh the various sins and punish the appropriate actor. The voters preferred January 6 to The Groups, so I doubt they care about the Office of Personnel Management.
I think this misses the point, though.
But I think the point is that “vote for Democrats, we’re not as bad as the Republicans” is not sufficient.
Whether it fair or not, Democrats are structurally disadvantaged because of the electoral college, the Senate, gerrymandering, the lack of representation of DC and Puerto Rico and on and on. All the things about we talked about in 2016 and 2020 but have forgotten in 2024.
Democrats did not meaningfully change any of this when they had power, and they are not able to change all because a lot of it just has to do with the geography how people are distributed. And others posts require overcoming huge barriers like constitutional amendments, which can only come about with bipartisan support.
Furthermore, crafting a message when you’re a party of change is hard when you’ve just been holding power. When your ideology is conservative (let’s avoid change or even roll back recent changes), your base will forgive you if you didn’t get a lot done.
So this structural disadvantage for Democrats is a reality they need to deal with. Being not as bad as Republicans is just not enough for Democrats. I think you’re right that Republicans are worse, which is why it’s so important for Democrats to get this stuff right, so they can actually have a shot at winning.
According to Nate Silver the electoral college disadvantage is basically gone, and the House is either now fair or close to it, basically the only "unfair" advantage GOP has left is the senate. The Dems lost the 2024 elections "Fair and square" and the good news that if they manage to become more popular than GOP in 26 or 28 then that will be reflected in the election results. In THAT respect, at least, we are actually in a far better place than we've been since 2010!
How is it true that the electoral college disadvantage is gone, yet the Senate disadvantage remains? Because the electoral college votes are just the number of House seats plus the number of Senate seats. If Democrats are more likely to live in larger states, isn’t there still an electoral college advantage for Republicans still? And for the House, while a couple states made nonpartisan commissions since 2016, like Michigan, still Republicans did quite well in state legislatures in 2020. If you can link me to the Silver article that explains that that would be great.
I agree that the Democrats lost 2024 fair and square, no question. That’s why Democrats are actually having this conversation about what went wrong, which they avoided in 2016.
But even without all of these disadvantages, the Democrats still cannot rely on being just not as bad as the Republicans. They have more ambitious policy agenda, a more politically attentive base, and a more delicate coalition.
I may be wrong on the senate, then. And I am mentioning Nate Silver’s assertion re:the electoral college. I am sure he asserted this. I didn’t bother getting in to his reasoning. It’s a projection to the figure anyway, we won’t know if and how much ec advantage anyone has until the results , but as I recall his argument was based on the recent realignment which basically made the gop base more geographically wasteful and the Dems more efficient. You’d need to google it to find the details.
Exactly. Each side running up the score in six non-competitive states has all but wiped out the electoral college advantage.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/its-2004-all-over-again
For at least 3 years, voters made it abundantly clear what they liked and didn't like about the Democrats, demonstrated a willingness to elect the Democrats who did (or didn't do) these things. They also made it abundantly clear they were willing to vote for Trump if Democrats strayed too far away from what they wanted.
All correct. Want to add my and my wife's experience to this discussion, in case there are others who feel this way.
We are (or were) centrist Democrats. A year before the election we switched to being Independents. The reason was that Biden/Harris administration turned pure "progressive," and we knew that progressive views were losers in terms of the general public.
In fact, in many forums we expressed this idea: "Progressives would rather experience the inner glow of feeling "right" than win elections."
Why should we invest energy in a "cause" that doesn't really even want to win?
As long as progressives are running the show Democrats will lose.
Good point. Just look at the transgender sports bill that just passed the house. Even with almost 80% of the electorate supporting keeping sports seperate by natal sex (and over 60% of Democrats), only two Democrats voted for the bill (neither of which was Seth Moulton). The 2026 GOP attack ads write themselves.
It was a stupid unworkable bill. Why do we need a law at the federal level about this anyway? You fell for a meme.
Who cares? It's not about the specifics of the bill, it's about winning elections which means not being on the wrong side of the electorate. Pander to the voters, not the groups. The "Kamala is for they/them" ad was tremendously effective. Don't give the GOP more ammo. Vote for the bill, take the dub and look to get a Democratic majority in the 2026.
Answer: To protect girl's and women's sports. Our daughter is a nationally known athlete, and has set a Guinness world record. If her record is surpassed by another runner, then it should be by a natal woman. We will celebrate, with our daughter, that runner's accomplishment. But only if she's beaten by a natal woman.
I'm touched that Republicans have such protective feelings about women's sports.
It took them decades but they finally came around.
I hear other progressives say "What about Title IX and the real struggle for women's equality? Why didn't you care about that?" and I think "that's whataboutism". Trans women in women's sports is either right and fair, or it's not. You can argue that point or you can change the subject.
If anyone cares, I think the governing bodies of sport (like FIFA, or the IOC, or the NCAA) should make rules regarding who can participate in women's sports. I think IOC track and field requires an estrogen-to-testosterone ratio of like 4:1. Anyone who meets those requirements then can participate. That's a path forward to balance equality, compromise, and fairness.
Democrats should show the trans community some tough love regarding transwomen participating in women's sports.
That said, the tender concern of Republicans who have just discovered their devotion to the cause of women's sports leaves me cold.
Um ... Guinness World records are mostly gimmicks and few elite athletes care seriously about them. Citing that as some sort of achievement that must be protected at all costs does not do much for your credibility.
never set one have you? You simply cannot wrap your brain around the fact that some peoples' records are not gimmicks but are accomplishments that are almost unfathomable.
So, try it yourself. Start today and run 32 miles a day, without a missed day, for 201 days, and with taking only 20 minutes for the entire 32 miles to take breaks that can't be longer than 5 minutes each....in other words it's constant running.. You'll be the record holder. Come back in several months and let us know how it went. And let us know if it's a gimmick. And if you're a natal female we'll celebrate too! For real. We will.
My hat's off to her! That is an accomplishment. I am a runner, so I know how hard that is. As a mid distance girl, I don't like anything above a half marathon and top out around 30 miles a week.
But just because something is personally hard, doesn't mean it's meaningful on the societal level to the extent that national elections and policy should prioritize it.
I also couldn't even try to set such a record, because I have kids (yes, that I physically gave birth to as a natal female) to financially support. Sure, you might celebrate me, but would you pay me? Because overall, my ability to provide for them is FAR more important than running an insane amount of miles per day, no matter how grueling that is.
Holy .. woah! Hat's off to the lady! That sounds overly brutal (and completely excessive, but absolutely unquestionably deserving of respect and accolades!)
Is endurance easier for males? After a few naive google searches to me it seems female genetics is better suited for it :o
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36802328/
"This study shows for the first time that the gap between men and women shrinks when trail running distance increases, which demonstrates that endurance is greater in women."
Though I guess at the top the deciding factor is probably more cultural. Are we even encouraging women to do these extreme things, or are we encouraging them a bit more to have a family, yadda-yadda.)
Whether or not it's a gimmick, I feel like someone who sets a record in running is a pretty serious athlete.
Why do we need Title IX? Is that a meme?
Kind of, yeah. Title IX is pretty outdated in the era where women vastly outnumber men college.
I don't think that's an outrageous position, but I'll point out that here we are with men pushing women out of the spaces which have been created for them.
I would say that the arguments for women not being a suspect class are a bit early.
Sooooo are you agreeing with me? I don't follow your argument. If Title IX exists, why do we need a poorly drafted bill on top of it?
That's 200% untrue.
What's untrue?
That the failure is at the feet of progressives, and I'm neither far left nor your typical mainstream Dem.
Jessica: I'm operating on the basis of surveys. The main issue for swing voters was progressive ideas. And they have been shown, over and over, to be unpopular.....some VERY unpopular. Why do you think the Trump ad about Harris caring about they/them is considered, on the basis of research, to be the most effective ad ever? Unless progressives can admit they are out of touch then Democrats will continue to lose. Something like 15 million Biden voters stayed home in this election, despite being told over and over that "Democracy is at stake?"
Unlimited immigration is a progressive idea. And it got STOMPED.
It's even worse than that unfortunately. Because these so called progressives ad infinitum bashed Biden for being a boring centrist ghoul, and Biden and "the groups" were pandering to them for abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
Of course these idiots infected a lot of people with the commie vanguard mind virus. (Be the better person, show an example to the people and they will follow.)
Which might have worked for about 20 minutes sometime in 1917 October, but just in a few years it became "You know better." And ironically ... Lenin himself was dismayed at the rise of "Russians First" mentality in the Party.
Didn’t you say that you voted for Trump, deciding that the mess of orders this week is less bad that someone feeling too pure?
HI Kenny: I'm afraid I don't really understand your question.
"deciding that the mess of orders this week is less bad that someone feeling too pure?"
-------can you explain this for me? Thanks.
If folks haven’t already, I would encourage people here to listen to the recent episode of Stay Tuned with Preet that had Astead Herndon on. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-maga-house-divided-with-kara-swisher-heather/id1265845136?i=1000685132479 In it, Herndon makes a number of important points like: 1- do Democrats actually *want* to be a working class party? He doesn’t think it is clear they do, and he points out it will be really hard to get more working class votes if it isn’t what you actually want. And 2- he points out that Democrats have tried to “message” their way out of issues like immigration, before actually figuring out what they really believe on it- which makes those messages appear inauthentic. More people should have been listening to Herndon through this whole election cycle- he was pounding drum back in 2022 that a lot of Democratic voters did not want Biden to run again, and he took a lot of crap about that then.
The Democratic Party doesn't want uneducated rubes in its coalition. The problem is there are not enough highly educated people in the country to form anything close to a majority coalition.
The problem, here, is that the Republicans have always made themselves the official anti-worker party. This makes the D's the defacto workers party. Unfortunately, this has lead to the D's basically ignoring workers (as guaranteed votes) for most of the last 30 years. I always assumed that eventually there would be some comeuppance. I just didn't think it would be as horrific as Trump.
Excellent point. If you think you're the de-facto workers party, you can proceed to court the votes of people with opinions you know those workers might not like ("there are 27 genders", "defund the police", "America is shameful", etc.)
I absolutely want the Democrats to be the party of working-class Americans, and of all other Americans who support the rule of law and our small-d democratic tradition.
What that means to me:
-promote policies that improve the lives of working-class Americans materially, including but not limited to:
-a strong social safety net
-good vocational training, so that you don't need a college education to have a decent job
-support unions
-abundant housing construction/YIMBY/ONE BILLION HOUSES so that a working-class person doesn't have to shell out two-thirds of their paycheck for mortgage or rent
-reshore some key industries (like computer chips), both for national security reasons and to create more factory jobs in the US
-fix immigration; enforce immigration laws, expand legal temporary immigration (like for agricultural workers) if needed for "jobs Americans won't do"
-dispense with performative wokery/academic vocab like "Latinx" that is alienating to working-class voters.
What that does NOT mean:
-run on grievance and stoking fear against "The Other" (elites, liberals, Haitian immigrants eating pets, etc.)
Does this make me "pro-working class" or not?
Agree - a great episode. Kara Swisher had some good inside baseball insights on that one as well.
Everyone told us democracy was at stake but what was really at stake was their own filthy jobs showing that they are just like any other politician. Definitely not on the right side of history more on the side of self-centered slime bags. And they wonder why those of us hate them and don't trust them and just view them as self-serving jackasses. A great exemplar of this is pelosi not wanting to vote against inside trading. Why should we trust these people who say character and integrity matter and yet live the opposite. The people who said Trump was a massive danger which I believe he is yet could not sacrifice themselves to organize in a way that ensures electoral victory and the flourishing of American citizens. And do I think some sweeping shift of messaging will fix this? Heck no You will just have a criticize your own team brand of politician but the same kind of immoral bullcrap under the hood.
Are you saying that the actions of this week *don’t* support the claim that democracy was at stake? We’ve had a bunch of blatantly illegal orders thrown at the wall with some of them (TikTok) sticking for a while.
No, I totally think it was... But you would never know that given the behavior or democrat candidates, the party etc.. Joe Biden 11th hour drop out etc
They *said* democracy was at stake, but didn't act like it.
Many of us *actually believed* it was, which is why we're all complaining about the betrayal.
Let us also not forget the rest of the family, specifically Jill and Hunter who also clearly couldn’t be bothered to convince Joe to not run. All of them let their ego’s and pride get in the way of what they knew was best for the country.
Jill was like a parent whose child is playing in a sports event and always blames the coach for her child not playing. In this case Jill is the parent blaming the Party and Country.
Hunter was probably being unselfish. If daddy had been re-elected, he wouldn’t have gotten a timely pardon. Indeed, Hunter would have been better off if Biden had quit after being VP
Henceforth, I am to be addressed as Dr. Weary Land!
I’m tempted to say that the insanity of the 2020 primary was way more damaging than we knew at the time.
But really, 2020 did work out as well as it probably could have. It was Biden’s ego-driven decision to seek a second term that did us in. And boy, that one was a doozy.
I find very little to disagree with, apart from your contention that only Republicans and some on "the left" were and are angry with Biden
I and many other moderate-ish and/or mainstream-ish Democrats were incandescently angry with Biden (and his family and inner advisor circle) after the debate, and we were the collective force that pushed him off the ticket. (Remember that for a while his main protectors in the party were AOC and the CBC, while Pelosi and others were publicly and privately all but imploring him to step aside.) While those of us who engaged with the media were mindful of being respectful in our rhetoric both before he actually handed off the keys and after, that was for the calculated reasons you allude to. Namely, before his acquiescence, to not push him further into a stubborn refusal, and after, to help unify a somewhat fractured party, which I believe mostly worked.
What is remarkable to me is the tiny sliver of donors and others who claim Biden would have won. This is ludicrous on its face. When Biden dropped from the ticket, his own campaign's polling had him down in Virginia and (I think) Minnesota.
I don’t recall feeling *angry* during or after the debate. But I absolutely was horrified.
About 30 seconds after Biden completed his opening statement, I turned to my wife and compared what we were seeing to 9/11.
I didn’t then and don’t now think that was an inaccurate comparison.
Jon Favreau said he saw internal campaign polling that had trump winning 400 EVs! That's losing Illinois Colorado levels bad. And have to assume that polling is still structurally discounting Trump's support.
I mean as it was Harris kinda almost lost New Jersey
As a matter of strategy, you want to be making your margin in the swing states, not running up the score where it doesn’t matter. She did better in the swing states and her losing margin was quite small. I’m not high-fiving anyone about it, but it’s obvious to me Biden would not have done better.
Did she? I thought she won New Jersey 52-46, same as Virginia, New Mexico, and Maine. It’s true that these states have been considered close-to-swing in a way that New Jersey hadn’t, but this isn’t close to losing.
Yeah I guess that's really what I mean. Harris was notably weak relative to expectations in New Jersey in a way that wasn't true of those other states, but you're right she didn't almost lose it.
In the Trump era, the Democratic Party has been trying to sell itself as the party of normalcy, stability, competence, and honesty. The gaslighting around Biden’s age greatly damaged this image, and made even reasonable Dems (like Matt) seem like they were either disconnected from reality or a bunch of liars.
I agree with the Dems on most issues, and I am genuinely worried about a Trump presidency, but this episode reminded me why I’m still an independent — partisanship rots people’s brains!
Can you expand more on how it would have been better for Trump to win narrowly in 2020? I think it would have been equally if not more psychologically devastating at the moment to Democrats to have lost the 2020 election, and Trump would have been able to conduct his civil servant purge and who knows what else besides.
Or are you arguing for the counterfactual with hindsight, where Trump second term presiding over inflation would have absolutely nuked his approval and the GOP would be demolished in 2024?
Trump has had four years to hone his message, strengthen his team and develop a plan. None of which he would have had in January 2020.
The onslaught of actions in the past week is the result of this interim period.
Addendum: Plus, the downside effects on the Democratic Brand from Biden's actions make coming back to cultural and electoral power more difficult now than in 2020.
Furthermore, so much of Trump's plan now is forged in vengeance for his enemies that he feels cost him 2020. If none of that happened its not that Trump would suddenly have the grace of Bush 41 but the direction of his second term would have been totally different. And democrats would have had the chance to regroup far faster and in a direction more of us are in agreement from. I think a trump win in 2020 would have genuinely killed the power of the Groups for good.
Your first sentence gets to the heart of it. If I had been able to look into the future, I would have voted Trump in 2020. Him winning would probably have been less damaging than what he did by claiming a stolen election.
Same logic as looking back and voting for Romney and 2012.
But it's pretty bad that the pattern here is that the GOP gets more and more deranged after every election loss!
If the GOP continued to lose every election, and the Dems were consistently reasonable, it wouldn't be quite so bad. There are several factors that make this really bad:
(1) the GOP gets quite unreasonable;
(2) their unreasonableness includes disrespect for norms, and even for laws and for refraining from political violence;
(3) the left has its own craziness (not originating from the top in the same way as it happens on the right), which alienates the median voter enough that a "laws constrain you, not me" GOP from step 2 can get elected.
Not being in the White House, Trump has had his chance to pick plenty of stooges and cronies. While in there he was trying to repair the plane while flying it, which meant using establishment Republicans like Bill Barr who would tell him to his face that the stolen election claims are bullshit.
Like his staff got bad by -10 each year, so the first administration was -10, -20, -30, -40. His next 4 years would have been -50, -60, -70, -80.
But he's not starting at -90 now. More like -160 because plenty of people have been auditioning for the role of #1 suck-up to Trump.
I think that's all true. I suppose another way to phrase my question is "would telling a Democrat in November of 2020 how the next four years would go convince them that it would be better for Biden to lose?"
Perhaps I'll be shuffling around the gulag in 2028 feeling that yeah, we definitely should have spiked the snap in 2020, but I'm not necessarily there yet. I think 2020 me would still have pressed the Biden wins button. The counterfactuals so far aren't imaginative enough in the "how could Trump have been maximally horrible in a 20-24 second term" to convince me that Biden losing in 20 is obviously better.
Somewhat missing from Matt’s analysis is the probable effect of Biden’s age and lack of energy making him more susceptible to influence from his staff and the “Groups”, leading in turn to a more leftish series of policies that were out of step with the edge case voters the party needed to attract. The confluence of age, appearance, and actual policies made for a toxic political environment that Harris could not overcome, “Joy” notwithstanding.
It’s definitely not *obviously* better. But we don’t know how much awfulness took four years of planning and how much could have happened during that term (especially with a pandemic raging).
The RFK embrace probably wouldn’t have happened.
No J6 if Trump just wins legitimately in 2020, which means no embrace of election denialism in the republican party..
I guess no January 6th is better for the country overall, but it’s better for the history books that Trump did it. We need to understand the consequences of reelecting evil personified.
Do we, though?
Yes.
Did we also need to understand the consequences of a global pandemic, or invading a country for made-up reasons? Sometimes things are just bad and it would be better if they hadn't happened.
Would have been something else.
They would have just held it in reserve for the next time they did lose.
We would not be facing another Republican trifecta and there might be a Dem senate at least. Trump would now be gone, likely much reduced, and our "institutions" battered but not out.
To be fair, we would have been *much* better off had Biden been the 2016 nominee and Trump were a fading memory by now. It's not just Biden who fumbled this moment in history.
Maybe? I'm just trying to imagine what I'd have to do to convince November 2020 me to believe that "no really, it's better that Biden narrowly lost". Even if we played the 2020-2024 tape, I'm not sure November 2020 me would prefer the counterfactual here.
Matt has just repeated the "it would have been better if Biden lost narrowly in 2020" a few times like it's obvious, and it's not obvious. Curious what his reasoning is.
Well, that is MY reasoning on it. Matt will have to speak for himself.
My bigger issue is that Democrats have *utterly* mishandled this last few years, completely unable to read the room. The only reason Hillary Clinton was even *competitve* in 2016 is that she was running against a lunatic, yet she was shoved down our threats anyway, and then there was a repeat of that with Harris in 2024. I'm beyond disgusted with this crew, and I can really see why anyone not steeped in party politics is contemptuous of them.
How was Hillary “shoved down our throats”? She won a competitive primary and was the clear choice of Democratic Party voters!
Dems cleared the field for her in 2016. Here's Ezra Klein writing about it in 2017:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/14/16640082/donna-brazile-warren-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-rigged
"To the extent Democratic primary voters feel like they were denied a broad range of candidates in 2016, and that party officials tried to clear the field to coronate Clinton, well, they're right."
No arguments here!
The other issue choking Dems IMO is that they have become the de facto protectors of the status quo, which admittedly has been somewhat forced on them, in an era where most people are very distrusting, and frankly not without good reason. I've always said Republicans are crazy but Democrats are wussy, and when that is your choice people will nearly always choose crazy.
Look at how much more efficient Trump is this time around*. I'll admit, I was one who pushed back on some of the fears by pointing to 2017-2021, but it's clear Trump actually learned from his experience.
*So far. I think he is starting to get pushback, and things will settle into a new equilibrium (still worse) soon.
It’s definitely not obvious. But the strongest case is that everything he’s doing this past week is the result of several years of planning by many people who have thought carefully about what might or might not stick. It’s more effectively destructive than anything he did in his first term, or would likely have done in a second term continuing that first term, even if a chunk of it is still not sticking.
Playing the tape of January 6th and all that followed from it wouldn't convince you? It would certainly have convinced me
He probably would have shut down vaccine distribution.
I'm not a doctor, but I'm guessing that would have been bad.
I think there’s a good chance there would have been some idiosyncratic vaccine refusal in both parties, that might have remained fringe and non-partisan, which might have been a better result. No RFK-centering.
I actually think that the vaccine thing would have gone differently had Trump won in 2020.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/harrris-vaccine-i-would-not-trust-donald-trump-n1239422
Democrats absolutely would have questioned and attacked "The Trump Vaccine." Which would have led to more information being shared, more evidence being public, probably no mandates, and ultimately, greater trust in the process and in vaccines generally.
That’s one alternative history experiment I’m so happy we didn’t run.
If Trump had won in 2020 it would almost certainly have been with a huge popular vote deficit (indeed, giving him the closest tipping point states might have led to an election decided by the house of Reps?). And all of that campaign he didn't have anything like the cultural cachet he built up during the Biden years. I think this second Trump term will differ from the first a lot more than if the second term came in 2020
Just to add to this, Mike Pence would still have been VP; a lot of the first term cabinet would probably have been held over, etc.
That's a great point; the craziest and worst people (Hegseth, RFK, Gabbard) probably don't become part of a second Trump term.
Also, I'm guessing there's a much earlier reckoning on the Dem side with the excesses of the left in 2020 re: defund and Covid hawkishness and we get significant moderation in advance of the 2022 midterms. Given those would likely have gone well for Dems (particularly with inflation in the state it was globally at the time) I think we probably see more candidates staking out a moderate lane in the 2024 primaries.
Hm... I'm not sure a loss by "moderate lane" Biden would have forced this reckoning.
Maybe, but there were definitely recriminations in the House after the elections - Abigail Spanberger saying "Defund the police killed us." Those would have been amplified after a loss.
The actual best 2020 outcome would have been Trump winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote, so the 2024 election (and all future ones) would be decided under the new Constitutional amendment for direct election of the President by nationwide popular vote. Of course, the Republican winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote would have been even better in 1968, 1976, 2000, 2004, and 2016.
He would have lost the house and senate
Would he? Democrats won the Senate because Trump wouldn't shut up about election fraud and they kind of miraculously picked up two seats in Georgia, which even then only gave them a majority with Harris as tiebreaker.
Maybe in 2022 Dems do very well, sure. But not sure what that nets us in terms of the civil service.
I don't think that was miraculous in GA. Both GOP candidates (especially Loeffler) were pretty unpopular.
Loeffler might have lost (she was both the weaker of the two Rs and facing the stronger of the two Ds) but Perdue wasn't going to lose. Heck if we imagine Trump winning 2020, that means he narrowly wins Georgia, and that means Perdue-Ossoff doesn't even go to a runoff.
I don't think anyone's priors going into Jan 5 was Democrats were going to pull out two wins.
What the others said below, plus the House and Senate were both controlled by Democrats from 2021 to 2023, so that would have further limited the damage he could have done, while inflation would have still raged because it doesn't care who controls which branches of government.
Yeah, that's the counterfactual with hindsight.