An unserious nation faces dire choices.
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We are heading into a rematch that promises to be weirder than any presidential election we’ve ever experienced. Let’s review where things stand.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Where Things Stand
More than two years ago, I wrote my first newsletter for The Atlantic, titled “An Unserious Country.” I was worried.
We’re facing a slew of challenges, from reinvigorated foreign enemies to a dedicated authoritarian movement at home. And yet, as a people, we and our elected officials seem unable to focus even for a nanosecond with enough seriousness and deliberation to muster the cooperative, can-do perseverance that once characterized the American spirit.
I wrote this 10 months after the January 6 insurrection, around the same time we learned that thousands of people had died due to their refusal to accept the lifesaving vaccines against COVID. And Donald Trump had been making news a few weeks before by insisting (in response to questions no one was asking him) that he was not into a certain kind of sexual activity that I will not repeat here. It was an unsettling time, but at least we could hope that with Trump defeated, politics would return to something like normal.
So much for that. We’ve had some odd elections in American history; in 1976, for example, an obscure former Georgia governor ran against a sitting president whom no one had actually elected. (The vice president was also an unelected appointee.) In 2000, the son of a former senator and the son of a president ran against each other. But in 2024, we are heading into a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden that promises to be weirder than any presidential election we’ve ever experienced. Let’s review where things stand.
On the Democratic side, Biden is facing a reversal of the laws of political gravity, mostly because so many American voters are now ruled by vibes and feelings rather than facts. By any standard, Biden’s first term is perhaps as consequential and successful as Ronald Reagan’s first four years. With achievements including holding together a NATO coalition in the face of genocidal Russian aggression and an economic soft landing almost no one thought possible, Biden should be running far ahead of any Republican challenger—and light years beyond Trump.
And yet, Biden is not only struggling with Trump; he’d likely lose to almost any other Republican nominee. Why? Well, he’s old, apparently. (Unlike, say, 77-year-old Trump, or 76-year-old Joe Manchin.) And people are still mad about the economy, which continues to torment them with its low inflation, low unemployment, declining mortgage rates, and high growth. As my friend Jonathan V. Last notes, this is a “mass economic delusion,” and there’s not much Biden can do about it.
Biden has also been castigated by some of his fellow Democrats for not welcoming a primary challenge. I was very surprised to see Ron Fournier (a writer, now based in Michigan, whom I’ve long followed and enjoyed reading) grousing that Biden’s massive win in the South Carolina Democratic primary over Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips—who came in third after the writer Marianne Williamson—was “how Putin rolls.”
Well, okay, but it’s also how Obama rolled (he was unopposed in 2012), and how Bill Clinton rolled in 1996, when South Carolina didn’t even bother with a primary for an incumbent and instead held a caucus. In a serious country and a serious party, no incumbent president with Biden’s record would be criticized for crushing two flyweight candidates; indeed, anything less than a total win would invite charges of political weakness.
More to the point, barring an unforeseeable event, the 2024 election is set: Biden is going to face Trump again. In yet another sign of the public’s lack of seriousness, most Americans claim not to want this rematch, but it’s time to stop wringing our hands over those objections. (We also need to stop talking about third parties; the 2024 election, like every presidential election, will be binary.) American voters engage in this whining and complaining in every election cycle, a ritual in which many citizens—after refusing to pay attention to politics and staying away from primaries and off-year elections—demand to know who keeps saddling them with such poor electoral options. Americans ask this with clockwork regularity, despite the abundant presence of mirrors in their homes.
The Democrats have been having a rough ride lately, in part because of the stubbornly obsessive belief among so many voters that a good economy is terrible, but also because, I suspect, so many Americans have not yet internalized the dangers of a second Trump term. But a lot of Democrats, especially younger people, have turned on Biden because of the war in Gaza, believing that he could solve it if only he concentrated hard enough. This “President Superman” problem afflicts both parties, but if angry Arab and Muslim Americans put Michigan in play—another challenge for the fractious prodemocracy coalition the Democrats hope to create—then Biden’s loss to an anti-Muslim bigot would be among the greatest face-spiting nose removals in political history.
The Republicans, however, have completely departed Earth’s orbit and are now plunging headlong into the destructive black hole of Trump’s personal needs. In the past week, the GOP has moved along toward a Trump coronation, and they have been trying to help Trump’s later general-election chances by hamstringing solutions to the border crisis and holding up important foreign-aid packages—all while the military situation in Ukraine worsens and U.S. and allied forces carry out strikes in Yemen.
Senate Republican leaders proved yet again that the upper chamber of Congress tends to be less chaotic than the House, by reaching an agreement with their Democratic opponents and the president on a border deal. Biden has said that he would sign the bill, which includes money for Ukraine and Israel. My colleague David Frum, himself an immigration hawk, says the proposal is “basically a border hawk’s dream bill, plus frosting and candles,” and that Republicans will never get a better deal.
House Republicans, of course, have therefore vowed to kill the whole business.
Now, anyone who has ever worked in politics knows that sometimes good bills die for stupid and cheap partisan reasons. The House GOP’s obstruction, however, is beyond partisanship. Republicans are threatening to harm the country and endanger our allies merely to help Trump’s reelection chances, obeying a man under multiple indictments and whose track record as a party leader has been one of unbroken losses and humiliation.
Trump, of course, cares nothing for national policy. He has also clearly abandoned any pretenses about democracy, a position that might seem less than ideal heading into a general election, which is likely why Trump’s campaign has tried to ridicule concerns about its candidate’s commitment to the Constitution. But the former president’s footmen can’t help themselves, and they continue to trumpet their hopes for a dictatorship. Over the weekend, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, under pressure from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, said that a president has the right to defy the Supreme Court. (This wasn’t the first time: Trump, the senator said in 2021, should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.’”)
Vance is only one of the many morally vacant politicians hoping to swim in Trump’s victorious wake should he regain the Oval Office. I wrote before Vance was elected about his careerist transformation, but even now, it is jarring to see a U.S. senator applauding a presidential candidate’s promises to eviscerate the powers of two of the three branches of the American government.
Such is the state of play in national politics, with only nine months until an election unlike any other in our post–Civil War history. The good news is that it’s early in the cycle, and Americans tend not to focus on and get serious about fall’s elections until summer. There is still time for voters to realize that this year, focus and seriousness are more important than ever.
Related:
Today’s News
Evening Read
Plenty of People Could Quit Therapy Right Now
By Richard A. Friedman
About four years ago, a new patient came to see me for a psychiatric consultation because he felt stuck. He’d been in therapy for 15 years, despite the fact that the depression and anxiety that first drove him to seek help had long ago faded. Instead of working on problems related to his symptoms, he and his therapist chatted about his vacations, house renovations, and office gripes. His therapist had become, in effect, an expensive and especially supportive friend. And yet, when I asked if he was considering quitting treatment, he grew hesitant, even anxious. “It’s just baked into my life,” he told me.
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
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Listen. The latest episode of Radio Atlantic reexamines the story of Scot Peterson, the school resource officer who was accused of not intervening during the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
Play our daily crossword.
P.S.
Perhaps you watched the Grammys yesterday. I did not. But I did create a social-media controversy you can file under yet another of “Tom’s enraging music takes.” Many people are swooning over the duet (which I saw online) featuring Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, the country singer who resurrected Chapman’s 1988 hit “Fast Car” and sent it to the top of the country charts. Combs is both respectful and faithful to the original, but his version (which last year generated some controversy) is a twangy, masculine remake that just sounds wrong to my ears.
This observation made a lot of people mad, because instead of focusing on the music (good or bad), they instead wanted to see in Chapman and Combs a cultural marker, a sign of unity, a Much-Needed Moment. (The over-the-top, rhapsodic commentary in The New York Times mentioned, as so many people did, Chapman’s smile. Yes, it was nice.) But not every piece of art has to be about cultural warring or peacemaking or How We Live Now. Something’s lost when a song that once was praised for not only its musicality but also its unique point of view—the harrowing loneliness of a young woman trapped in an urban nightmare—becomes just another country-pop hit. People are understandably longing for a positive cultural moment, but that shouldn’t lead to homogenizing one of the central aspects of the song that made it a classic.
— Tom
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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