In Final Kick in the Pants, Departing Biden Denounced as Another Trump

by Matt Taibbi | Jul 24, 2024

From an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post, titled “Historians say Biden’s withdrawal shows American democracy is working”:

President Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign following 25 days of agonizing pressure from his own party may seem like yet another moment of chaos in an American democracy already buckling under historic levels of polarization…

 

But to many historians… the momentous events of the weekend revealed that America’s beleaguered system of government still functioned.

Joe Biden only became the nominee this year after a historically undemocratic process:

Florida canceled a primary for him; North Carolina, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Wisconsin submitted only his name to ballots; and New Hampshire chose delegates through a “nominating event” that didn’t include voters. Under a new vision in which “the DNC [was] not something separate” from the Biden campaign, the party refused to schedule debates with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dean Phillips, or Marianne Williamson. Proof that “America’s beleaguered system still functioned” would have involved a competitive primary through which Democratic voters could discover Biden’s infirmities early enough for them to have a say in choosing a fitter candidate. Instead, the public was only confronted with the truth a few weeks ago, by which time only internal party power brokers were positioned to make a change. That’s a failure of democracy, unless you think choosing a candidate without voter input is a systemic improvement.

The Post cheered the stage-managed primary season throughout, running laudatory pieces about “How the DNC challenger-proofed the primaries for Biden” and profiles of the “hidden campaign” Biden ran with the party. The paper noted the Biden team’s belief that the president could “seize the advantage of a unified party apparatus” while “splintered” Republicans faced “an increasingly bitter primary battle between Trump and his rivals for the presidential nomination.” In reality, Republicans benefited from competition, getting long looks at Trump and rivals like Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, while Biden was shielded from competition all the way through his calamitous collapse in the middle of a general election season.

For all that, Biden still received millions of Democratic votes this year, and won both primary and general election processes in 2020. Though many like me believe Biden is already incapacitated and should leave office now, that number doesn’t include writers at the Post. Greg Jaffe merely noted that Biden’s “meandering” debate performance left “doubts among both the party’s elite and its base that he could defeat former president Donald Trump.” He isn’t suggesting Biden is unfit to be president now, just that he’d likely lose to Trump and/or have a hard time serving out a second term. Under those conditions, Biden would have every right to stick it out and compete for re-election. After all, those primary votes are his, aren’t they?

Not according to the Post. For the crime of refusing to instantly concede to unelected pooh-bahs that he’s “no longer capable of mounting an effective campaign,” Biden earned the ultimate demerit: the paper compared him to Trump!

In forcing Biden to concede he was no longer capable of mounting an effective campaign, the party’s leaders sent a message that America’s system of government is bigger than any single leader. For weeks, as he fought to hold on, Biden repeatedly insisted that his first-term accomplishments proved he was uniquely qualified to lead the country.

 

“Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me. Tell me who … that is,” Biden snapped on a recent call with Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.). His tone often mirrored that of Trump, who has boasted that he “alone” can “fix” the country.

Having a president who actually won votes be pushed out so party chiefs can hand the nomination to a political punchline in Kamala Harris (who washed out before a single primary vote was cast in 2020) is “not out of step with how American democracy was intended to function,” according to historians Jaffe interviewed. But clinging to office in defiance of bureaucratic cognoscenti just because a bunch of people voted for you, that’s Trumpian behavior, apparently.

The speed with which this switch flipped is amazing. Trump’s former comms director Alyssa Farah Griffin shanked Biden in early July,* accusing him of “employing Trump-like tactics” through his “combative responses, cable news call-ins, pressure on lawmakers and an ‘I alone can fix it’ attitude.” When Biden committed the cardinal sin of saying on Morning Joe that he was “frustrated” by the “elites in the party,” and criticized the press for being “wrong about everything so far,” Trump comparisons were instantly assembled under screaming headlines. A feature by AP about how a “defiant” Biden borrowed “tactics from Trump” ran everywhere from the Washington Post to The Seattle Times to PBS, while Newsweek bluntly declared, “Joe Biden Has Turned Into Donald Trump.” These outlets all fellated the president for years before the Trump debate as a protector of democracy, but now cast him as a systemic obstacle because he wouldn’t relinquish claim to his own delegates fast enough:

Calling Biden “Trumpian” raises the question of what Beltway shot-callers have meant by the term all along. They whine now that Biden criticizes the press (which deserves it), complains about “elites” (who also deserve it), and calls in to cable shows (that’s called using the bully pulpit). Worst of all, they say Biden boasted of “unique” value and refused to concede that “America’s system of government is bigger than any single leader.” The editorialists’ views misrepresent the basic idea of the presidency, which is vested in one flesh-and-blood person for a reason. Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers stressed the importance of the chief executive being a single highly visible figure, saying the public could better detect corruption and judge where the buck stopped if they could “narrowly” focus on one man, rather than a faceless club:

When power, therefore, is placed in the hands of so small a number of men… it becomes more liable to abuse… than if it be lodged in the hands of one man; who, from the very circumstance of his being alone, will be more narrowly watched and more readily suspected… The Decemvirs of Rome, whose name denotes their number, 3 were more to be dreaded in their usurpation than any ONE of them would have been.

The blue-party brahmins now bashing Biden should remember they couldn’t have re-seized power without him. The DNC proved in 2020 it was incapable of putting forward even one other candidate who could believably tout what the Post calls the “regular-guy persona” Biden rode to office. In that sense Biden has every right to call himself “uniquely qualified” to sit in the Oval Office as the Democrats’ leader. In the same way, Trump for all his warts has every right to boast that his election was a democratic triumph, since he legitimately won enough votes to carry him past an array of institutional obstacles.

In this late flurry of “Biden is Trump” obits, Washington insiders are showing what they mean by a “working” system: one in which even the president is an interchangeable part who should know his place, unlike a “Trumpian” leader who thinks votes somehow entitle him to office. Once Biden took more than a week to Snagglepuss offstage after the blob started calling for his head, he made Trump comparisons inevitable. Now that the elected insubordinate has been successfully upchucked, the system is said to be back in order. Is there anyone who still has illusions about what “American democracy” means inside the Beltway?

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