“THEY ALWAYS GET IT RIGHT”
Not long ago, Charlotte reminded me of something I had forgotten. When she was nine years old, she asked me what would happen if a bad person was elected President of the United States. I told her that was impossible, and that impossibility was one of the things that made America a good place, despite its faults. Democracy allows average Americans to pick the president, I said, and while voters don’t always choose the best candidates, they have a nose for the bad ones.
I was thinking of politicians like Alabama Governor George Wallace, a charismatic racist. (Many of his now-elderly supporters and their children love Trump.) Wallace ran three times for president and garnered a lot of support, even in the North, but he never came close. Even if he hadn’t been shot in 1972, he would not have won that year’s Democratic nomination.
So I was confident in my assurances and the timing of them was not coincidental, as another story from that same year suggests:
It was September 21, 1998—the surreal day that the videotape of President Clinton’s sexually explicit and dodgy grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky case (“I have said what it did not include. It did not include sexual intercourse”) played endlessly on TV. Until Donald Trump was elected, this was arguably the most embarrassing day in the history of the American presidency.
I had spent the morning analyzing Clinton on NBC News. In the afternoon, I went downtown to NYU, where Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair were speaking as part of a forum connected to the annual opening of the UN General Assembly. I napped through part of it.
Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist turned senior White House aide to Clinton, was headed for a small private reception afterwards. He invited me to come along. This was pre-9/11, and because I was chatting with Sidney on the way in, the Secret Service didn’t notice that I had no pass.
Suddenly I was in a room with the president and first lady and maybe twenty-five other people, mostly senior diplomats. No other reporters or columnists were present.
In the Oval Office with Clinton, 1996
Neither Bill nor Hillary had spoken to the press in the eight months since the scandal began, and the unsmiling first lady was unhappy to see me. I approached her to chat informally about some global issue I’ve forgotten. She was polite but terse.
The president, on the other hand, greeted me with a big effusive smile and leaned in to talk. The first thing he said to me was that a Latin American head of state had approached him earlier that day at the United Nations and whispered, referring to the Republican calls for Clinton to be removed from office: “You’re lucky. In our country, when they stage a coup d’etat, they use real bullets.”
Clinton’s approval rating was above 60 percent but he didn’t know yet that—in reaction to all the tut-tutting about a liar and adulterer in the White House—the Democrats would defy historical trends and pick up seats in the 1998 midterm elections. Afterwards, hypocritical House Republicans impeached him, even as Speaker Newt Gingrich and his successor, Bob Livingston, both resigned amid sex scandals.
But even in September, Clinton already sensed that the American people would be his salvation, and he talked of them the way a man would speak of the woman he loved. He trusted them “totally,” “completely,” and said, “If they have the time and information to sort things out, they always get it right.”
Even then, I took issue with the word “always.” But I embraced the idea that voters are usually endowed with good judgment, and this meant that they almost always get it right.
Yes, voters elected Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000, with negative consequences after each wrong choice. But there were extenuating circumstances in those elections, and the innate wisdom of the American people remained intact.
Now, a quarter century after that chat with Clinton, my faith in this democratic wisdom—and in this country—is on trial. I’m no longer sure that if voters have the time, they will “sort it out” and “get it right.”
Distracted by cultural effluvia and besieged by disorienting misinformation, we’re not just divided but in danger of losing what—for all of our many faults—has made us so successful: a native common sense about who is fit for leadership and who is not.
TRIAL AFTERMATH
The jury in the Trump felony trial showed great common sense, but a lot of other folks out there were awful.
Between April and June, NYPD logged nearly five hundred threatening phone calls and emails, including fifty-six “actionable threats” against Alvin Bragg. The home address of one of the prosecutors was posted on one site, and another social media post included “sniper sights” on “people involved in this case or a family member of such a person.” No wonder no jurors have surfaced to give interviews or write books. Doing so could get them killed.
After the verdict, Steve Bannon said Alvin Bragg “should be—and will be—jailed” if Trump returns to the White House. That’s the America that MAGA wants.
Less crazed critics accuse Bragg of “selective prosecution.” But public integrity cases are, by definition, selective because they require a decision to devote significant resources to trials that make examples of politicians who commit crimes, thereby deterring corruption. That Bragg prosecuted a less egregious offense than masterminding a coup attempt, or hoarding classified documents, hardly discredits his efforts. In fact, it ennobles him. As new evidence emerged, he followed the facts. With calm fortitude, he did his duty.
In the aftermath of the trial, I got a sense of what happened behind-the-scenes on both sides. Trump was a demanding client, of course, but he was asleep so often in court that beyond occasionally recommending that his attorneys offer more objections and foolishly insisting that Robert Costello testify, he usually left his attorneys alone. And he privately blamed the judge and jury more than his lawyers when he lost. “Clarence Darrow couldn’t have won this case,” a lawyer in Trump’s Mar- a-Lago inner circle told me, apparently reflecting the views of his boss.
Prosecutors were nonetheless surprised by what they considered the incompetence of the other side. Why did Trump’s lawyers put all their chips on discrediting Michael Cohen rather than offering a multi-pronged defense? Why did they put on a half-assed case with only one witness (Costello) instead of, say, calling Trump Organization witnesses to testify that Trump was so busy as president he couldn’t possibly know trivial details like paying lawyers? Where were witnesses to impeach Stormy Daniels and Cohen, and to testify to what the Trump side presumably believed was the legitimate legal work Cohen did for Trump in 2017?
Some of the defense’s tactics left prosecutors scratching their heads.) In pre-trial filings, Todd Blanche said the 194,000 documents held by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York included “voluminous exculpatory evidence,” but he didn’t introduce a single exhibit from them.
Defense attorneys had the right to introduce documents into evidence on cross examination, but they rarely did so beyond Stormy merch that they somehow imagined might discredit her. And even though Judge Merchan sustained about fifty percent of their objections, Trump’s lawyers offered amazingly few. Prosecutors could not believe their luck when, for instance, Josh Steinglass asked David Pecker 342 questions on the second day of his direct testimony and Emil Bove objected only twelve times.
Outside the courtroom, the defense of Trump was even weaker. One of the striking things about the Republican screeching was that almost none of it was actually about the case. It was all about the “corrupt” Juan Merchan, the “crooked” Alvin Bragg, and the “biased” New York jury. No one has contested the mountain of evidence on the thirty-four counts. Even as rightwing legal analysts rejected the “other crimes” that made this a felony without having actually seen any exhibits—without knowing anything about the details of the case—they were essentially conceding that Trump broke the law on business records. These bootlickers didn’t claim he didn’t break the law; they said that it doesn’t matter that he broke the law. Because he’s Trump.
My smart lawyer friends from the courtroom tell me the odds are against Trump winning on appeal. His best shot is to get the case to the Supreme Court, not on an immunity claim but under a 2022 ruling that the Constitution requires unanimous jury verdicts. Might that be extended to every element of a verdict? Unlikely, though of course you can’t rule out anything with this Trump high court.
On most other grounds for appeal, Merchan prepared well. He drew on ample precedent when he allowed the misdemeanor to be bumped up to a felony; protected himself from reversal on the grounds of Stormy Daniels’s testimony being prejudicial by issuing his own objections and chastising the defense for not objecting more; did not rely solely on the federal campaign finance statute for the “other crimes”; and properly interpreted the underlying state law on interfering with elections.
All in all, Merchan was exactly the kind of meticulous judge needed in these circumstances.
HOBSON’S CHOICE
In late June, Bill Maher summarized the dilemma involved in prosecuting Trump, who has used the fallout from the trial to raise a boatload of money.
“It’s a Hobson’s choice always with him because he’s always guilty,” Maher said. “But the repercussions [of prosecuting Trump] might be worse.” Maher argued that it would have been easier to prosecute in the court of public opinion if the case was about corruption instead of just sex. His view that the case is, at bottom, political is shared by Andrew Sullivan, Andrew Cuomo, and several others who are also not Trumpsters.
My answer to that is that every prosecution of a politician risks looking political. If you prosecute a politician from the other party, you’re partisan; from the same party, you’re just trying to get bipartisan brownie points when you run for higher office.
The question is not how something looks politically, or how one reads the tea leaves on “repercussions,” or how sex cases are perceived differently than corruption cases.
The question is whether we’re comfortable doing nothing when we have evidence that a former president of the United States broke the law.
FOR THE RECORD
Trump’s felony conviction is the first time he got caught. But we shouldn’t forget that it’s hardly his first offense.
Let’s recap: He illegally discriminated against Black renters; colluded with mobbed-up unions; engineered a massive tax fraud scheme to save his family hundreds of millions; colluded with the KGB’s illegal efforts to elect him in 2016; boasted on audio about sexually abusing women; was accused by two dozen women of sexual improprieties; gave a Cabinet seat to a Florida prosecutor who covered up for Jeffrey Epstein.
Shall I continue? Trump’s “foundation,” his “university,” and his business—the Trump Organization—have all been shut down as frauds, and in a civil case he has been found liable by a jury for sexual assault. For all the delays, he may yet face criminal charges in Georgia for racketeering, in Florida for hoarding nuclear secrets, and in Washington for trying to stage a coup d’etat. The federal cases will go away if Trump is reelected, but even with control of the department of justice, he cannot snap his fingers and make the Georgia case and the New York criminal conviction disappear.
TURNING PRESIDENTS INTO KINGS
Long after Trump rides off into the sunset in his golf cart, we’ll be stuck with the poisonous majority opinions of his Supreme Court, two of which were issued in the tumultuous summer of ’24. The Supreme Court’s reversal of the Chevron case means that judges—not experts inside federal agencies—will determine how thousands of regulations work. This decision—Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo—was an astonishing judicial power grab. It will likely have the most far-reaching consequences of any decision besides Dobbs this decade. Over time, this decision will unravel the administrative state—an essential bulwark of health and safety regulation against corporate power—that was born in the 1930s under FDR.
Then came the disastrous Supreme Court decision in the Trump immunity case. Chief Justice John Roberts issued a sweeping opinion that delayed and complicated Jack Smith’s coup trial. But it also affected the hush money case. Judge Merchan felt obliged to postpone sentencing Trump, pending a hearing that sorts out how the Supreme Court decision might affect the case. Trump’s attorneys will argue that anything Trump said as president to Hope Hicks, a senior White House staffer, was part of his official duties and thus cannot be used in the case against him. Hicks’s testimony was important, but Manhattan prosecutors had plenty of evidence without it, which will likely give them the edge in long legal wrangling.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized the larger threat posed by the SCOTUS immunity decision: If the president “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” She ended her fierce opinion with an instant classic: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”
All six of the judges in the majority claim to be “originalists,” but they have apparently never read The Federalist Papers, especially Federalist No. 69 where Alexander Hamilton said that after leaving office presidents would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”
After the high court used a crowbar on the Constitution, my brother-in-law, Rob Warden, reminded me of a famous scene from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons.
When William Roper says he would cut down every law in England to get at the Devil, Sir Thomas More responds, “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”
Rob asked: What if, with his newfound immunity, Biden ordered the FBI to seize without warrants the six justices in the majority and hold them incommunicado at some secret gulag in the wilds of northern Alaska?
Where would the justices turn, the laws that would have protected them now being flat?
Of course Biden would never do that, and that is my only consolation. We’ve had forty-five men serve as president (Grover Cleveland is counted twice, which is why Biden, technically, is the forty-sixth president). Many have lied, governed poorly, and started disastrous wars. But only two of them—Nixon and Trump—have been crooks.
If Trump wins, he will be emboldened and empowered to run roughshod over everyone. If he doesn’t, we have some hope of reverting to the norm—a country where presidents don’t need immunity because they don’t break the law.
PROJECT 2025
The press has done a decent job explaining that Trump would use the presidency to retaliate against his enemies, but Trump has fuzzed it up with his usual response: I’m-rubber-you’re-glue-what-you-say-bounces-off-of-me-and-sticks-to-you.
So he’s pounding away at the Biden-Harris Administration for “weaponizing” law enforcement against him and turning the US into a banana republic—exactly what he did when he was in office.
Of course it’s Trump who plans to wreck the FBI so he can revive it as his personal fiefdom; Trump who plans to smash the “deep state” so he can replace career civil servants with his political stooges; Trump who plans to sabotage NATO and let Putin conquer Ukraine and try to reassemble the rest of the old Soviet Union.
And it’s Trump who plans to use the National Guard to deport 15–20 million immigrants, ripping people away from their families who have been here for decades (including Dreamers), in an operation that essentially militarizes American society. They may not pull it off, but they sure as hell are going to try. It’s one of the only issues Trump truly cares about.
Until late on the last night of the Republican National Convention, it seemed as if Trump would actually be able to do all of this. A giddiness infected the delegates, many of whom were wearing square white ear bandages to honor their chief. Trump began his acceptance speech by recounting his near-assassination and reading from the prompter the words of unity that had been prepared for him.
But then he veered off into an endless rant of moldy oldies that put some delegates to sleep and did nothing to win white women swing voters in the suburbs, who might not be vegetarians but aren’t fans of rancid red meat.
With dizzying speed, Trump lost his convention bounce and J. D. Vance got clobbered for old quotes, with “childless cat ladies” and “I hate cops” especially harmful.
But the even more serious problem for the Trump-Vance ticket is that Vance wrote the introduction to the Heritage Foundation report, Project 2025, which Harris immediately wrung around Trump’s neck.
Despite his attempts to run away from it, Project 2025 is Trump’s blueprint for a second term. The best way to understand the authoritarian society he envisions is to recall what Trump told civics students at the White House in 2019: “I have an Article II [of the Constitution], where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The manager of this revolution would not be Trump himself. He has almost no interest in how the government works. It would be his vice president, J. D. Vance, and a guy almost no one’s heard of: Russell Vought, a former budget director in the Trump White House. Vought is a self-described Christian nationalist and head of the Center for Renewing America, which is driving the Trump agenda. He is much smarter and more dangerous than Trump himself.
Vought believes the left has betrayed America and so we need what he calls “radical constitutionalism.” In Trump, Vance, and Vought’s government, all power would be centered in the Oval Office and the person of the president.
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
Just hours after Trump was nearly assassinated in Pennsylvania, J. D. Vance was already blaming liberals who say democracy is at stake in the 2024 election. He made it seem as if the twenty-year-old assassin—a registered Republican—was acting on orders from Democrats, an assertion based on zero evidence. The truth is that it is Trump and his MAGA acolytes who have stoked violence.
It’s important to record this: Trump sanctioned violence against protesters, reporters, immigrants, and Hillary Clinton (with the help of “Second Amendment people”); made light of the attacks on Paul Pelosi and Gretchen Whitmer; used rhetoric that the shooters in El Paso and Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue said inspired them; called the violent January 6 insurrectionists “hostages” and “martyrs”; predicted riots if he lost in 2024 and a “bloodbath for the country”; suggested that General Mark Milley be executed; and posted images of himself taking a baseball bat to Alvin Bragg.
At the same time, too many on the left went online to say that they regretted Trump’s luck in avoiding assassination. These people are not only wrong and morally obtuse, they know little history.
Violence can be useful for autocrats but it has never been a solution to political problems in democratic societies. There’s a reason Shakespeare gave Caesar’s friend Marc Anthony the big part in his play, Julius Caesar. The assassination of Caesar in 44 BCE marked the end of the Roman republic and the beginning of autocratic emperors and all the kings and Caesar wannabes to come. We have to rid ourselves of Trump the old-fashioned Athenian way—through democracy.
WHAT I MISS
Sooner or later, Trump will be out of our lives, but in the meantime, a lot else has atrophied in American public life.
I miss the sovereignty of facts—the time in this country when facts mattered, words mattered, arguments mattered, journalism mattered.
I miss the vibrant (if often superficial) local press, the lungs of democracy. If you laid a map of “news deserts”—places with no local newspaper or digital news source—on top of a map of Trump counties, they would be almost perfectly congruent.
There are hundreds of good reporters out there still doing important work. Charlotte is one of them. A TIME cover story she wrote in advance of the 2022 midterms helped prevent the victory of election-denier candidates for secretary of state in four battleground states.
But the fragmentation of media has been consequential. It’s harder to get traction with a story when so many people get their news from TikTok.
Maybe the old system gave too much power to people like me. Maybe it was wrong that a small group of reporters in Iowa and New Hampshire could force Gary Hart out in 1987 for monkey business aboard a yacht called Monkey Business (a story fueled by a photo in the National Enquirer of Donna Rice on Hart’s lap); or push Biden out of the same race for (maybe) plagiarizing a story about coal miners from Neil Kinnock, a British politician; or turn front-runners into also-rans for a variety of other shortcomings.
But at least there was some vetting process in place after the Blackstone Hotel’s smoke-filled rooms aired out. By 2016, there were no antibodies left to defend one of our major political parties. A draft-dodging fraudster named Trump could trash the 2008 Republican nominee (John McCain) for getting shot down and being held captive for five years and still be able to hijack the GOP.
Now, those batshit crazy letters on many subjects that I sometimes received in the 1980s at Newsweek, written with random exclamation points on the red typewriter ribbon (a dead giveaway), are not only more common online; they have infected the entire political debate.
I’m beginning to feel a little like Sy Feltz, the character in the Fargo television series who says: “The world is wrong. It looks like my world, but everything’s different.”
Then I realize that it’s not my world anymore, so who am I to say it’s wrong? And the things that are different—new media platforms, new ways of connecting, new AI applications—can be hugely exciting. The power of Kamala Harris’s “We’re not going back” message is that it frees us to, in Lincoln’s words, “think anew and act anew” far beyond the bounds of politics.
NO SUGARCOATING
As we feel our way to the future, it’s important not to sugarcoat the past. We didn’t even have anything resembling democracy in the South until the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Before that, only 7 percent of Black Mississippians were registered to vote. “Whites-only” primaries had been declared unconstitutional in 1944 but remained the norm in the South, and racial discrimination was rampant in the North, too.
I’m old enough to remember 1968, when the tensions were even higher than they are today. That year ended badly—with Nixon’s election—but we survived.
And we would survive Trump’s election, too, one way or another. The difference is that Trump’s disregard for the norms that even Nixon respected is so far-reaching—and his plans for governing as an authoritarian are so plain—that we have no precedent for what might happen.
Still, it’s not accurate to say that we’re in uncharted waters. The waters have been chartered in Hungary, the country that MAGA is looking to as a model. There, strongman Viktor Orban has destroyed a fine university, corrupted the judiciary, and turned elections into mere formalities. I’m less worried about sugarcoating the past than I am about sugarcoating this kind of future.
HITLER AND TRUMP
I’ve always been a little suspicious of Hitler-Trump comparisons. Watching Trump strut a stage or balcony, I’m more taken with the Mussolini analogy, though Mussolini was much smarter and more competent than Trump. To me, the best comparisons are to Trump’s modern-day role models: not just Orban but Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Nicolas Maduro, Jair Bolsinaro, and other strongmen who love money and power and use their authority to get more of both. Trump makes no secret of his respect for these thugs with blood on their hands.
Until recently, Hitler analogies were verboten in American journalism. Using them was a sign of simplistic historical analogizing of the kind that Richard Neustadt would reject. So why do we hear so much about Hitler? Because Trump himself keeps injecting Nazis into the conversation.
This isn’t a new habit. In 1990, Marie Brenner wrote an article in Vanity Fair about Trump’s divorce from Ivana, who told her lawyer that from time to time her then-husband would read a collection of Hitler’s speeches, My New Order, that he kept in a cabinet by his bed.
Trump almost certainly didn’t read it; his aides have said for years that he doesn’t read anything except his press clips—not even intelligence briefings. But an interest in Nazis is clearly lodged in his brain, and it has been growing since he left the presidency.*
Trump actually plagiarizes Hitler, only with immigrants subbing for Jews. He dehumanizes immigrants by calling them “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”—Hitler’s exact words for the Jews. He echoes Hitler’s depiction of “the enemy within,” and he constantly talks about the nonexistent threat of “Marxists,” a favorite Hitler target.
In the White House, Trump complained that his military commanders were not “totally loyal” to him and he wondered aloud to his White House chief of staff, retired Marine Corps general John Kelly: “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” (Kelly had to remind him that some of those generals tried to kill Hitler.) Trump, whose grandparents were German (a fact he tried to cover up), told cabinet members that “Hitler did some good things” and was pleased when German chancellor Angela Merkel compared the size of his crowds to Hitler’s.
In 2022, Trump hosted Holocaust deniers and Jew haters Nick Fuentes and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, which didn’t seem to hurt him much. Nor did a campaign video, posted on his Truth Social account, promising that if reelected, his industrial recovery would be “driven by the creation of a unified Reich.” Trump pulled down the video but didn’t bother with his normal “just kidding” excuse.
Why does Trump do this? The answer is that—like Hitler, who also started as a clownish figure—he must constantly up the ante to keep his fanatic followers engaged and his critics shocked and appalled. It’s also because the only sincere part of Trump is his entirely honest thirst for total power. If he gets it, he will use it to crush his enemies, not all at once but over time.
In 1940, George Orwell wrote a book review of Mein Kampf. He said Hitler was “appealing” because “he is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds.” This sounds a lot like Trump, who, as Hitler did, uses “drums, flags and loyalty-parades” to cement his support.
Everything Hitler did, he promised in Mein Kampf. Everything Trump would do, he is promising now, from bringing “retribution” to his enemies to “suspending the Constitution.” One of the starkest lessons of history is that when a strongman tells you that he wants to hurt you, believe him. It’s the only thing he’s telling the truth about.
THE DICTATOR
I signed my contract for a book on Franklin Roosevelt’s famous first one hundred days on Monday, September 10, 2001.
In the weeks that followed, as I went repeatedly to Ground Zero and tried to wrestle with a changed America, I thought my FDR book was irrelevant and dead.
A week after 9/11, President George W. Bush visited a mosque in Washington, where he urged Americans not to take vengeance on innocent Arabs and Muslims, a move that Trump would never make. His short war to remove the Taliban was successful and his speeches were strong.
Then, in 2002, Bush began marshaling support for an attack on Iraq and politicizing what he called “homeland security.”
I woke up in the middle of the night and thought: Our challenges now involve presidential leadership. I began working again on FDR, who saved democracy twice—first in 1933, when pulled the country out of the fetal position after millions of Americans had given up on democracy and favored a dictatorship, and again in early 1941, when his much-maligned Lend-Lease program saved our allies from being conquered by Nazi Germany. Arguably, he did so a third time in 1944 with D-Day.
I remember being struck by how many Americans admired Mussolini in the 1920s and early 1930s. My Grandpa Harry merely sold him a radio; Lowell Thomas, the most famous broadcaster of the era, extravagantly praised him on it. I was surprised to learn that the revered columnist Walter Lippmann, whom Mom hoped I would emulate, recommended to FDR that he assume some dictatorial powers, and even Eleanor Roosevelt, more liberal than her husband, told him that he might need to be “a benevolent dictator.” Studebaker had a car called the Dictator that sold well.
Nowadays, with so many Republicans enabling Trump’s plans to be a “dictator for a day” (as if he’d stop after that), the public’s weakness for strength in the early 1930s is more comprehensible. They yearned for a strong leader to set things right.
Roosevelt was tempted. In one of my favorite research discoveries, I found in the files of his library at Hyde Park a speech he never gave. On the second day of his presidency, he was set to deliver a radio address to the American Legion in which he was prepared to tell decommissioned veterans in their thirties that he might draft them into a Mussolini-style private army: “I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.” This was dictator talk, but FDR decided not to give that speech. He rejected going extraconstitutional (even his 1937 court-packing scheme was a failed bill to reform a horrible Supreme Court, not a power grab), and he worked with a Congress that was not as pliant as many historians assume.
Roosevelt’s isolationist Republican opponents, like today’s MAGA movement, were scarier than even the dopiest progressives. In 1939, the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization, held what it called a “pro-American” rally at Madison Square Garden. More than 20,000 people attended, many with regalia featuring swastikas. The US Congress contained several pro-Nazi lawmakers. Arthur Schlesinger wrote that the fight between isolationists and interventionists—known as “those angry days”—brought the deepest divisions in American society of his lifetime.
The country came together only after Pearl Harbor. If Harris loses, it might take some other shock to the system to change our current political trajectory and restore my faith in our common sense.
TEMPERAMENT
When assessing presidential leadership, Richard Neustadt wrote that “temperament is the great separator,” an observation connected to a famous story. During the first week of his presidency, FDR visited retired Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to celebrate his ninety-second birthday with a little bootleg champagne (akin to Biden smoking a little weed with Stephen Breyer). When Roosevelt left, Holmes remarked: “Second-class intellect; first class temperament.”
The same could be said of Biden, who, like FDR, was never much of a student but knew how to get things done. Jimmy Carter possessed the reverse—a first-class intellect and a second-class temperament. He was close to the top of the heap in terms of raw intelligence but had a prickly personality that undermined his powers of persuasion. Yet his decency, good judgment, and, yes, much-maligned attention to detail constituted its own kind of productive temperament in the presidency.
Clinton and Obama both had first-class intellects and first-class temperaments, but the latter took distinct forms. Clinton’s temperament was shaped by a superior political intelligence, though one that was hampered by his personal flaws; Obama was missing the schmooze gene but he compensated for it with immense coolest-kid-in-school magnetism.*
Bush Sr. was at the upper end of second-class in both categories, and his son on the lower side. Trump, exclusively transactional and self-interested, breaks Holmes’s formulation entirely. He can be clever and his political instincts, especially about the juncture of television and politics, are superior. But he has little interest in policy and—in the words of more than forty of his former senior appointees—is temperamentally unfit to be president.
Temperament is a product of motivation, and vice versa. What is the motive for a president’s struggle to win and wield power? Trump’s fight is entirely about himself—his battle to stay out of jail, bolster his ego and political position by mobilizing resentments against “the other.” Kamala Harris’s fight is for her campaign, of course, but also for an agenda to help Americans get ahead and to put MAGA in the rear view mirror.
Even in normal times, I’ve always thought that presidential leadership counts more than people realize. Imagine how much worse the situation in the Middle East would be today if Israel and Egypt were mortal enemies, as they were until Jimmy Carter engineered the Camp David Accords. Imagine a world where if someone in your family fell seriously ill, you had to sell your home or declare personal bankruptcy. That was the case for millions of American families until Obamacare. Imagine we had more of Trump’s useless “Infrastructure Weeks” instead of Biden’s trillions of dollars of investment in infrastructure, chips, and clean energy.
After the Tower of Babble collapses under its own weight, it’s policy that remains—programs and ideas with the potential to be harmful or transformational.
BUSH-WHACKED
Trump’s only domestic achievement as president—if you can call it that—was his gargantuan tax cut for the rich. But George W. Bush, whose father raised taxes in 1990 to put the government on a path to a balanced budget, is the one who first succumbed to the GOP’s mania for tax cuts. Trump was just picking up where Bush left off.
In 2000, my Newsweek colleague, the late Howard Fineman, and I interviewed Bush during a long van ride in New Hampshire. Dubya, as the press called him, showed no concern about last-minute prepping for a GOP debate that night, an insouciance (or arrogance) that would hurt him in the presidency.
I asked Bush why he wanted to end the inheritance tax, noting that his fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, was a strong believer in it. TR thought unearned wealth was “bad for young men” and that great fortunes should be returned upon death to the commonweal. Bush scoffed. He said today’s heirs would buy fancy cars and other expensive stuff, and that would recirculate the money—the Maserati dealer theory of wealth creation.
It’s far down the list of sins, but one of the bad things about Trump is that he makes George W. look OK by comparison. Junior wasn’t any good in the job—and he serves as a rebuke to the dynastic impulses of the American electorate.
At the same time, Bush’s tie with Al Gore in 2000 and very narrow win over John Kerry in 2004 are clearly within the normal parameters of American politics, hanging chads and all. And as bad as the Iraq War turned out to me, no one worried that Bush would trash democratic institutions.
The 2000 election was the first in 112 years in which the popular vote winner was not elected. I didn’t expect to see another such undemocratic outcome in my lifetime and it never occurred to me that the loser of both the popular vote and the election itself in 2020 would lie incessantly about how he really won—“and by a lot.” Another shock to our system—and to my own.
EYEBALL TO EYEBALL
Carter, Clinton, and Obama all explained to me at various times that the job of president is mostly about reacting to events. Trump was lucky he faced no major foreign policy crisis between 2017 and 2021; he is unlikely to be so fortunate again. His illusions about his relationships with Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un are dangerous. According to John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, “They think he’s a laughing fool, and they’re fully prepared to take advantage of him.” Trump and his vice president, J. D. Vance, who said “I don’t really care about Ukraine,” would be fine with that.
With Putin now prepared to ship the technology to Kim that would allow North Korean missiles to hit the United States, this could get very ugly very fast.
I’m reminded of why I always list John F. Kennedy in the first tier of American presidents. In 1962, JFK was a forty-five-year-old president who on foreign policy often deferred to the older and wiser men of the Senate, Richard Russell and William Fulbright. As the thirteen-day Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded, there were two options on the table for dealing with the presence of Soviet missiles a mere ninety miles from the United States: an air strike to take out the missile bases or a naval blockade directed against Soviet ships carrying more missiles to Cuba.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff favored an air strike. So did Russell and Fulbright. But Kennedy chose a naval blockade, and after the US and the Soviet Union went “eyeball-to-eyeball,” as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it, the Soviet ships turned back and the crisis was over.
At a 1992 conference, Fidel Castro said that if the US had invaded, “I would have agreed to the use of tactical nuclear weapons,” launched without the permission of Soviet authorities and with the knowledge that it would possibly mean the destruction of Cuba. We can’t know for sure if that would have happened, but had Kennedy done nothing else in office (and his legislative record, beyond funding NASA for the moon shot, was middling), his willingness to stand up to the hawks at this moment by itself qualifies him for greatness.
JFK’s secretary of defense was Robert S. McNamara, whom I interviewed several times. I’ll never forget McNamara putting his thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart and saying on camera, “We came this close to nuclear war.”
I doubt Trump could have been elected during the Cold War, when Americans took the threat of nuclear war seriously and cared who had his finger on the button. Voters were more aware that with the wrong leadership, there are lots of ways to stumble into Armageddon.
LOSERS AND SUCKERS
For most of my childhood, Dad didn’t talk about the war. He wasn’t traumatized, just wary—like McCain—of coming off as some kind of hero when so many others of his generation served, too. But over time, he appreciated that he had seen combat in the largest military conflict in human history, and he wrote a fine short book about it.
Like navy veteran Jimmy Carter, Dad’s priority was always peace. The biggest political disagreement we ever had was over the Iraq War. I believed Colin Powell, whom I had traveled with and respected, when he said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I described it as “right war, wrong commander-in-chief.” Dad thought it was a double wrong, and he was right.
Dad disliked “chicken hawks”—people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Pat Buchanan who had taken steps to avoid combat when they were young but were later perfectly willing to send young men off to die for their illusions. Biden’s college deferments wouldn’t have bothered him because they weren’t hawks, but Trump’s five deferments, supposedly because of “bone spurs” we never heard about again, would have irked him, as it did McCain. Trump told Howard Stern in 1998 that with STDs, dating was like combat. “It’s Vietnam,” Trump said. “It is very dangerous. So I’m very, very careful.”
In 2018, Trump canceled a visit to a military cemetery outside of Paris because he feared the rain would hurt his hair, but he also had no interest in seeing the “losers” buried there. He’s denied saying it, but does anyone believe that? General Kelly, his chief of staff, who lost a son in Iraq, heard the “losers” line and other slurs directly and later described Trump as: “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and he wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”
There’s a lot that I don’t understand in this strange world, and one of them is how anyone connected to the military can vote for this man.
BLACK SWAN SUMMER
In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote an influential book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb argued that Black Swan events (e.g., 9/11 or the development of Google) share three criteria: they are extremely rare, extremely impactful, and—in spite of being outliers—explainable and even predictable after the fact.
Both Donald Trump’s felony conviction and Joe Biden’s late withdrawal in favor of a dynamic Kamala Harris will be seen as Black Swans if Harris goes on to win the election. These events weren’t just improbable and impactful; they were also, in retrospect, predictable. Why shouldn’t a criminal president be held to account and a frail president be forced to stand down? On the other hand, if Trump wins, the trial and the passing of the torch to Harris will fade as Black Swan events, while his near-assassination will qualify as one.
If Trump loses the 2024 election, the pivotal moment will have been his decision on May 15 to agree to Biden’s request that they debate in June. Biden’s team hoped to reset the campaign with an unprecedented mid-year debate. That miscalculation doomed his candidacy. Trump might have doomed his own by not waiting until the fall to debate, at which point it would have been too late for the Democrats to replace Biden.
I got a heads-up on what might happen. On Father’s Day, eleven days before the historic June 27 CNN debate, I spoke to a senior Democratic senator who told me that if Biden did poorly in the debate, Democrats would have to find another presidential nominee. Surprised by this, I immediately broke (again) my New Year’s resolution not to scheme against Biden.
The debate was a fiasco from the moment the cadaverous president walked on stage. The idea that, if somehow reelected, he would still be president in 2028 at age eighty-six was alarming for many of his supporters. For half an hour, Trump steamrolled him. Biden was so weak that everyone ignored not just Trump’s dozens of lies but his viciousness, which we apparently now take for granted. He even had the nerve to go after Nancy Pelosi for not protecting the Capitol on January 6, as he incited his mob to kill her and his vice president and watched TV for 187 minutes without ordering help. Biden has said privately that Trump is “a sick fuck” for repeatedly joking about the home invasion that almost killed Paul Pelosi. Why couldn’t the president have managed to say some less profane version of that in the debate? Why was he so bad?
The answer was obvious. Age had robbed Biden of what Richard Neustadt taught me forty-five years ago is the only real power any president has: the power to persuade. He had lost his connection to the American people at least eighteen months earlier. Now it was clear that he couldn’t be Harry Truman, coming from behind to beat Tom Dewey in 1948. He wasn’t up to it.
My family couldn’t bear to watch the debate to the end. I did, and I stayed up until 2 AM writing the first of three New York Times Opinion pieces advocating an open audition process for a new nominee. That afternoon, the Times published an historic editorial that called for Biden to withdraw, describing his nomination as a “risky gamble.” Ezra Klein, Crooked Media, James Carville, David Remnick, Michelle Goldberg, and Tom Friedman were among the early big voices insisting that the president must immediately stand down, with David Axelrod’s view that Biden’s chances were “very slim” also highly influential.
While the idea of an open nomination process was always a bit of a pipe dream, it proved to be an effective fantasy. Democrats began to see the debate fiasco as a blessing in disguise, offering them the chance to nominate a fresh young candidate who had not been dented in fractious Democratic primaries. By making the idea of a “blitz primary” seem real, the Times gave Democrats uncomfortable with Kamala Harris permission to speculate about other possible nominees. If big donors had thought their only choices were Biden and Harris, they might have continued to fund Biden, assuring his nomination.
The effort to sideline the president was brutal and it briefly divided the party. But given the stakes, it wasn’t enough just to murmur, “It’s up to him.” Biden had to be gently cajoled in private and pushed harder in public, so that he would finally realize there was “no path,” as political strategists say.
It wasn’t easy. Bess Truman in 1952 and Lady Bird Johnson in 1968 both thought it sensible for their husbands to stand down and said so early in the election season. (When an exhausted LBJ announced he wasn’t running, he was fifty-nine, the same age as Kamala Harris.) By contrast, Jill Biden was all-in on Joe seeking reelection. Hunter Biden, too.
For two weeks, the president seemed to be in denial. He appreciated all of the comparisons to George Washington giving up power but still preferred to be in the company of successful two-term presidents Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, rather than one-termers Carter, H.W. Bush, and Trump, whom he continued to think—against all odds—that he could beat again. On July 5, George Stephanopoulos asked him what he would do if a delegation of congressional leaders came to the White House and asked him to step aside. He confidently predicted that wouldn’t happen, but did not close the door.
The key figure in getting Biden to change his mind was Pelosi, who drew on their forty-year friendship. At first, she thought Biden could survive what he described as his “bad night.” But Pelosi is an institutionalist; she loves the House, and her nightmare of not regaining control of that chamber (when Democrats were so close to winning it back) seemed to be coming true. With Republican control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, who would check Trump’s authoritarian impulses? After Biden under-performed with Stephanopoulos, Pelosi expected that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill would stage an intervention. “But the men were MIA,” one insider told me. “She wasn’t happy that the only bloody fingerprints on the knife were hers.”
The week of July 8, Pelosi went to the White House amid great secrecy and opened a channel to the president with an I’m-here-for-you tone, followed by several phone chats. When the poll numbers of endangered House Democrats worsened, her concerns deepened. A fly on the wall would have seen a master class in subtle politics, as the former speaker—a velvet-gloved boss for our times—maneuvered with great sensitivity to ease the president of the United States out of power. “She’ll cut your head off and you’ll never even know,” one of her friends told me.*
To put pressure on Biden, Pelosi matched her inside game with a subtle public effort. On July 10, she told Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Biden has been a “great president” before saying, “It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run.” Of course Biden had already decided to run, which made Pelosi’s comments an easy-to-decode message for others to resume pushing him to stand down once the NATO summit in Washington ended. This set the stage for George Clooney in public and scores of big donors in private to turn off the money tap.
By the end of the week, the men got more involved, as Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer made sure Biden saw devastating polls that his top campaign aides had been hiding from him or interpreting with confirmation bias. On July 18, Biden tested positive for Covid-19. During his time recuperating at home in Delaware—which overlapped with the coronation of the nearly martyred Trump at his convention in Milwaukee—he saw polls showing him in danger of losing long-blue New Mexico, Virginia, and Minnesota.
Biden’s intimates viewed Covid as the last straw. It took him off the road and seemed to underline the gloom of the moment, with the tide of Democratic opinion that favored a new nominee showing no signs of receding. If the president hadn’t tested positive, he might well have run out the clock, lashing himself to a party that increasingly viewed him as a selfish loser. The White House, the campaign, and the Democratic National Committee were fully on board with this lambs-to-the-slaughter approach and they needed to hold the line for only two more weeks before delegates would nominate Biden by virtual roll call. But with Covid, the endgame began. After denial (on display in interviews) and bargaining (over which polls to believe), Biden’s grief for the death of his presidency finally moved toward acceptance.
As he weighed this momentous political decision, he cut himself off for more than four days from almost everyone outside his family. The wounds of what he called “Obama’s deal with the Clintons” in 2016 were still surprisingly fresh, and he consulted none of them in this period—an extraordinary decision in itself. He would make this excruciating call without the wisdom of the fellow presidents he had once considered good friends.
In the nine years since Beau’s death, Biden had become much less joyful. The solemnity had its compensations: he was a steady, well-grounded, and philosophical president. Like his friend John McCain, he had seen worse, and the enduring pain helped keep him calm. It was no coincidence that on Friday, about forty-eight hours before he withdrew, he told Cindy McCain—hardly a close friend—that he would likely step aside. Even his chief of staff, Jeff Zients, hadn’t heard that yet.
After finalizing his decision with aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti on Saturday, Biden got up Sunday, July 21, and began telling people, including Harris. Senior staff heard the news only moments before the world did. Pelosi found out when she was performing community service with Jon Bon Jovi in New Jersey; Obama was playing golf. Just one hour before withdrawing, Biden was on the phone with the president of Slovenia putting the finishing touches on the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War, more proof that he was still a global leader of great skill and compassion.
When he finally bowed to reality, Biden went out with class. Less than half an hour after he issued a statement withdrawing from the race, he passed the torch to Harris, who moved with impressive speed to unite the Democratic Party behind her. Two days later, Biden’s eloquent Oval Office address included a deft insertion of great presidents into today’s struggle for democracy and decency. He conjured “Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the immortal words that guide this nation. George Washington, who showed us presidents are not kings. Abraham Lincoln, who implored us to reject malice. Franklin Roosevelt, who inspired us to reject fear.” The president never mentioned his former opponent, but it was hard to miss the message: Trump defiled the temple that his transcendent predecessors had built.
The speech reminded me of an ailing FDR—in much worse health than Biden—addressing Congress after returning from the Yalta Conference in 1945, only six weeks before he died. The postwar international order that Roosevelt designed is the one that Biden has done so much to reenergize. It’s the world that Eleanor Roosevelt conveyed to Mom and that she and Dad and my great teachers conveyed to me—a world of alliances, not autocrats; cooperation, not chaos.
As I reviewed why Biden had to stand down, I had a flashback that at first seemed disconnected from the extraordinary story of a political party trying to replace a successful president on the ticket. I thought about how the common experience of so many Americans having gay friends and relatives helped speed support for marriage equality in the early years of the twenty-first century—an issue on which Biden was ahead of Obama. In the same vein, the common experience of gently taking the car keys away from elderly parents helped lead two thirds of Democrats to the conclusion that Biden was too old to run again.
In retrospect, I’m glad I was passionately committed to Biden’s withdrawal, in print and in private conversations. Like my father in a single airplane, I played a very small role but it made me feel that I was doing everything I could to help protect democracy.
REBIRTH
When politicians reach a certain level, they take on the capacity to be born anew. Kamala Harris, who went from maligned vice president to thrilling presidential candidate overnight, is only the latest to experience this phenomenon.
Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was widely derided as a lightweight when he first ran for president in 1932. Even after he was barely nominated on the fourth ballot at the Chicago convention, pundits said it was “a kangaroo ticket—stronger in the hindquarters,” a reference to FDR’s Texan running mate, John Nance Garner. It wasn’t until his galvanizing acceptance speech that the Democratic Party united behind Roosevelt and his “new deal.”
In 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy was seen as a risky candidate. He was Catholic, and the only previous Catholic nominee—Governor Al Smith of New York—had lost badly to Herbert Hoover in 1928. Besides, Kennedy talked funny and was seen as a callow senator. Once the campaign began in earnest, the Democratic Party united behind him and he eked out a victory over Richard Nixon.
In 1980, former Governor Ronald Reagan was initially seen as a gaffe-prone (“Air pollution is caused by trees”) and trigger-happy cowboy who was too extreme to survive a general election.
The point is, fortune favors candidates who can paint a compelling picture of the future, where presidential campaigns are always won or lost.
Kamala Harris bringing it.
From the moment Biden stood down, Kamala Harris electrified the Democratic Party and gave herself—and the country—a chance to be reborn.
I wish Mom was here to see Harris, the embodiment of everything she dreamed of from that day Eleanor Roosevelt sat on her bed at Mount Holyoke.
ALWAYS THE RACE CARD
Donald Trump began polluting national politics in 2011 by peddling the racist lie that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States.
We often forget how brazen this was, more than forty years after politicians gave up explicit racial politics in favor of “school busing,” “welfare cheats,” and other code words and dog whistles.
After Obama produced his long-form birth certificate, Trump doubled down, offering to give $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice if he released his college applications and transcripts. The man George Will called a “bloviating ignoramus” claimed Obama—a former editor of the Harvard Law Review—had been too stupid to be admitted to college except as an affirmative action case.
A dozen years and hundreds of insults later, a bullying Trump went on stage at the National Association of Black Journalists convention and slimed Kamala Harris as an Indian woman who “happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” comments that would get any CEO in America fired. This was a lie (Harris graduated from Howard University) and a slur intended to stir fear of “the other.” Inserting this poison into the heart of his campaign, he followed up with more racist and misogynist rants. Trump is determined to get reelected playing the same race card he brought to the table in the first place. On top of a verdict on the future of NATO, reproductive rights, and democracy itself, American voters will have to decide what they think about this kind of politics. Will it be sloughed off as a forgivable reaction to “woke excesses”—or repudiated as the foul residue of a country we no longer want to be?
WE DO OUR PART
I’m hearing people muse about leaving the country if Trump is elected. I’m not sure they’re serious but it reminds me that this is exactly what rightwingers have wanted ever since those “America—Love It or Leave It” bumper stickers in the 1960s.
I also didn’t like the liberal bumper sticker from those years: “America—–Fix It or Forget It.” I don’t want to leave America or fuhgeddaboudit either, as Jimmy Breslin or John Gotti might say.
Why hand over the country to these weirdos?
If Trump wins, we’ll fight him in the courts, in Congress, and, peacefully, in the streets. We’ll need to protect immigrants—many of whom have been here for decades—from being rounded up and deported. We’ll need to serve democracy in a hundred other ways that are hard to predict.
The main difference between our current challenges and what we’ve faced in the past is that all of the haters and demagogues and con men in our history have operated at a level below that of the president of the United States.
In that sense, Trump presents unique threats that, of necessity, involve far more of us than were needed to confront, say, Huey Long or Joe McCarthy, or the broader “paranoid style” that has always been present on the fringes of American politics.
After the Jack Smith case was delayed, it became a truism in the commentariat that no trial could stop Trump. Only the voters could do that.
Truisms are often true, but this one is incomplete. Democracy is a set of muscles and they work best when exercised throughout the body politic. Trials, turnout, journalism—it’s all important. Politics is a game of inches, so anything might make the difference.
All citizens need to think of what we can do to meet the moment, as my father and George H. W. Bush and so many other brave men and women have done before us. Electing Kamala Harris would protect democracy but mark only the beginning of the revival of democratic values. With MAGA having metastasized, the battle against authoritarians at home and abroad will be, as JFK described the Cold War, a “long twilight struggle.”
In the meantime, what we know for sure about Donald Trump is that he will challenge the election returns if he loses and continue to inflict himself on us. Every time we think he has finally touched bottom, he crashes through the floor.
In the early years of the New Deal, at the depths of a Depression much more painful and disruptive than anything we have experienced since, Franklin Roosevelt launched the National Recovery Administration. Shopkeepers and homeowners attached a decal to their windows featuring a blue eagle—the symbol of recovery—and a legend below that read: WE DO OUR PART.
Will we do ours?
LINCOLN
The history of American democracy is a story of unruly struggle and of common sense, a handy tool passed down like a practical family heirloom.
Abraham Lincoln was a natural storyteller but also a listener, and he craved hearing the horse sense possessed by the people—the voters that FDR, Clinton, and other politicians so trust. Lincoln enjoyed hosting big public events at the White House, which he viewed as “my public opinion baths”—essential for any success. “Public sentiment is everything,” he said. “With it, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” He applied this even to children, whose voices he wanted to hear.
One day after court, I wandered four blocks south of the courthouse to what in the nineteenth century was the notorious Five Points, as readers and viewers of Gangs of New York may recall. Lincoln went there, too, in 1860, not long after he bought a new suit at Brooks Brothers and a stovepipe hat and had his photograph taken by Mathew Brady.
At Five Points, Lincoln visited the House of Industry, a grim workhouse for desperately poor children. The children’s faces, a witness reported, “would brighten into sunshine as he spoke cheerful words of promise.” When told he had inspired the children, Lincoln responded, “No, they inspired me.”
Lincoln’s speech about slavery that week at the Cooper Union would help catapult him to the presidency. He wrote the ending in all capital letters so he would know to stress it in his reedy tenor:
LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.
Trump, inverting Lincoln, echoes strongmen like Putin who believe might makes right, and that “doing our duty” is for suckers. He celebrates Jan. 6 insurrectionists who flew a Confederate flag inside the Capitol that Lincoln helped build.
The 2024 election is the most crucial in American history with the possible exception of 1864, when President Lincoln faced dashing General George B. McClellan, who opposed the abolition of slavery.
In 1865, less than six weeks before he was assassinated, Lincoln delivered his brilliant second inaugural address beneath the partially completed Capitol dome.
He said:
“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
I’m not a natural optimist, but I have always been hopeful. I’m convinced that our angels are better than so many now assume, and that those mystic chords of memory will, over time, swell our chorus and carry us home.
*In 2016, J. D. Vance, Trump’s future running mate, wrote to a friend that Trump could become “America’s Hitler.”
*We think of Obama as an inspiring orator, but because he spoke in beautiful paragraphs, not pithy sentences, few of his lines have stood the test of time.
*This was not the first time Nancy Pelosi showed her LBJ-level political skills. In 2010, she stiffened Obama’s spine and shepherded the Affordable Care Act to passage against great odds. And in 2021, she helped shape Biden’s multitrillion-dollar legislative program before modeling a transition to younger leaders by not seeking reelection as speaker.