Among Americans who pay attention to politics, there is currently a palpable panic in Democratic circles that Joe Biden could well lose the 2024 presidential election. The opponent we fear can beat him is currently facing 91 separate felony charges in four different criminal cases at both the state and federal levels—not to mention additional civil suits—among them some of the most serious offenses imaginable for a public servant. And the evidence against him is close to overwhelming. 

Yet the race is terrifyingly close. Such is the desiccated and diseased state of contemporary US politics, a state for which that aforementioned defendant bears a great deal of responsibility. 

Luckily, Joe Biden has recently signaled that he intends to enlist a new and unlikely ally in his cause—an ally that can be found under the heading “Wretches, Ink-Stained” and their brethren in the electronic realm. That is a bold gambit, as thus far those folks have figured heavily in fomenting the very danger in which Joe finds himself in the first place. 

STOP THE PRESSES

Biden, corny ol’ fella that he is, has long been fond of telling voters, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” It’s become a hoary line by now…..but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. 

The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein reports that last week the Biden campaign issued a press release that “urged the political press corps ‘to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House.’” 

(T)hough neither the media nor the electorate is yet paying full attention, Trump in his 2024 campaign is regularly unveiling deeply divisive policy positions (such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented immigrants) and employing extremist and openly racist language (echoing fascist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in describing his political opponents as “vermin”). Eventually, Trump’s excesses could shape the 2024 election as much as Biden’s record will.

With his callout of the press, Joe is challenging the media to highlight that stark choice for the American people. 

That exhortation speaks to a crucial truth: That the press must abandon the pre-2016 mentality that insists on reporting a presidential contest in “horserace” terms when one party is openly proposing the installation of an autocracy; that it must cease engaging in wildly inappropriate and dangerous bothsidesism when the very fate of democracy is on the ballot; that it has a responsibility to alter its antiquated obeisance to the great god Objectivity when one candidate and his enablers have ruthlessly exploited that ethos and inverted it into a weapon against Truth itself.

One would have thought the press would have learned from these mistakes in 2016, and to a lesser extent in 2020. But clearly it has not.  

The press is both under-covering Biden’s accomplishments and failing to highlight Trump’s monstrosity. To cite but one example, it is hammering Joe on favorite Republican talking points like his age, doing the GOP’s work for them, while failing to offer comparable coverage of Trump that presents a fair picture to the American people. 

(In Republican media, Biden is simultaneously derided as an “imbecile”—that is the precise word they use—and a criminal mastermind pulling all the strings in a vast conspiracy to undermine ‘Merica. A huge advantage of being in the right wing is the absence of any need to hew to logic.)

Biden is regularly the butt of jokes about his age and his alleged mental decline, but Trump is barely any younger, and his mental state is far more degraded and alarming. It’s a dynamic reminiscent of the press’s fixation on Hillary’s emails in 2016, while devoting a relatively paltry number of column inches to Trump’s own long history of outrageous corruption and malfeasance, a howling disservice to the voting public that distorted the entire campaign. 

In part, this disconnect is a function of the press’s natural inclination to go for the more sensational story in all cases, even at the expense of substantive and accurate reportage. The notion—relentlessly promoted by the GOP—that the press is left-leaning is demonstrably false. (If anything, the MSM tilts center-right.) But even more than allegiance to any given political ideology, the press’s prime directive is to seek out that which is juiciest and most attention-grabbing. 

As Molly Jong-Fast recently wrote in Vanity Fair:

Not only is the media more interested in covering Trumpworld than Bidenworld, but it seems like journalists are somewhat resentful toward the current administration for its disinterest in playing ball these past few years. Remember, Trumpworld was filled with blockbuster leaks and White House feuds, leading to increased subscriptions and sky-high ratings—the “Trump bump,” as it was called. “The media became addicted to the constant excitement and danger of Trump,” Guardian media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote in an email. “Biden offers something apparently far less compelling: decency, sanity, and a sense of reasonable calm.”

If it bleeds it leads, right? 

Sadly, if we let Trump back into office, it will be democracy that is laid down on the blacktop and bleeding out, with no ambulances on the way.

WTF, AMERICA?

In throwing down this gauntlet to the press, is Biden trying to outsource his campaign’s job, asking the media to make an argument that is really the task of his own team? No, he’s just asking the press to do their own job as it is meant to be done.

Similarly, are we ascribing too much power to the press? Setting aside those mouthbreathers who thrilled to it, the ghastliness of the Trump presidency ought to be self-evident to any sentient American. If it is not, do we really believe that the mainstream media can change the country’s collective mind? 

Maybe not. But it doesn’t help when it aids the other side. 

We have all seen—and many of us shivered to our bones over—polls showing Trump beating Biden in a head-to-head rematch, including in the crucial swing states. Whether or not those polls are accurate, the fact that Biden is not beating Trump by high double digits is worrying all by itself. The idea that significant numbers of Americans trust Trump more on the economy, foreign policy, and immigration—three areas where, ironically, he is especially horrific—can only be ascribed to some combination of mass amnesia, ignorance, and willful self-delusion. Indeed, the idea that anyone would trust Trump on anything, but on those matters in particular, is hard to comprehend, as is the idea that anyone would want to return to the hellscape that were the years 2017-2020. 

The Bulwark’s Mona Charen writes:

While a second term of Trump will destroy democracy and potentially destabilize the entire world, these Americans either don’t know that, don’t believe it, or don’t care. Trump’s calls for internment camps, his interest in invoking the Insurrection Act on day one, promises of prosecution for political enemies, the probability he will pardon his own crimes (and the certainty that he will shut down federal investigations into them), and an overhauled government filled with cronies who will do Trump’s authoritarian bidding are not registering as a danger in these polls.

You would think that trying to overturn an election and leading a coup, encouraging the murder of your own vice president, stealing government secrets and recklessly waving them around at your golf club, kidnapping and caging children as a matter of national policy, licking Vladimir Putin’s boots, wantonly exploiting the office of the presidency for personal financial gain, being twice impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and demonstrating the depraved indifference to human life that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths during a global pandemic would, collectively, make a person un-electable.

But apparently not, in the good ol’ USA.

We know that despite Biden’s many impressive accomplishments, the broader American public consistently fails to give him credit. Just to review, those accomplishments include pulling the country out of a historic pandemic; deftly managing two complex foreign wars involving key US allies; overseeing an economic recovery at a speed few experts thought possible; restoring America’s badly injured global reputation and undoing the damage done by his predecessor; and passing landmark legislation in areas as diverse as semiconductor production; lowering prescription drug prices; addressing the climate emergency; promoting clean energy; and instituting the most comprehensive gun control measures in decades. And he has done all that in the face of an obstructionist—indeed openly seditionist—opposition party that refuses even to acknowledge that he is the legitimately elected president. 

That stinginess with credit is especially nutso when it comes to the state of the economy, which is actually doing quite well, even as a slim majority of the public actively believes exactly the opposite. Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told The New York Times, that she had “never seen this big of a disconnect between how the economy is actually doing and key polling results about what people think is going on.” 

We also know that working against Biden in the 2024 presidential campaign is what the researcher David Atkins calls “thermostatics”: the American electorate’s reliable impulse to “throw the bums out” no matter who’s in power, a kind of built-in disadvantage to incumbency that serves as a counterbalance to its much-documented advantages. 

But there is some good news. In contrast to years past, negative views of the challenger look to figure more heavily in the 2024 race than the usual referendum on the incumbent, a phenomenon that the veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff called unprecedented. In a recent poll by McInturff’s firm in cooperation with a Democratic partner and NBC, nearly three out of five voters said that their view of Trump would be their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch. “I have never seen a number like this NBC result between an incumbent and ‘challenger,’” McInturff reported. “If 2024 is a Biden versus Trump campaign, we are in uncharted waters.”

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll also showed that swing state voters who currently favor Trump would flip to Biden if Trump is convicted of some of the 91 criminal charges he currently faces. I guess there’s more respect for law and order and the criminal justice system than previously thought. 

It is also worth noting that this is the first time since 1892 that both the (presumptive) nominees of the two parties have occupied the highest office in the land. (Brownie points for anyone who can name the two men in that contest, and no Googling. Answer below.) In other words, as former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina says, 2024 is a matchup of two incumbents. The electorate doesn’t have to imagine what a Trump presidency would look like: we’ve already seen it. That denies Donald the advantage of hypotheticality and the tabula rasa onto which dreamy voters can project their fantasies, an advantage from which most presidential challengers benefit, thermostatics wise.  

Let’s just hope enough voters remember the nightmare that was the first Trump administration, and make it the only such one. 

THE HORROR

In the first years after Biden took office, while COVID-19 was still raging, there was a fella who lived near my father’s house in Bucks County, PA who had a homemade sign by his mailbox that read FAKE PANDEMIC, REAL TYRRANY. 

The precious bodily fluids mentality that held that COVID was a hoax was mind-boggling enough, but that was to be expected. It was the attendant claim that Joe Biden—perhaps the most avuncular American politician since Hubert Humphrey—was somehow a dictator that really blew my mind. 

This is a man who kept in place the US Attorney that his predecessor appointed to investigate his own son, and didn’t lift a finger even when his own Attorney General gave that same man special prosecutor status; a man who studiously avoided any involvement in righteous investigations into the manifest criminality of that presidential predecessor; a man who labored mightily to provide federal funds and to pass legislation to help states that fiercely opposed his presidency, and that continue to demonize him.

If Biden is a tyrant, he must have finished at the bottom of his class in Dictator School. 

And yet, in MAGA World, Dark Brandon—per above, simultaneously a borderline vegetable and an all-powerful master puppeteer—remains the antichrist. Could there be a more perfect example of the polarization of contemporary America? 

As Mona Charen notes, it’s hard to fathom those who are unbothered by the prospect of a second Trump administration, let alone those actively excited by the idea. But Trump’s red-hatted true believers I can at least understand, even though I disagree with them with every fiber of my being. I even understand the motivations of loathsome and cynical Trump supporters like Lindsey Graham, despicable though they are. What I don’t understand, and what drives me crazy, are those low-information apathetic folks who shrug at the prospect of Trump 2.0, along with the too-cool-for-school crowd who claim it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, and repeat the lazy canard that “both candidates are bad,” or whinge that they’re tired of politics and polarization and all this drama. (NB: That’s exactly what the GOP wants you to feel. Cui bono?) 

When I watch SNL make smug, halfwitted jokes denigrating Biden, I always think the same thing: Keep it up, bozos—you’ll get Trump again.

Is it unsporting to ask comedians not to go after obvious comedic material, low-hanging or otherwise? Maybe. But like shoddy journalism, cheap jokes, hidden beneath the disingenuous cloak of being an “equal opportunity offender,” are impossible to justify when they contribute to fascism on the rise that threatens to devour us all. By all means, let’s use satire for its intended purpose, but contextualized in truth-telling, something that more ambitious comedians often lay claim to, court jester-like. Biden can take a joke; a second Trump administration would see James Austin Johnson and his dead-on impression of The Once and Possibly Future Despot clapped in irons.

You think I’m kidding? Wait and see.

In a recent piece for Slate with the unimprovable title “The Horror of Who Is Still Listening to Trump,” Dahlia Lithwick describes the Trump of 2016 as a thought experiment. (“What if we allowed a guy who talks like this to run for and secure the US presidency?”) The Trump of 2023, she writes, is much, much scarier: “How many people who once struggled to condone and parse and rationalize the opaque notions floated by a mediocre demagogue can now do so knowing his full intentions and ability to achieve them, without breaking a sweat?

Turns out—a lot.

Lithwick looks back on Trump’s outrageous statements of the past, going back to 2015, writing of the bitter irony that now the “violence is both more overt and insane, and it also goes down even smoother in 2023, despite being more recognizable as a real threat.”

What Donald Trump is now expressly promising is perfectly clear—just look to his Veterans Day “vermin” speech; in an earlier statement that immigrants “come from mental institutions and insane asylums.…It’s poisoning the blood of our country”; and in promises to “aggressively deport resident aliens with jihadist sympathies.” Gone are the gauzy illusions that he just wants to make America safe. Gone are the double and triple meanings that we in the press used to parse for days. Donald Trump used to be described as inadvertently saying the quiet parts out loud, but now he is quite purposefully saying the fascism on the stump. Now he’s openly calling for mass deportations and the murder of his opponents and martial law.

Rank senility notwithstanding, Trump’s word choice and manner haven’t changed appreciably in the years since he took office. What has changed—what has morphed unrecognizably—is how it’s being received. Which is why we should stop asking why the message is still allowed to happen and start asking when it became distilled down to constitutional elevator music.

DEEP DARK TRUTHFUL MIRROR

I would caution here that we should not let bad numbers cause us to throw up our hands. A sober recognition of the challenges of Biden winning re-election are in order, but defeatism is of no use, and in fact, counter-productive to say the least. 

If the American people return Trump to office next November, even by means of a deeply flawed, antiquated, anti-democratic system that favors the minoritarian party, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. Even given the inherent inequities of that system—the Electoral College, extreme partisan gerrymandering, the poisonous infusion of dark money, voter suppression, and outright electoral subversion—if we cannot get ourselves together sufficiently to muster our collective outrage, get out the vote, and keep this fascist out of the White House for a return engagement, we will deserve what we get.    

The media’s role in facilitating that catastrophe cannot be ignored. 

As the political scientist Brian Klaas recently wrote in The Atlantic (after Trump called for General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to be executed for criticizing him), “The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the US Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.”

Good on Joe Biden for calling the press out on that point. Spread the word. 

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Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press

The last time two US Presidents faced off in an election was 1892, when Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who had been the 22nd president, defeated incumbent Republican Benjamin Harrison in a rematch of their 1888 contest.