America’s Political ‘Teams’: Not Fit to Play

A s we enter the penultimate phase of the 2024 presidential race, we should take a look at how the competing teams are coming together. Or not.

First, and most conspicuously, consider the Trump legal-defense team. It will play a pivotal role in the upcoming campaign, for it is clear by now that Trump will not be running as the self-imagined “de facto incumbent” but as a back-page, tabloid defendant.

I am a layman, but Trump’s new lawyers do not strike me as first-round draft choices. In truth, they beg questions. To wit: Will all of them, or indeed any one of them, still be around to offer a toast at the end-of-trial dinner in December? Do any of them find it unsettling, professionally speaking, when the client departs from script to deliver free-form rants on the courthouse steps? Do they have issues, ethically speaking, when the client expresses views in direct conflict with documentary evidence? Are they overly (if understandably) concerned with the possibility that their invoices will go unpaid and their reputations disfigured? More generally, are they committed to the client, and he to them? And more fundamentally, who is actually mounting this defense, the client or his counsel?

(On one point I agree comprehensively with Trump’s lawyers — with, that is, both the present crew and their several predecessors running all the way back to the inimitable Michael Cohen: Trump cannot get a fair trial. This is sad but true. He can’t. And it’s not just because he’s up against a cabal of ideologically crazed and legally prejudiced New Yorkers. If Trump had managed to change the venue of his trial to, say, Laramie, Wyo., and then had managed to exclude from the jury pool anybody who had not affixed a Trump sticker to the back end of his pickup, and had then asked each of the remaining prospects the question, “In your opinion, am I, Donald J. Trump, the kind of man who might BS a banker on a loan application form?” . . . well, it seems likely that the answer would have been some cowboy variant of, “Does a bear poop in the woods?”)

Now consider the Biden business-development team. The Biden family business (BFB, Inc.) has, for starters, a strong financial model. If you don’t have to manufacture a product or provide a service, your Cost of Goods Sold comes in on the P&L at approximately zero. Revenue falls to the bottom line, the profit margin swells. The only ongoing cost for BFB, Inc. is personal expense — airplane tickets, hotels, hookers, and the like.

And then you notice that BFB, Inc. has what legendary investor Warren Buffett likes to call a moat. The Oracle of Omaha is referring there to a durable barrier against upstart competition. Think of Google’s algorithms or Coca-Cola’s sugar-water formula or Nvidia’s secret AI sauce. When it comes to BFB, Inc., if a client wanted to purchase the influence of a Senate committee chairman in the Aughts, or the vice president in the Teens, or the president in the Twenties, he had only one real choice: He could fend for himself or he could issue a sole-source contract to BFB, Inc. That was it, and that was a moat, virtually oceanic in width.

But there comes a moment in even the best-designed grift when somebody has to do some work. Not much, but nice. Somebody has to inform the prospective client what the deal is, and do it with a straight face. Somebody has to hand-hold the existing client, explaining why the Big Guy has not yet delivered his quo for their quid. Somebody has to manage that archipelago of shell companies. (If I could think of a reason for standing up 20 faux corporations around the world other than hiding payments from oligarchs and Communists to people named Biden, I would cite it here.) That somebody, off at the end, is not going to be named Biden — he might be named Archer, or Bobulinsky — and the day he becomes a partner is the day he becomes a problem. That omertà thing works only in the movies.

We come finally to what might loosely be called the House-GOP-leadership team. Last week, eight Republicans, stating that they hoped to move the House in a more conservative direction, signed on as junior partners with the Democratic caucus to overthrow Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Not one of those 208 Democrats — a unanimous delegation led by representatives Jeffries, Pelosi, Raskin, Schiff, and Ocasio-Cortez — hoped to move the House in a more conservative direction. And it soon became clear that the Magnificent Eight, having vacated the chair, had no plan whatsoever for installing a new occupant. As I write these words, the GOP conference is trying to finalize a candidate for speaker, having tentatively chosen the latter of the two leading prospects: a prominent member of the Hannity wing of the party and one of the few men in Washington in worse physical condition than Joe Biden.

Three teams, three winless seasons.

I ask you: Are these teams fit to lead America into our challenging future? Is this the America that, united and resolved, beat the Nazis in a hot war and the Communists in a cold one? How did that America turn into this America? The quandary gives those of us of a certain age a Casey Stengel flashback: The great baseball manager once looked out over his clubhouse-full of hapless, bottom-dwelling New York Mets players and asked plaintively, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

I hope — no, I know — that a brave scholar somewhere is beavering away on the definitive study of how and why America lost her competitive edge. We need that study, desperately, but we also need, for immediate reference, a quick and dirty version.

Try this. It seems to me that the change occurred in the Hemingway sequence — gradually, and then suddenly — and that it evolved across three phases. The first phase, unrolling over the past 30 years, was the marginalization of the U.S. military. Over that period, we went from the Greatest Generation to the Be As Good As You Can Be Generation to the We’ll Take Whatever You Care to Give Us Generation. Today, with the military reporting recruitment shortfalls year after year, we have in a country of 330 million people a force of 1.4 million active-duty personnel, fewer than half of them even theoretically combat-ready. That’s marginalization.

Why does that change matter? For the reason that, for the last half of the 20th century, American boys learned teamwork from either serving in the military or from being coached, taught, or raised by those who did. Boys learned, as a unit, to maximize their strengths — brains, skills, courage — and to hide their weaknesses. Leadership emerged from the crucible of competition. The objective was always in focus: To produce a unit with speed, power, and lethality superior to the enemy’s unit. And the objective was pursued with urgency. As if their lives depended on it.

The second phase, starting sometime in the first decade of this century, was the bureaucratization of competitive sports. Veterans, local businessmen, retired athletes, after-work fathers, part-time history teachers — the very core of the longtime coaching brigade — drifted away and were replaced by people who were better organized, followed the rules more closely, and appeared to believe that sports was not about winning and losing but how you played the game. At every juncture, these new people expressed preference for process and disdain for result. Their consolidation of control was epitomized by the spreading plague of the participation trophy, which taught young Americans that how the team performed was less important than how they felt about themselves.

The third phase has now erupted all around us. Pregnant women in the army. Girls changing in the coach’s office after playing (briefly and heart-stoppingly) for the boys’ football team. Large men, claiming they are women, dominating small women in the swimming pool. The craziness came upon us quickly, as it tends to do when the Left drops all pretense and lunges for the end game.

Huddle up, guys. We have some big games on the schedule.