Dear Weekend Jolter,
He did it. He beat two impeachments; muted criticism inside his party over his role in January 6 and rebranded his rioter-fans as martyrs; weathered civil judgments that would have financially and reputationally bankrupted most; cleared away a field of primary opponents without setting foot on a debate stage; pressed his immunity claims all the way to the Supreme Court and walked away with enough of a victory to scramble his legal proceedings for months; and, a teetotaler, heads to Brew City next week to officially claim the GOP nomination a third time.
Bah, just kidding. That’s not the real story, is it? Donald Trump’s biggest victory may be that all of that is below-the-fold news — compared with what’s happening on the Democratic side, a melodrama entering its third full week and quite likely to last through Trump’s accession.
Donald Trump is, as he has always been, the luckiest man. At June’s end, he was facing the possibility — remote, but real — of being sentenced to prison in the run-up to his party-nominating convention, which would have been a political-world-consuming event. But the Court’s ruling delayed his New York sentencing, and could even kill the case, and now Milwaukee will smoothly, perhaps uneventfully, wrap Trump’s autopilot nomination.
Democrats, to the contrary, will be engaged in the worst kind of counterprogramming imaginable, as the party devours itself in full public view over whether President Biden should be renominated at their convention in August or step aside for an able-bodied and lucid person. Biden’s NATO press conference on Thursday, for all its rambling and name-muddling and unfinished thoughts, made clear he is not budging unless somehow forced into it — by family, health, delegates — and continues to view himself as the indispensable actor on the world stage.
This is not the counterprogramming the Democratic Party intended. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s operation haunted the GOP convention host state of Ohio with regular events including a “counterconvention.” Biden’s presumably will go through the motions — the president is planning a sit-down interview with NBC for Monday, though one largely about self-preservation — and counterprogram Milwaukee with warnings about the threat Trump poses to democracy.
But the campaign’s organizing theme has already lost its punch, with Democrats prosecuting what Rich Lowry terms an “attempted intraparty coup.” At this late stage, there’s no scenario in which democracy itself is being championed:
On the one side is the faction that wants to dump the presidential candidate chosen by more than 14 million Democratic-primary voters.
On the other side is the faction that wants to keep the presidential candidate who almost certainly will not serve out his four-year term, leading to the ascension of an unelected president and unelected vice president.
Rich adds, “There’s no doubt that Joe Biden is the democratically selected presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, but also little doubt that his condition was hidden from the public and that, if he had to run in a free and fair nomination contest today, he would lose handily.”
Then there’s the related hypocrisy. As Christian Schneider writes, “Biden is putting himself before his country; at the same time he is warning that Trump is an ‘existential’ threat to democracy, he is making it almost certain that Trump will be reelected.”
In an election Democrats wanted to make all about Trump, the Republican National Convention should have provided the struts of their closing argument. Instead, they will struggle to make hay out of the inevitable antics of next week’s nominating session. In all likelihood, the party’s own chaos will overshadow Trump’s Roman triumph on Lake Michigan.
It’s hard to feel sorry: The president’s infirmity is a scandal. As NR’s editorial notes, dozens, perhaps hundreds, are implicated in the cover-up: “What we know is that, while expounding on the importance of saving democracy and our norms, a host of Democratic players hid the president’s condition from the public for partisan reasons, and that they stopped not because they were conscience-stricken but because — thanks to the debate — they got caught.”
Of course, nobody knows what will happen next. Biden appears to be attempting the full Northam, intent on brazening this out despite the inherent risks for his candidacy and country. As Phil Klein noted earlier this week, the dump-Biden movement was starting to feel like the fizzled anti-Trump effort of 2016. But concerned members of the party haven’t stopped revolting; Biden’s condition is so bad he’s lost Clooney, who proclaimed to compatriots as only he knows how that we’re in a tight spot, and even members of his campaign staff; the polls foretell disaster for Democrats; and the money is drying up. They are in a real bind, as Audrey Fahlberg explains, and a convention fight is possible. The terrible reality may be that, as Noah Rothman writes, Democrats are depending on another public meltdown from the president to effectuate his removal from the ticket.
What a sorry state. One takeaway from Quagmire 2024, however it resolves, is that the only player more feeble than Biden is the political-party system. On that point, Yuval Levin, play us out:
We have arrived at an election in which one party’s candidate is psychologically unfit to be president, the other’s is physically and mentally unfit to be president, and both are intensely unpopular. Will that be enough to hammer home the lesson that what the parties are doing isn’t working?
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Our editorial on the Biden cover-up, again, is here: The Biden Scandal
Bravo, Mr. Speaker: Mike Johnson’s Strong Case for American Strength
Keeping VOA honest: A Reckoning at Voice of America
On the U.K. elections: The Tory Catastrophe
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: Reporters Congratulate Themselves on Being Shamed into Doing Their Jobs
Audrey Fahlberg: Biden’s Dem Critics Wait for the ‘Tipping Point’ as President’s Hill Allies Dig in Their Heels
Joshua T. Katz: President Biden’s Goodest Job
Andrew McCarthy: Biden’s Fitness Is Not Just a Campaign Issue. It’s a National-Security Issue
Andrew McCarthy: After Supreme Court Decisions, Judge Merchan Must Throw Out Trump’s Convictions
Ramesh Ponnuru: The GOP’s Insufficient Abortion Platform
Philip Klein: Republicans Make Fiscal Irresponsibility Part of Their Official Platform
Philip Klein: The Time When Biden Did Drop Out
Rich Lowry: The Youngkin Alternative
Abigail Anthony: The ‘Transphobic National Review Article’
Madeleine Kearns: The Disturbingly Shaky Conviction of Lucy Letby
Michael Brendan Dougherty: Political Realism, Populism, and Pro-Lifers
Will Swaim: ‘Read My Lips: I Lied’
Neal Freeman: That Week in San Francisco
Arthur Herman: NATO Needs a New Look
CAPITAL MATTERS
Dominic Pino, on union-on-union clashes: Teachers’ Union Staff Goes on Strike during Teachers’ Union Convention
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen returns to the Clark Art Institute for an exhibition suitably in time for Bastille Day: Rediscovering a Star Artist from the French Revolution
Armond White, on the rut of stereotypes: A Quiet Place’s Censorship and Race-Scare Tactics
NR EXCERPTS: THE CHOICE OF GOP CONVENTION DELEGATES, PROBABLY
Phil Klein looks to history amid today’s history-making moment in American politics — specifically, at the circumstances that led to Biden’s dropping out of a presidential race many decades ago:
There are plenty of differences between the two cases. In 1987, Biden’s campaign was just a few months old, and he was just 44 with a long career ahead of him. Now, he is a sitting president in the twilight of his career who has already secured his party’s nomination. The stakes of a president stepping down this close to an election are orders of magnitude more consequential than a candidate bailing on a primary.
But if you read through the relevant sections of What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer’s seminal work on the 1988 presidential race, and Biden’s own 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep, it’s hard to miss some parallels between the two periods — particularly the extent to which he leans on family to help him navigate tough decisions.
To offer a refresher, Biden launched his candidacy in the summer of 1987 as the relatively young, up-and-coming candidate who hoped to appeal to Baby Boomers and expected to get a boost in the primaries from the Robert Bork confirmation hearings, which he would be leading as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. But things fell apart when he started quoting lines from Welsh politician Neil Kinnock, first with attribution and then without. Further reporting found that he had also quoted lines from Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey speeches without attribution and had been reprimanded in law school for an academic paper in which he plagiarized a law-review article. He was also under fire for exaggerating his academic record and lying about marching in the civil-rights movement. The scandal spread outside the political arena, and he became the butt of jokes on the late-night shows.
As the stories mounted and with the Bork hearings under way, Biden was under heavy pressure to drop out, eventually including from his political advisers. . . . Biden wrote in his memoir, “I was torn; it really came down to family. The gurus and friends could talk, but this was a family decision.”
Beau, then in college, and Hunter, then in high school, were angry and argued passionately for him to stay in the race, seeing the media portrayal of him as inaccurate. “The only thing that’s important is your honor,” a young Hunter said. “That’s what you’ve always taught us. Your honor.”
According to Cramer, a pacing Biden agonized, saying, “I’ve never been a quitter . . . never quit anything in my life.”
His mother told him it was time to get out, and he retreated into a private conversation with Jill. “Once we were alone, the question we asked was simple,” Biden wrote. “Could we save my presidential campaign and stop Bork?”
He and his closest family members were convinced that if he had the opportunity to keep campaigning and explaining himself to voters, he could get past the scandal and prove everybody wrong. Dropping out meant he was vindicating the naysayers — proving himself a plagiarist, liar, and cheater. But if crisscrossing the early primary states meant botching the Bork nomination process and getting blamed by liberals for his getting confirmed, it would be the end of his candidacy anyway. Ted Kaufman, his longtime chief of staff and eventual successor in the Senate whom Biden described as “almost family,” told him, “There’s only one way to stop the sharks and that’s pull out.” Ultimately, Biden decided to drop out — but bitterness lingered.
“Jill was on his left, close, her right arm almost touching him,” Cramer wrote of the scene at the withdrawal speech. “She stared straight ahead at the wall of cameras, the pack . . . but she met no one’s eyes. She hated them. First time in her life . . . but it was true: this was hate. It was just another story for them. They were excited: the crowd at a hanging.”
Meanwhile, where were the media during Biden’s deterioration? Noah Rothman writes that the belated press attention on an issue that should have received such treatment months, possibly years, ago doesn’t cut it:
There’s nothing intimidating about an industry that has to be shamed into action.
But action is what we’re getting, albeit belatedly. The Associated Press reported late Tuesday night — and NBC News subsequently confirmed — the revelation that Biden sat down for a January 17 neurological exam, which contradicts White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s claim that White House visits by two well-known neurological experts had nothing to do with the president’s health. . . .
New York magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi’s deep dive into the worst-kept secret in American politics may be the most damning entry in this genre. Biden is reported to have “stared blankly” at a “Democratic megadonor and family friend” until he was reminded to say “hello.” “Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names,” Nuzzi wrote. One guest at a White House event came away from it appalled by the president’s inability to make it to the end of the reception. “The guest wasn’t sure they could vote for Biden, since the guest was now open to an idea that they had previously dismissed as right-wing propaganda,” the report continued. “The president may not really be the acting president after all.”
This is hard-hitting investigative reporting, and it takes time to develop the sources required to flesh stories like these out. Perhaps it was the debate alone that shook those in Biden’s orbit out of their complacency and made these dispatches possible. But that doesn’t alone suffice to explain the sudden enthusiasm reporters have shown in their effort to chase those sources and their stories down. Nor does it explain the degree to which journalists have declined to paper over the president’s manifest impairment.
In a segment on his CNN program on Tuesday, host Jake Tapper exposed the degree to which even Biden’s efforts to reassure Democrats of his acuity have fallen short by simply reading verbatim transcripts of the president’s extemporaneous remarks. It was an effective tactic, but also one that could have been employed at any point in the president’s term — throughout which, Biden has mused over the “cumalidefasredsulc” benefits of student-debt forgiveness, touted his efforts to repair the country’s “bldhyindclapding,” and summed up his affection for America in a single word: “Asufutimaehaehfutbw.”
Andrew McCarthy’s got a two-parter on the implications of SCOTUS rulings for Trump’s legal battles. Part Two is here; and Part One is here:
Given that he presided over the trial and willfully abetted [Alvin] Bragg’s blatant violations of Trump’s due-process and substantive legal rights, it would be naïve to expect that [Judge] Merchan would reverse himself on the existing record. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has now given him an off-ramp. Rather than stand behind the embarrassing trial, the judge can now plausibly rule that new decisions from on high, issued post-trial, require vacating the verdicts of guilty, regardless of how one assesses the record compiled before these new rulings.
In this column, the first of two on this subject, I will address why Merchan must vacate the guilty verdicts because of the Court’s decision in Trump v. United States, which holds that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution based on their official acts. In the second column, I will explain why the verdicts should be vacated in light of the Court’s decision in Erlinger v. United States, which reaffirms the due-process requirement that juries must make unanimous findings beyond a reasonable doubt on all facts that have the effect of increasing a defendant’s potential sentence.
One other introductory note. It has become popular in Democratic circles to refer to Trump as a “convicted felon.” But no judgment of conviction is formally entered on the court record until after the judge imposes a sentence. Thus, I speak of vacating (or setting aside) the jury’s guilty verdicts, not of reversing convictions. Technically, Trump is not a convicted felon — at least, not yet — and the fatally flawed Manhattan prosecution should not be the occasion of his becoming one.
Indeed, Merchan should enter a judgment of acquittal, such that double-jeopardy principles would bar a retrial. That’s because the admissible evidence presented by the state was insufficient to convict. Bragg simply did not prove the 34 charges that Trump falsified his business records with fraudulent intent to conceal a second crime, particularly once the improperly admitted testimony is stripped away, e.g.: Stormy Daniels’s outrageously prejudicial testimony about an alleged sexual encounter; the even more improper testimony regarding Michael Cohen’s guilty pleas to federal campaign offenses and David Pecker’s non-prosecution agreement (in conjunction with Merchan’s suppression of Trump’s constitutional right to present a defense by calling an expert witness on federal campaign law even though he allowed the unqualified Cohen and Pecker to testify as if they were experts on the subject); and what I am about to explain was highly doubtful evidence of official presidential acts as to which Trump was immune from prosecution — specifically, Cohen’s testimony about Trump’s alleged assurance that he was having Attorney General Jeff Sessions scuttle a campaign-finance investigation implicating Trump, Cohen, and Pecker.
Shout-Outs
Lauren A. Wright, at the Atlantic: How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students
Leor Sapir, at City Journal: The White House’s Transgender Tangle
Lanny Davis, at RealClearPolitics: Mr. President, It’s Time To Pass the Torch to Kamala Harris
CODA
In these times, we need soothing music. Calming music. For this, I recommend Kronos Quartet, even the songs heavy on pathos, such as this one (their take on a Portuguese song).
You probably already know this group, even if the name doesn’t ring bells; Kronos played the memorable theme for Requiem for a Dream, among other films, and has collaborated over the years with various rock/pop musicians. But the quartet is in its element exploring and reinterpreting world music, as above.
Have a restful weekend, and thanks for reading.