What's More Frail Than Joe Biden? American Democracy

Monday was a horrible, awful, not good day for the United States of America. Of course, I am talking about the disastrous early exit — on U.S. soil no less — from the Copa America tournament by the beleaguered U.S. men’s soccer team, after its 1-0 loss to Uruguay. (What did you think I was referring to?) Anyway, it’s clear that a chronically inept organization has chosen the wrong leader — in coach Gregg Berhalter. (Who did you think I was referring to?)

One of the first things they teach doctors in medical school is the imperfect but necessary art of triage, the technique used on a battlefield or during some other mass-casualty event to determine who is most gravely wounded and who needs immediate attention during a crisis when the system is overwhelmed, and clear-headed thinking will save lives.

Clearly, this is not something that is taught in journalism school.

Over the course of a remarkable weekend, I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down.

The soft clacking of these keyboard commandos turned into a stampede as the nation’s pundits, its editorial-page poobahs, mega-rich but anonymous donors, and Democratic horse whisperers competed to outdo each other on The Daily Rip or in “the paper of record,” or wherever they thought the actual frail president, Joe Biden, might be paying attention.

Dropping names — Whitmer! Shapiro! Warnock! — like a groupie backstage at a heavy-metal concert, floating wildly implausible scenarios, stretching so hard for historical analogies that several probably blew out a hamstring, America’s pundit class managed to achieve a level of groupthink that surpassed the brainwashers of The Manchurian Candidate. All argued that for the good of the country he loves, Biden — hoarse, barely audible, and visibly confused a few times during Thursday’s Atlanta presidential debate — must immediately end his candidacy.

Meanwhile, in the actual America that less resembles The West Wing than the disaster flick Don’t Look Up, two comets simultaneously bore down on America in the hours leading up to its 248th — and possibly last — birthday as a democratic republic.

First, there is Donald Trump — desperate to avoid his sentencing for his 34 felony convictions, firing off racist insults about “Black jobs” and “bad Palestinians,” and carrying around a 900-page blueprint for American dictatorship called Project 2025 — streaking into the cosmic void of our troubled republic.

Meanwhile, don’t look up but a thoroughly corrupt and compromised Supreme Court is blazing a second trail toward American autocracy. In a flurry of body punches over the last several days, the nation’s highest court gutted the federal government’s ability to regulate fat-cat corporate polluters or stock swindlers, but said poor folks who sleep outside because there’s nowhere else to go can be arrested. Then, with a fierce right hook, it issued a 6-3 partisan ruling that will help Trump — who appointed three of them — evade justice while placing all future presidents above the law.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal naysayers, read her blistering minority opinion from the bench Monday morning, arguing that the court’s finding that a president performing official acts can be immune from criminal prosecution “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.” She ended with the words, “with fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

I wish Justice Sotomayor had the bandwidth and the energy to work a second shift as editorial page editor at one of our major newspapers.

At Time magazine (yes, it still exists), the cover of its new issue contained just one word, “Panic” — not at the prospect of an American dictator with the seeming power to have the military assassinate his enemies, but at Biden’s health. At the New York Times (yes, it still exists), an editorial board that considered it pointless, or whatever, to call for Trump to leave the race after those 34 felony convictions — as well as the civil rape and financial fraud verdicts and the two impeachments and three other pending indictments — made its grand pronouncement that it’s Biden who must go. Other papers jumped on the bandwagon, including the swing state Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which in the 1950s and ‘60s won Pulitzers for its courage in taking on Southern racists before deciding instead to appeal to their grandchildren.

And look, I’m not going to argue that Biden’s health is not an issue. His debate performance was troubling, but I also think those of us determined not to see Donald Trump become president again should take a deep breath — even if that’s not the clickbait headline that many are eager to write. Biden needs to do more to assure the public about his energy level, and we also need to see the polls. Any decision should be based on the paramount thing — the thing that should be getting 72-point headlines: stopping dictatorship. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote Monday in her dissent, this is a “five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance.”

The power of Monday’s dissents by Jackson and Sotomayor form quite the contrast with the speculative flights of fancy about a brokered convention in Chicago, which, it’s worth noting, have largely come from white male boomer types. Many Black and brown and female voices, on the other hand, are urging Biden to stay as the only realistic hope — warts and all — of beating Trump in November. Maybe people who in one way or another know the horror of being treated as a second-class citizen understand the risk of dictatorship in a way that white dudes who’ve always been OK do not.

Most journalists want to be seen as savvy (or not naïve, essentially the same thing) and influential. Many editorial writers and columnists are still hurting from the fact that Trump was elected in 2016 with zero major print endorsements. They think calling for Trump to drop out would make them look foolish now that the Republican Party has devolved into a dangerous cult. But a demand for Biden to drop out might actually happen — so that’s savvy, right?

Except maybe the dangerous cult is the more important crisis, especially when it carries a printed guide to dictatorship and holds six justices in its back pocket. To focus on the actual threat we are facing, I wish America’s top pundits would spend less time watching reruns of The West Wing and maybe pick up a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The reality of what’s happening in July 2024—that an authoritarian-minded president, with help from a politicized and unethical Supreme Court, is on track to lead a nation where all power is being vested in him, his MAGA movement, and the corporate polluters—is THE story, and Biden’s health is a subplot in that drama. The current president is walking slowly, but it’s the American Experiment that’s on a ventilator. Journalists aren’t doing their job: performing basic triage and focusing on the sickest patient in the room. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.