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July 2, 2024 - 10:00am
In the wake of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, top Democrats are being increasingly honest about their rationale for sticking with the President: he may be a flawed vessel, but Biden is the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump. And given that Trump poses an existential threat to the country, that’s all that matters. This is the logic, at least, and it’s pulled straight from the “authoritarian” playbook that conservatives embraced against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
That September, the Claremont Review of Books published a viral essay titled “The Flight 93 Election” which argued that “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.” The piece, later revealed to be written by Michael Anton, was thereafter denounced by the chattering classes for years, held up as an example of intellectual rot in a conservative movement corrupted by Trump.
Compare those words with what Democratic senator Chris Coons said about Biden on ABC News on Sunday: “The stakes of this race couldn’t be higher. And the only Democrat who’s ever beaten Donald Trump is Joe Biden.” To be clear, that is a direct quote from a Biden campaign national co-chair. Just last week, Coons referred to himself as a “close friend” of the President’s.
Scrambling to assuage donors, the campaign itself made a “Flight 93” case in a fundraising email blast after the debate. The message actually included a graphic of polling that showed other leading Democrats “far[ing] similarly” to Biden against Trump if they replaced the President in the election, adding: “At the end of the day, we’d switch to candidates who would, according to polls, be less likely to win than Joe Biden — the only person ever to defeat Donald Trump.”
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein reflected at the weekend on the reaction to his controversial but prescient February plea for Biden to back out of the race. At the time, he said that “no one tried to convince me that Biden was a strong candidate. They argued instead that he couldn’t be persuaded to step aside, that even if he could, Vice President Kamala Harris would lose the election and that if a convention didn’t choose Harris, passing her over would fracture the party.” Months ago, these arguments remained private. What we’re hearing from some now is merely honest: Biden may be incapacitated, but even a Weekend at Bernie’s commander-in-chief is better than Trump in these dark times.
As the Biden campaign and its stakeholders use the existential rationale to justify his ongoing candidacy, for reasons that range from moral and sincere to self-interested and cynical, Democrats asking him to step down are using similar logic to Anton and Coons. “If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick. That is how much of a danger Mr. Trump poses,” wrote the New York Times editorial board. “But given that very danger, the stakes for the country and the uneven abilities of Mr. Biden, the United States needs a stronger opponent to the presumptive Republican nominee.”
Echoing that assertion, a Monday essay in Vox contended: “Treating an existential threat as existential requires the one thing that the Democratic coalition has increasingly struggled to do: prioritization. It means putting aside personal feelings, individual ambition, and subjective preferences in favor of a single goal: success’.” Otherwise, the author wrote, “it’s just empty rhetoric.” That’s about as close to “Charge the cockpit or you die” as it gets.
Anton’s logic was deemed “histrionic, false, and absurd” in the pages of the Atlantic. In New York magazine, Johnathan Chait lamented that Anton sought to “make the Flight 93 ’emergency’ more or less a permanent condition” and called it “singularly hysterical”. The Washington Post described the argument as “of the permanent variety typically used to justify authoritarianism”.
The candidates in question are dramatically different, to be sure, so it’s entirely reasonable to defend one iteration of “Flight 93” while objecting to the other. But the underlying logic here is the same — and that underlying logic was itself dismissed as a false premise when Anton published it in 2016. What is now clear is that our entire political class sees itself as engaged in apocalyptic warfare — and it doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.
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SubscribeThe gas lighting has become totally unhinged now. After his performance last week, there’s no way Biden can win an election on his own merits. So the deep state is doubling down, tripling down on fear – that Trump is some existential threat to democracy.
They literally want people to cast a vote for a president who clearly won’t be running the country. We won’t tell you who is actually running the country, but vote for us because we are the defenders of democracy. And just forget the lies we told you last week that video clips of a clearly feeble Biden are cheap fakes.
We won’t even let party members vote for our presidential candidate, but trust us, we are committed to democracy. Just because we have some convoluted, opaque process for selecting our candidate doesn’t diminish our commitment to democracy.
In the meantime we will donate $10 mill to the most extreme MAGA candidates in Republican primaries even though we say they are an existential threat to democracy. And we will convict our political opponent in some convoluted criminal case that 99% of the population would be baffled to describe.
People are sick of it. They aren’t buying it. And according to this poll, people think Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/26/biden-trump-swing-state-poll-democracy/
Yes – the hysteria is utterly bizarre given that Trump largely governed as a Clinton democrat.
The hysteria is due to the fact that Trump is volatile, erratic and totally unpredictable. In short – crazy. Unless there are some grown-ups in the loop to stop him – and grown-ups are unlikely to be tolerated in a Trump-2 administration – there is no way of knowing what he might not do. Leave NATO? Hand Ukraine over to Putin? Nuke Iran? Zap half the federal government agencies, fire a third of a federal employees, and replace another third with Trump loyalists? Change the system of validating elections so that in the future the President is safe from people voting the wrong way? Your imagination is the only limit.
Sure, he might decide not to do any of this. But what safeguards do you have, except his own sense of restraint (ha!).
Your argument makes no sense.
Trump has already been President, for four years, and the sky didn’t fall down.
True, but because Trump is completely unpredictable, childishly vindictive, and going to accept a lot fewer restraints second time around, what happened last time is no guarantee for what might happen next time. I mean – the man can go into a superpower summit meeting and not even know himself what kind of deal he is going to make. How can anyone else know what the limits are, if Trump himself does not?
So let’s send in the guy who with the vacant stare and has trouble stringing three sentences together. Whoever is in charge of foreign affairs today clearly doesn’t have a clue because the world is much more volatile today than it was four years ago. The cognitive disconnect with TDS is jaw dropping.
Not an attractive choice, is it? Personally I do not have the vote, but I would vote for Biden over Trump even if Biden was dead. A dead president does nothing either way. A live Trump is all too likely to make things worse.
Steve Jolly wrote this the other day and it resonated with me deeply.
“For all his many and obvious faults, Trump has done the most important work. Not intentionally of course, but history is often moved by the wrong people in the right place at the right time. It’s because he is such a bellicose, pompous ass, because he has been little more than a glorified snake oil salesman most of his life, because he thumbed his nose at the unwritten rules and instead started playing dirty, and then won, that we all understand just how deep the resentment goes. If the people will overlook Trump’s checkered past, his combative attitude, his rude, combative, and sometimes outright embarrassing public demeanor just to stick it to the establishment, what does that say to the establishment. Alarm bells should have been ringing loudly as early as late 2015 when polls consistently showed Trump leading the field in the Republican primary. The election was a neon sign displaying a loud and clear message of disapproval to basically everyone in Washington. It took them considerably longer to understand the situation than it should have, and that has hurt them as well.”
You don’t have to like Trump and he doesn’t deserve my respect, but the TDS garbage has been generated by a group of people who will stop at nothing to protect their own privilege and power.
Very interesting point. In the UK it was Brexit. A lot of people are royally pissed off and willing to vote for anything that will break with what we currently have. The trouble is that breaking stuff by itself makes things worse not better, and no one is proposing a way to actually improve anything. In fact many of the problems that people are sick and tired of probably cannot be solved, and for many of the rest nobody really knows what to do. And it is not just about protecting their own privilege and power – it is not clear what should be done. The old communists at least had a plan. The current lot of rebels do not. Do you?
Voting to smash things up may be a good way to vent, but it is not a good way to make things better. It is like a teenager who gets so furious that he has to share a room with his sister that he sets fire to the house. It may be a good way to make his feelings clear – but burning down the house is not going to get him a bigger room. It is also not going to make anybody respect him, or work with him to make changes.
I would normally agree with and agree that we do need leaders with vision. But maybe it’s baby steps. I’m on board with the guy who wants to smash open borders and net zero. Sometimes a good smashing is needed. Maybe the vision comes afterwards.
Trump is less likely to start a world war than Biden or his camp.
And just to remind you, world wars make things worse.
You’re projecting your own bad qualities onto Trump.
Hear, hear! Remember all the predictions of the world ending if Trump became POTUS back in 2016? The opposite actually happened. The same with 2024. It’s a ploy that some swallow hook, line and sinker.
If the Dems truly believed any of this, they would not have donated $10 mill to the most extreme MAGA candidates in the Republican primaries. What explains this disconnect? You’re right about one thing – your imagination is the only limit.
Oh, they surely believe it. They were just irresponsible enough to go for the likely upside of getting in more of their own, and ignore the downside risk that the crazies might actually win.
You sound the crazy one. Trump was president for four years and I don’t recall the sky falling down, new wars breaking out, or the economy tanking. Rather a better record than Biden, actually.
You have your MSDNC talking points down pat, Rasmus!
The Dem and MSM position reminds me eerily of the argument “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” during the Vietnam war. Will their next argument be for Biden/his shadow government to order a drone strike on Trump, all in order to “save democracy?”
>The hysteria is due to the fact that Trump is volatile,
Wrong. The hysteria is due to the fact that Trump disrespected Obama with the birth certificate business. To Leftists he committed blasphemy against the messiah.
That is the only thing that can explain this unhinged attack that is going on 10 years now. It’s a religious war to them.
Yes, but abortion, and free stuff for the very very poor and the very very rich.
Versus a functioning energy and agricultural sector, competent foreign policy, and secure borders.
Quelle horreur.
It’s all so very hysterical. And yet, when it comes to the really big issues, there’s not that much difference between Trump and Biden / Biden’s corpse.
Neither fired Fauci. Neither pardoned Snowden. Both pushed lockdowns and the vaxx. Both allowed war hawks to stretch the world to the brink of ever wider and more dangerous conflict. Both provide unconditional support to Israel – no matter what they do. Both talk about the poor while protecting the interests of the rich. Both will continue to fund gain of function research. Both will allow the climate scam to continue greenwashing hard earned taxpayer dollars…I could go on.
Did you miss the Trump presidency? Orange McBadman was the only recent president under whom NO new wars began. The Abraham Accords were signed on his watch. Black and Hispanic unemployment reached record lows. He never mandated the vax or fired people for not taking it, and as to lockdowns, he went along with the two weeks line but otherwise left decisions up to individual governors.
Some of this is true. Some of this not. There’s at least two major differences. Trump strongly opposes net zero and open borders.
Biden didn’t “defeat” Donald Trump, so the entire argument is ridiculous.
Your tinfoil hat is on a little tight this morning, dearie!
Joe Biden isn’t senile. All those videos are fake ! You need a tinfoil hat if you believe them.
“At the end of the day, we’d switch to candidates who would, according to polls, be less likely to win than Joe Biden — the only person ever to defeat Donald Trump.”
Donald Trump has run twice.
keep in mind the audience at whom that message is directed.
First thing I thought. And one of those was against Hillary Clinton. Lol
Thinking about it, Hilary Clinton is the only democrat ever who couldn’t beat Trump.
And yet Trump has already completed one Presidency without destroying the USA – so the argument that an increasingly frail Biden is a safer bet seems highly contrived.
Plus what happens if Biden has a public meltdown between now and November?
Whatever one thinks of the two candidates, what remotely sane person who lives in the real world (and by definition, this includes the bulk of the ruling and media classes) thinks four more years of the same is a good thing? If the goal is the “fundamental transformation” that the fraud Obama talked about, then that is the only in which supporting the husk-in-chief makes sense.
The left loves to project its worst intentions onto Trump, as if he hasn’t already held the office and done precisely NONE of the horrible things they claim he will do. Perhaps his biggest mistake was abandoning the “lock her up” campaign talk and abiding by what, at the time, was among the norms in DC – we don’t jail our opponents. The left may be right to fear that he may do the same to them in a second term, but it would be nice if they had the good grace to acknowledge what that is.
We only seem to have insane people living in a contrived world, thanks mostly to social media.
Every election is a Flight 43 Election when facing the party of Internet speech suppression, mandatory Woke indoctrination in elementary schools, decriminalizing crime, health official tyranny, intentional shrinkage of the economy and the power grid that feeds it, forcing the population onto mass transit, the completely corrupt mainstream media and a thousand other willful threats to the country’s tradition of freedom.
Exactly. Hubris on steroids.
This is the disconnect between beltway professionals and everyone else.
The former think that, because they personally would feel better off with a prop for a president, the voting public can be induced to support that option.
And maybe if the ballot actually said Trump/Not Trump, then Not Trump would win. But in reality, getting the public to tick the box for the dead guy is going to be an almightily tough sell.
The Dems have absolutely no-one else to blame for this. It was they who convinced themselves that Biden was el-Cid rather than Bernie Lomax, it was they who did nothing as the oldest ever president bricked up the emergency exit by appointing Harris as his VP and then, instead of handing her a few easy wins to boost her public standing, made her more toxic than ever by sending her down south to “sort out the border situation”. It was Dems who scotched any sort of internal primary to figure out whether their supporters might prefer, say, a figure like Gretchen Whitmer or a roll of the die with RFK Jnr.
They’re going to lose. And that is the system working as it should. I hope that, this time around, it provokes a little more reflection than it did in 2016.
Reflection?
How likely is that?
Not very.
But more likely in catastrophic defeat than in the aftermath of an unearned victory.
Trump makes me want to puke. But if Biden really IS the only person the Democrats can find to defeat him, what does that tell you about the incompetence and uselessness of the Democrats?
Why? And are you really such a paragon of ‘virtue’ that you can preen and lecture others about how ‘____’ makes you puke? Please …..
This is a forum in which people express opinions.
Acknowledged, but I haven’t yet heard why you’re a virtuous human being OR what DJT did or said that justifies your ‘puking’. I’ve heard such talk from many, but never with any kind of backing for. Make your point, yes, but also back it with solid reasoning, friend.
I repeat: I was expressing an opinion. My personal virtue or lack thereof is irrelevant in that circumstance. You seem to be assuming that only what you acknowledge as “virtuous” human beings are allowed to criticise others, which is as prissy as it is absurd.
The reference to my feelings about Trump was intended to indicate my broad political position, and thus to emphasise my contempt for the Democrats on this particular issue. I wasn’t looking to engage in a debate with Trump supporters about his supposed merits, and I have no obligation to do so.
You are of course free to respond to this post. For the reason just stated, I am unlikely to respond in turn.
Lets get it slightly more accurate, ” Trump poses an existential threat” to the anti-America cabal of the Democrat Left. The Democrats will do anything to gain and retain power. Their mantra is “The end justifies the means”. Lie, cheat, steal, and worse. I can’t elaborate on the “worse” or my comment will be deleted.
“the only Democrat who’s ever beaten Donald Trump is Joe Biden.” Well, not exactly. It was the “special” Democrat voting process that defeated President Trump. Remember the saying “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. Biden made history on several fronts in 2020. He got the infamous 81 million. The deciding ballots being counted in the early morning hours after the polls closed.
Since Biden just received sweeping immunity from the “MAGA SCOTUS” and Corporate Media, Democrats, The Unhinged, are obsessed with using Seal Team Six Death Squads to assassinate political opponents, then logically, according to the hysterical media, Biden must summarily dispatch the Death Squad to Mar-A-Lago.
The end justifies the means, existential threat to democracy, and all that.
Trump ran the US of A for four (4) years just 3.5 years ago.No warsBooming economySecure bordersNo massive inflationPlus he did many great things that are too many to mention here. My point is that all this Dem howling about how he’ll ‘destroy democracy’ is nicely countered by the good work he did last time he was on the job.
Joe Biden will be the nominee and he may even debate again!
It may seem odd in view of Joe Biden’s performance in last week’s political debacle against Donald Trump. I couldn’t watch it all and I’m not a Biden fan. How much worse it must have been for those who supported him and were somehow ignorant of his condition is difficult to imagine. Those who knew of his state and worked for him and camouflaged his condition got what they deserved. Unlike the victims of their deceit, they cannot simply ditch Biden. No, they are in it for the long haul, and it won’t be pretty. One of the most excruciating stages in their “election journey” will be the next debate. Will Joe have a good day? Will he not?
You might well ask why there’s any chance of a second debate when Biden’s handlers bungled so thoroughly in agreeing to the first one. Fair enough. The answer has several parts. For one thing, it is too late to find another candidate. Polls suggest that Kamala Harris would fare even worse against Donald Trump than would Joe Biden. So, how do they get her off the ticket, particularly without offending those in the Democratic constituency that her position as VP was chosen to placate. Perhaps she could be offered some plum position somewhere in the Permanent State from which she could emerge later, if she wants to, to try her chances. Would anyone be fooled though, if she suddenly decided to become, say, Secretary of Transportation or a judge in the Ninth Circuit?
But let’s assume that Harris gracefully steps aside so that another, more electable, candidate can take the top spot on the ticket. How now to find a Democrat acceptable to a wide swath of the party, a party now sharply divided among the Left, the Radical Left, and the billionaire donor class? I leave it to readers to decide, but I suspect such candidates are rather thin on the ground.
Now let’s assume that such a candidate (and a running mate) is found. Many state deadlines for putting his or her name on the ballot are looming— and some have passed. Even if states whose statutes forbid changes to ballots were to oblige by flouting their own laws, court challenges might would certainly delay things, even where they failed to compel states to follow their own laws. What are the chances of getting the new candidate on these ballots?
Conditional probability is a useful concept. It means that the probability of an occurrence is the product of the relevant probabilities that it will occur. Thus the chance of two given people attending the same cocktail party is one in four if each of them has a one in two chance of attending. If three given people each have a one in two chance of attending the event, the probability that all three will do so falls to one chance in eight. Not very good odds. I think you can see where this is going.
Multiply the chance that Kamala Harris is willing to step down by the chance that a broadly acceptable candidate can be found, and multiply that by the chance several state deadlines can be successfully challenged or evaded, and it looks as though Joe Biden will be on the ticket. Just for the sake of amusement, let’s presume that each of these probabilities is one in ten. The arithmetic comes out to one chance in a thousand. That’s one chance in a thousand before a single vote is cast in the national election. Even if we generously improve the odds to one in five for each contingency, the chance of success comes out to 8 in 1,000. And then there’s the election to worry about again. The odds of a successful democratic candidacy drop even further.
So, what to do? First, of course, tell the American people that Biden had a bad day. That’s being done, but even rubes will be doubtful. In fact, they’re more likely suspect the lie than than college educated democrats who have been trained to trust their party. But wait! There is a solution.
The solution is a second debate. It’s daring— even counter-intuitive— but it makes sense given the odds. When you consider the practical impossibility of swapping out the ticket and getting it on the ballots of states whose deadlines have (or will have) passed, the only chance the democrats have is to run Biden. That means that they must convince the electorate that he has the capacity to carry out his duties, and stories from the the DNC won’t cut it, particularly now that the New York Times, the Atlantic and other supports of the Democratic party have called for Biden to step down. At this point only a live demonstration on national television of Biden showing something approaching normal acuity will do. Then they can hide him in the basement and hope the electorate will think his brief performance reflects his usual state. And this means a debate. As investment firms say, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” It may be that Mr. Biden will do well enough during the 90 minutes of a second debate to support the argument that he’s competent to be president. It seems unlikely— even extremely so, but are the odds better than, say, 8 in 1,000? Probably. If so, it’s the best bet his handlers have. So, don’t be surprised that Joe stays on the ticket, and that his handlers gamble on a second debate— they’ve got nothing to lose.
I’d keep working on that time machine, if i was a democrat apparatchik.
Don’t you go setting yourself up as a bookie is my advice.
If all your three conditions are non-correllated and each has a 1 in 10 probability then the chance that all three occur together is, indeed 1 in 1000 but, if the odds are 1 in 5 for each occurrance then the combined probability 1 in 125, not 8 in 1,000.
But the important thing here is that these are not discrete conditions, they are fundamentally correllated.
Harris will step down if you can guarantee her a job she likes more than she would enjoy losing the election. The ninth circuit probably doesn’t cut it but making her a Supreme might.
And you don’t need to get your candidates on State ballots if Joe Biden says he’s going and releases his delegates at an open convention.
Here’s the truth “generic Democrat” has polled ahead of Biden for ages. The obstacle has been Biden all along – just as Hillary was the obstacle in 2016. By gumming up the primaries, she (and he) prevented the party selecting a more popular candidate.
If the polling starts pointing to a total wipeout, Biden’s support inside the party will collapse and he’ll be forced to go. That will make a mess and the later he leaves it, the worse it will be. But, from here, it’s potentially salvageble.
Thanks for the reply. Very thoughtful analysis.
Well written, Eric. That was worthy of an article on Unherd! 🙂
Thanks for the compliment! If you like my stuff, I have a substack and some books out too.
It’s quite remarkable that this is the argument being used. I mean, it’s sort of the same argument that has been used for a long time about Le Pen, Farage, Wilders, to some extent the Tories in the UK for a long time but it is much more open now. Trump [or other despised opponent] is a threat to our way of life and our country. Any cost is worth paying to stop him.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of those making the argument.
What is remarkable is that they are sincere about this given that
Trump has already been president and the republic didn’t fallTrump has been president and the constitution wasn’t upended (I know about 6 Jan, but my understanding is that the circumstances of that are comewhat clouded and some of the intruders were actually invited in?)The Dems themselves are contributing to the end of the republic by undermining the institutions that maintain it, specifically by using the courts to pursue Trump for political reasons. There can be no surer way of destabilising the rule of law. They are only lucky that the court rulings have not mattered so no one has noticed.Trump can only be president for four years and will not have the ability to change the constitution during that time. How much damage can he really do? Just ride it out!
Still, these are crazy times.
None of these January 6th “insurrectionists” carried a gun. Think about that for a minute. An “insurrection” without a weapon? It sounds like a sandwich without bread ….