The Past Week Has Put Biden's Skewed Priorities on Full Display

Pop quiz: you're the new president of a nation that's experienced decades of wage stagnation, rising inequality, and where many low-paid workers have no choice but go to their jobs in person despite the fact that there's a contagious pandemic that has killed 500,000 people in this country alone. Which of the three options below is NOT a crucial thing to get done right now:      

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via Politico)

A.) Convince the Senate to overcome their hesitance and confirm your nominee for the director of the OMB, a person who happens to be an bad boss with a history of left-punching (quite literally, in at least one alleged case);

B.) Order airstrikes to be carried out in a country the United States is not at war with, in violation of both the Constitution and international law; 

or 

C.) Raise the federal minimum wage for the first time in over a decade.

If you answered C, congratulations—the sitting president of the United States agrees with you. After the Senate parliamentarian ruled that a $15 an hour minimum wage could not be passed as part of the COVID relief package using budget reconciliation rules, Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that "President Biden is disappointed in this outcome" but that he "respects the parliamentarian's decision and the Senate's process." To be perfectly clear, as an unelected official the parliamentarian's ruling is purely advisory, and could be completely ignored by Kamala Harris in her role as president of the Senate. But nonetheless, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain had already indicated beforehand that the Biden administration had no intent of exercising this option were the parliamentarian not to rule in its favor. In fact, whether Biden and his crew are actually "disappointed," as Psaki claimed, seems questionable; CNN reports that "far from being a defeat, the ruling is viewed as clearing the way for the bill's passage in the Senate, [according to] a Biden administration official[.]"

Now that the House has passed a version of the COVID relief bill that includes a minimum wage hike, if Kamala Harris did overrule the parliamentarian, the Senate could simply pass that same bill and deliver it to Joe Biden's desk—rather than wasting time by stripping out the minimum wage provision and then sending the modified bill back to the House for its approval. Some of the Democratic caucus's more conservative members may not like the inclusion of the minimum wage hike, but whether they would actually have the gall to sink the entire COVID relief bill because they objected to one (widely popular) provision within it seems at least questionable. 

Perhaps the Biden administration's willingness to abandon the minimum wage raise would be a little more forgivable if not for some of its other recent actions. For one thing, there's of course the Neera Tanden saga. Tanden, who Biden nominated to head the Office of Management and Budget, has come under fire for a less-than-charming online persona that's involved attacks on those both to her right and to her left. But mean tweets are pretty far from her worst offense. As a senior aide to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, Tanden assaulted a journalist who asked Clinton about her support for the Iraq War. A 2018 exposé by BuzzFeed News revealed that, based on the accounts of 19 current and former staffers, the Center for American Progress (of which Tanden is the president) had failed to adequately respond to sexual harassment by one of its employees. To make matters worse, in an all-staff meeting after the exposé was published, Tanden named the anonymous victim of sexual harassment the story had centered around, shocking the employees in attendance. 

None of this even touches on how fundamentally compromised the Center for American Progress is itself. According to the Washington Post, the think tank "received at least $33 million in donations from firms in the financial sector, private foundations primarily funded by wealth earned on Wall Street and in other investment firms, and current or former executives at financial firms such as Bain Capital, Blackstone and Evercore" between the years 2014 and 2019. Under Tanden's leadership, CAP has aggressively courted these deep-pocketed donors. The organization has also, in recent years, accepted between $1.5 million and $3 million dollars from the dictatorial government of the United Arab Emirates, which has joined Saudi Arabia in its murderous assault on Yemen. Not surprisingly, these large donations seem to have had an effect: CAP declined to support a bipartisan Senate resolution designed to end American involvement in the war in Yemen, and an unsigned essay on the organization's website lauded Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The think tank also censored its own report on anti-Muslim bias in the US by removing a chapter on New York City's surveillance of Muslim communities under Michael Bloomberg, who has given handsomely to CAP both before and after the publication of the report.

Nominating someone like this for a cabinet-level position is bad enough, but what's happened since makes it all the more insulting. Not shockingly, Neera Tanden's nomination has run into trouble in the Senate, as both Democrat Joe Manchin and a number of more "moderate" Republicans have expressed their intent to oppose her confirmation. Committee votes have even been postponed to give Senators more time to consider Tanden's nomination, which at this point is hanging by a thread. But rather than doing the obvious thing—withdrawing her nomination and finding a less controversial alternative—Biden has continued to stand by Tanden. Press Secretary Psaki has tweeted support for this "leading policy expert who brings critical qualifications to the table" and Ron Klain told MSNBC's Joy Reid that "[w]e're fighting our guts out to get [Tanden] confirmed."

But getting Tanden confirmed isn't the only thing that's apparently more urgent than raising the minimum wage. Biden also ordered that a "defensive" bombing be carried out on buildings in Syria, killing at least 22 people according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. As Rutgers Law School Professor Adil Ahmad Haque writes, the 

airstrikes almost certainly violated international law, for two basic reasons. The airstrikes did not repel an ongoing armed attack, halt an imminent one, or immediately respond to an armed attack that was in fact over but may have appeared ongoing at the time...And the airstrikes were carried out on the territory of another State, without its consent, against a non-State actor...These two reasons, combined, are decisive. It cannot be lawful to use armed force on the territory of another State when it is clear that no armed attack by a non-State actor is ongoing or even imminent.

[...]

The U.S. airstrikes were not defensive. They were expressive. The Pentagon says that the operation "sends an unambiguous message: President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel." The operation sends another message: President Biden will violate international law, much like his predecessors.

And even Democratic Senator Tim Kaine (who was the party's 2016 candidate for vice president) noted that "[o]ffensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances," and demanded to know "the Administration’s rationale for these strikes and its legal justification for acting without coming to Congress."

It's hard to see, in any case, how the strikes serve to draw the seemingly never-ending American military involvement in the Middle East any nearer to a close. The buildings struck by the bombs were, according to the Pentagon, being used by Iranian-backed militias, and the bombing was carried out in response to rocket attacks on American targets in Iraq. The obvious solution, some might say, would be to end the US presence in Iraq as quickly as is practical, rather than further escalating tensions with a significant regional power that already has plenty of reason to be angry with the United States. But that sort of thinking has long been rejected by those in charge of the US government, and that doesn't appear likely to change any time soon. 

Such are the twisted priorities of the Biden administration: Neera Tanden's confirmation is worth "fighting [their] guts out" for, and airstrikes in Syria must go ahead without Congressional approval and in violation of international law—but if the Senate parliamentarian says no minimum wage increase, well, that's that. To be fair, Biden has of course found time to take some positive steps: the continued suspension of student loan payments is one I'm personally grateful for, and reentering the Paris climate agreement is a plus. But for anyone still under the illusion Biden will govern as a new FDR, the past couple weeks should be enlightening. Anything that provides long-term help for the working class ranks as one of the least pressing, most disposable elements of the Biden agenda. That's nothing new, but it's certainly not encouraging.

Reflections on the Trump Years

 (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

 

Seeing the end of the Trump presidency this past Wednesday felt a bit like waking up after a long and strange fever dream: how much time has passed? Nine hours? Four years? A century? Am I really awake now or is this just some trick my mind is playing on me? Was there ever really a time before Trump was president? Or was that just a dream?

Not to imply it brought any great sense of relief for me. No, as I watched Joe Biden get sworn in as the country's 46th commander-in-chief and heard the paeans to unity and cooperation in his speech, I couldn't help but feel our long national nightmare is far from over. I don't know what "unity" will look like in this moment in history, but I have little optimism about it being the answer to the problems we're all facing — or that old "Uncle Joe" will be the right man to fix them. But I'm not writing this post to make predictions about the next four years, I'm trying to offer some insight about the last four — so we'll table that discussion for later. 

What can we say about the Trump presidency, now that it's all said and done? There are the obvious things, of course — that it was a grotesque carnival of incompetence, corruption and cruelty. But many others have remarked, and will continue to remark, on all of this. So why dwell on it? As I said, those are the obvious aspects of the Trump presidency. But perhaps the biggest underdiscussed truth about Trump's term in office is that he was in many ways a remarkably non-transformative president. George W. Bush left office having plunged the country into not one but two new wars, signed the Bill of Rights-shredding USA PATRIOT Act and established the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay where, to this day, "terror suspects" are being indefinitely detained. Ronald Reagan's orgy of deregulation, tax-cutting and union-busting helped reshape the economy in ways we're still living with today. Even the last one-termer, George H.W. Bush, managed to fit in the Gulf War and the invasion of Panama before leaving office, not to mention signing NAFTA. Aside from the tax bill he signed in 2017, what did Trump actually manage to get done? What legacy will he have left even a matter of months from now, when Biden's had time to undo the executive actions he took? 

One of the great ironies of the past several years is that, despite the unending focus on Trump himself — whether he was being worshiped by his followers as the savior who will Make America Great Again or vilified by his detractors as a Fascist threat to Our Democracy — he was little more than a vehicle for largely unexceptional Republican policies. While he might have run on a heterodox platform in 2016 and certainly never behaved like a regular politician, to say the least, he mostly governed as exactly what he was: a Republican president.

And an ineffectual one, at that. What the polarized discourse around Trump — the stark divide over whether he was either a godsend or a Nazi monster — obscured was that he was really a weakling all along. Political theorist Corey Robin was one of the ones to consistently get this right: 

[Trump's] weakness has been evident from the beginning, as skeptics of the authoritarianism thesis, myself included, have argued. For last the two years, it hasn’t been a Democratic House but a GOP Congress that refused to give Trump money for his wall. Even with total control of the federal government, Trump never got an inch of that wall built. Nor was he able to get any legislation to restrict immigration.

Far from consolidating control over the GOP, much less the polity, Trump and his positions have been consistently rebuffed by the electorate, the Democrats, officials in the Executive branch and other parts of the government, members of his administration — as well as his own party. Indeed, Trump delivered budgets that were rejected not once but twice by a GOP-led Congress, yielding a spending package in 2018, in the words of The Atlantic, that would “make Barack Obama proud.” [hyperlinks in original]

The last few months of his presidency made this clearer than it had ever been, as his attempts to overturn the election results amounted to making a whiny phone call to Georgia election officials and sending Rudy Giuliani to fart in court. The climax of it all came when a Trump-incited mob stormed the Capitol and ultimately succeeded only in convincing a number of congressional Republicans to drop their plans to challenge Biden's electoral college votes. 

Obviously, being inept and ineffectual limits a president's ability to do good — but it limits his ability to do harm as well. With this in mind, it's ridiculous to argue Trump might be worst president of all time, or even of this century, at least if one is thinking in terms of the damage caused. As Glenn Greenwald writes,

Those who want to insist that Trump’s evils are unprecedented...should be prepared to explain which acts of Trump’s compete with the destruction of Iraq, or the implementation of a global regime of torture, or the “rendition” kidnappings and CIA black sites and illegal domestic eavesdropping under Bush and Obama, or imprisoning people for decades with no due process, and on and on and on.

Of course, Trump himself was more flagrantly reprehensible than his predecessors, who usually made an effort to project some sort of decent and honorable image. And as a person he is, as I once put it, "defective on every level...moral, intellectual, spiritual, emotional." But judging Trump as a person and Trump as a president are two different matters. 

The most truly remarkable — and terrifying — effect that Trump had as president was to markedly increase the level of derangement apparent in American politics. If Nixon was the man who (in Hunter S. Thompson's words) "broke the heart of the American Dream," Trump was the man who broke its brain. 

The Right had more than its share of baseless conspiracy theories even before Trump began his campaign in 2015, but the developments since then have been nothing short of astounding. The adherents of QAnon, which casts Trump as the hero fighting against a cabal of Satanic pedophiles, have crafted a mythos as elaborate and unsettling as anything one could find in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. This isn't a belief confined to hyper-online weirdos, either: the last elections featured "at least a dozen Republican congressional candidates who had endorsed or given credence to [QAnon]," two of whom ended up winning seats in the House of Representatives. 

That same derangement was, of course, on full display when the Capitol was stormed earlier this month. Many, if not all, of the people taking part no doubt believed Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election — and that, somehow, he really would lead them in a revolution that would overturn Biden's victory. One doesn't have to agree with the more hysterical reactions to this (incredibly stupid and ultimately ineffectual) event to see it as a symptom of what amounts to mass insanity. 

But the madness certainly hasn't been confined to the Right. On the contrary, the thought patterns that became widespread among liberals during the Trump years were alarming in their own way. The so-called #Resistance emerged as, in many ways, a liberal equivalent of the Tea Party. Just as Tea Partiers had decried Obama as a Communist tyrant, many liberals spent Trump's presidency claiming that he was a Fascist menace.* And, just as conservatives often seemed to believe that Obama was paradoxically both a diabolical threat to freedom as we know it and also a feckless incompetent, #Resisters could easily swing back and forth between viewing Trump as a blundering doofus and viewing him as a terrifying American Hitler.

Worse than that, though, was the unshakeable obsession with Russia that took hold of countless liberal brains over the past four years. Awkwardly worded ads on Facebook and a spear-phishing scam that fooled John Podesta became an existential threat to American democracy and an act of war by Vladimir Putin. Polling by YouGov in 2018 found that "[t]wo out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President — something for which there has been no credible evidence." Before his investigation concluded without finding any evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, Special Counsel Robert Mueller developed an utterly creepy cult following "complete with T-shirts, scented candles and holiday-themed songs like 'We Wish You a Mueller Christmas.'"

This obsession with Russia quickly turned into an insistence that Trump was governing as a puppet of Vladimir Putin, despite the fact that his foreign policy was, for the most part, that of an unexceptional Republican (which is to say, often diametrically opposed to the Russian government's interests). Even now, after the anticlimactic end of the Mueller investigation, this mania still persists not just among Democratic voters but even among prominent figures in the party. Just this week, Hillary Clinton tweeted that "[Speaker Nancy Pelosi] and I agree: Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again." Attached to that tweet is a less-than-two-minute video of a conversation between Clinton and Pelosi, in which the Russian president is mentioned by name no less than seven times and more or less blamed for the storming of the Capitol. 

.@SpeakerPelosi and I agree:

Congress needs to establish an investigative body like the 9/11 Commission to determine Trump's ties to Putin so we can repair the damage to our national security and prevent a puppet from occupying the presidency ever again. pic.twitter.com/yR7LQmXm5Z

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 18, 2021

One of the few things that I allow myself to hope for from the Biden presidency is that at least Donald Trump will no longer be sucking the oxygen out of every political conversation. Even the complacency that seemed to prevail among many liberals during the Obama years is preferable to the hysteria it's often been replaced with under Trump. If "Sleepy Joe" can help the political discourse calm down a little bit then, well, I suppose that's something, at least.

Of course, the shock of Trump's victory and the surreal spectacle of his presidency did help radicalize some left-leaning people, and pushed others who were already politically radical (myself, for example) to get more active in trying to push for a left-wing agenda — probably the best thing to come out of the past four years. We can only hope that Bernie Sanders' defeat in the 2020 primary, and the victory of an utterly Establishment Democratic ticket in the general election, won't completely squelch out this nascent leftist movement — but ultimately that remains to be seen. 

So, those were the Trump years. Where do things go from here? God only knows. While I'm hardly overflowing with optimism about President Biden, I can of course only wish him the best when it comes to trying to manage the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic havoc that it's wrought. As for the Republicans, Trump's presidency has put them in a tight spot. At this point, Trump's cult of personality has probably outlived its usefulness for any conservative agenda, but the man still enjoys a high (if somewhat diminished) level of support from the GOP's voters. The bigwigs in the party would probably like to just move on from Trump, embracing his "accomplishments" (the tax bill and his judicial appointments) while putting the more embarrassing parts of his presidency down the memory hole. But it's doubtful that either he or his fans will let them do that.

Of course (as I wrote last year) the 2020 election should also give Democrats plenty of reason to be worried about their future, and hardly marked the stark repudiation of "Trumpism" that many had been hoping for. But, on the other hand, it's certainly questionable whether Republicans will be able to find someone who can replicate Trump's appeal. Trump is a "genuine rustic idiot," as Matt Christman recently said, and that was certainly a big part of what drew people to him — one that his wannabe successors like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley can't replicate. Trump's specific blend of authentic anti-intellectualism, star power and "political outsider" status was likely what let him and his party outperform expectations in both 2016 and 2020. But there aren't many figures who can offer that same distinctive appeal. That may be a saving grace for the Democratic Party going forward, despite their (all things considered) lackluster performance in 2020. 

But that's all speculation. All we know for now is that after finishing his 10,000-year-long term, Donald Trump has finally left office. There are few things, if any, that I will miss about the time when he was in power. Aside from the occasional moments of hilarity he provides, I'm tired of hearing about him, thinking about him — and writing about him. I hope this is the last time I will feel any need to do so.

Reflection on the Election

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik via AP News)

It's over—the election, the agonizing waiting period and the Trump presidency itself (minus the last couple of lame duck months). As of my writing, the Associated Press has projected that Biden will take 290 electoral votes, a number that may well still increase given his narrow lead in Georgia. Trump will go down in history as a one-termer, one of the hapless rejects in the list of American presidents along with guys like Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover and Martin van Buren.*  He has been branded a loser—the last thing in life he ever wanted to be. But if he can recover from that psychological wound, he will probably find his post-presidency far more fun than any but the best days of his presidency: none of the responsibility, but with the same massive following he's had since he started running in 2015. We will not see the last of Donald Trump when he leaves (or is dragged from) the White House next January.

Or of "Trumpism," for that matter, to whatever extent such a thing can be separated from conservatism as it's existed for the past few decades. If exit polls are to be believed, Republican voters' support for Trump may well have increased in 2020 compared to 2016. This should come as no surprise: Gallup's most recent survey on the matter found near-unanimous approval for Trump among Republicans. While Trump himself may have outlived his usefulness to the GOP—at least in the role of president—we're certainly not about to see them repudiate the soon-to-be-former standard-bearer or his legacy.

Nor did we quite see the nation repudiate the Republican Party. The widespread glee at getting rid of Trump is understandable, but the results of this election are nothing to feel triumphant over—whether you're a committed socialist or just a liberal hoping for the Democratic Party's long-term success. Regardless of how the remaining states are called, Biden's victory in the Electoral College will be the narrowest of any Democrat since Jimmy Carter. In 2016, Trump managed to flip three until-then-reliably Democratic states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Biden managed to flip all three back, but with nearly all of the vote counted, his leads in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania stand at less than one percent and his lead in Michigan is less than three percent; in 2012 Obama carried the three states handily, by margins of better than five percent in each. Possible victories in Arizona** and Georgia—states no Democrat had carried since the '90s—may provide something of a bright spot for Biden, but on the other hand (former?) swing states like Ohio and Florida (both of which Obama won twice) remained safely in the Republican column. All of this becomes even more alarming when one considers who Biden was running against: a consistently unpopular incumbent presiding over massive unemployment, who has completely failed to adequately handle a pandemic as it killed hundreds of thousands of Americans this year. If the pandemic and ensuing economic disruption hadn't come along, it's hard to see how Biden could have won at all. 

Down ballot, the results look even uglier for the Democrats. While they were widely expected to take control of the Senate, it now looks likely that they'll need to win two runoff races in Georgia to even achieve a 50-50 split (with new VP Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote offering them an effective majority). It had also seemed probable that the Democrats would expand their majority in the House, but instead it was the GOP that found itself making unexpected gains.

Things get still more dismaying when we break the results down by demographic. As Osita Nwavenu writes for the The New Republic, "Democrats have seen a shocking amount of erosion among Latino voters, as well as potential gains for Republicans among Black voters, although a final verdict on the latter shouldn’t be rendered before we’ve had a look at postelection surveys that are traditionally more reliable than exit polls." In Texas, Trump increased his share of the vote in the counties that were the least white and most Hispanic. In Starr County for instance, where 96.4% of the residents are Latino or Hispanic, Biden won by just five percent, compared to Hillary Clinton's massive 60% margin of victory four years ago. 

Democrats and Democratic Party loyalists have responded to this underwhelming result in predictable fashion. MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson proposes that "just maybe about half of America actually wants a racist incompetent proto dictator" and that leftists won't admit this because it "would mean acknowledging race over phony economic theory[.]" Even if this is true, it raises some pretty major questions about how we got to that point. One of the biggest landslides in American history came in 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson, who had just pushed major civil rights legislation through Congress, defeated Barry Goldwater, who had voted against that same legislation. How did we go from an era when an election like that was possible to one in which a "racist incompetent proto dictator" is (supposedly) guaranteed almost half of the vote? And how was Barack Obama able to score a considerably more impressive victory than Joe Biden if racism is the dominant factor in all of this? 

When not indulging in this sort of fatalism—that no better result was really possible, because of America itself—Democrats and their allies have been eager to lay blame in all of the wrong places. Former Senator Claire McCaskill, who continues to get air time on MSNBC despite being a literal loser with no conceivable credibility on issues like these, seemed to blame excessive focus on cultural issues like abortion and "rights for transsexuals" for the Democrats' losses. Biden surrogate and former (Republican) governor John Kasich wasted no time in blaming the "far-left" for "almost cost[ing Biden] this election." In a three hour-long conference call this past Thursday, centrist House Democrats "blast[ed] their liberal colleagues...for pushing far-left views that cost the party seats," according to The Washington Post, with Representative Abigail Spanberger reportedly arguing that "We need to not ever use the word 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again...We lost good members because of that." This sentiment was echoed by Minority Whip James Clyburn, who warned that if "we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we're not going to win," apropos the upcoming Georgia runoffs. All this when a Fox News exit poll showed 70% of voters favor "[c]hanging the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan" and Florida voters approved a $15 minimum wage by a 60% supermajority even as Biden failed to carry the state. 

So what's the correct takeaway from all of this? That Bernie (or someone else) would have won by more? Who knows—but it's hard not to note how stupid the arguments against nominating him (He could never win Florida! He'd be a disaster for Democrats in down-ballot races!) look after this. And one can't help but note, when considering the Democrats' erosion of support from Latinos, that they were one of the groups most represented in Sanders' base. But the counterfactual does not interest me very much. Whatever the case is, this election deserves to be viewed as a remarkable shortfall on the part of the Democratic Party, and the analyses they're offering for why it happened this way are transparently self-serving lies. Perhaps it really wasn't possible for them to do much better than they did, but if so that only speaks to the political reality they helped create: a country where partisan polarization is rampant and politics has just become one more outgrowth of mass culture, where the concept of reviving the New Deal (or creating some modern equivalent) must strike many as either unrealistic or just shallow sloganeering because the foundations for such a project (a vibrant labor movement and participatory political culture) do not exist anymore. 

None of this is to say that I'm not relieved Donald Trump's days as president are numbered. I do think it will be good to get him out of office, both because I expect Biden to be somewhat less destructive (in the short term, at least) and because I'm incredibly sick of Trump completely dominating the political discourse; of every issue from NATO to trade to North Korea getting turned into a question of being pro- or anti-Trump. But, especially given the way this election panned out, removing Trump seems far more like a temporary relief than it does any sort of promising shift in the course the nation—or the world—is taking. The idea of pushing Biden left—a bad joke to begin with—is even more absurd now that the Senate appears likely to remain in Republican hands. I don't expect much positive good to come out of Biden's presidency, and I dread what future elections may bring. Something major needs to change quickly, and whatever it is wasn't on the ballot in this election.

____________________________________________________________________________________

*That is, assuming he doesn't run again and win in 2024—but this seems more than a bit unlikely if for no other reason than his age and health. 

 **As of my writing, AP and Fox have called Arizona for Biden, but other networks such as CNN and CBS have yet to make a projection. 

Trump Can't Stay in Power If He Loses, But He Could Steal the Election

(Chris Kleponis–Polaris/Bloomberg/Getty Images via Time)

Of the many worries that have dominated the public consciousness throughout this deeply unsettling year, one keeps coming up again: that Donald Trump will refuse to leave office even if he loses the upcoming election. Trump himself recently reignited these concerns when he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, ominously saying that "we're going to have to see what happens." But the concern has been around since well before that, with even as prominent a figure as Bernie Sanders warning that it could happen. 

Well, I'm here to tell you not to worry. Sort of. There is plenty to worry about in terms of what will happen between now and January 20, 2021, but if Donald Trump is the clear and official loser of the presidential election, I for one fully expect that his presidency and his reign of terror will end on that date. I could be wrong, but I really don't think I will be. I'm not the first person to examine, and ultimately dismiss, these concerns,* but I also want to take a look at why this (I believe) irrational worry persists—even when there's a much likelier possibility that would also let Trump stay in power.

Obviously, it's not as if Trump has any deep, abiding respect for rules and norms or democracy in general. So why am I so sure he will leave office if he loses? For one thing, because I don't think he enjoys being president. I don't think he ever really expected to win the first time, and I don't think the job is very fun for him. He could resign, of course, but only one president has ever done that previously, and only after major wrongdoing was revealed. He could decide not to run for reelection, but the last sitting president to do that was Lyndon B. Johnson, who was basically admitting his own failure by doing so. To do either of those things would look like a surrender on Trump's part—an admission that he no longer believes he has what it takes to be president. Obviously, someone like Trump is not about to make that sort of admission or give his enemies that kind of a win. But if he actually loses the election, on the other hand, no one would perceive it as some kind of show of weakness for him to leave office. It's just what would be expected at that point. He could very easily rant about how the election was rigged and he was the rightful winner while at the same time claiming his hands were tied and he had no choice but to leave office, and his followers would believe all of it. As ex-president, he could still command the same following and use his platform to talk about how he should have gotten a second term, meaning he would have all the fun of the presidency (the millions of rubes who hang on his every word and view him as a modern-day prophet) with none of the actual responsibility. I would almost be surprised if he's not secretly hoping he loses, and his completely awful campaign makes that idea all the more believable. 

But even if Trump doesn't jump at the opportunity to leave the White House, so what? Which actual institutions are loyal enough to him that they would ignore the results of the election and commit literal treason to keep him in power? The "deep state" that he's claimed is his mortal nemesis? The military, among whom his approval rating has been in decline to the extent that a recent poll of active-duty service members found Biden with a four-point lead? Plenty of Trump's supporters might be willing to go along with it if he decided to try and stay in office past the end of his term, but are they willing to form their own militias and fight against the police and the US military, of which Joe Biden would become the commander-in-chief at noon on January 20, 2021? Even if Trump proclaims himself president for life, without someone to back him up he's still just one feeble, flabby narcissist. A few federal marshals should be able to remove him from the White House pretty easily. 

Again, this doesn't mean that we have nothing to worry about between Election Day and Inauguration Day even assuming Joe Biden wins. There's plenty of reason to imagine Donald Trump would claim the election was rigged even after the results had been certified, as a way to soothe his ego if nothing else. Even if he himself doesn't make this claim, plenty of his supporters would discount the election results anyway. It's entirely likely we would see sporadic acts of violence from his more unstable, QAnon-believing followers. Many others might turn out to protest in the streets, resulting in scenes similar to those from the anti-social distancing protests earlier this year but perhaps more extensive and even angrier. It would very likely be an ugly few months, and Joe Biden's inauguration would certainly not put an end to it. But these are quite different concerns than any worries about Trump trying to stay in power past the end of his term. 

There is, however, a much more realistic concern about how Trump could illegitimately remain in office: simply by stealing the election. While an American president refusing to step down after his term of office expired would be unprecedented, a stolen election would be far from it—Trump's party, after all, has attempted to tip the electoral scale in its favor through shameless gerrymandering, needlessly restrictive voter ID laws and other such dubious means. It was only 20 years ago that the Republican candidate was handed the presidency on a silver platter when five conservative Supreme Court justices put a halt to the recount efforts in Florida, after all. And this election will be very unusual, given the ongoing pandemic and the likely far-higher-than-normal use of mail-in ballots. It is absolutely believable that the Trump campaign and Republican governors will seek to have substantial numbers of absentee ballots discounted for this or that reason, and the courts certainly might give them what they want. With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg there are now only three liberal justices on the Supreme Court, meaning that if a Bush v. Gore-esque situation were to occur once more, Trump's prospects of victory would be quite good. 

By no means is it certain that this is what we're headed for. In fact, if the current polls align with the actual votes cast, it would require far more than just stopping a recount in a state or two or getting a few absentee ballots thrown out for Trump to be certified as the winner. But it is much more believable that Trump and the Republican machine could steal a close election than that Trump would succeed in remaining in office even after Biden is certified as the official winner. 

So why is it the latter possibility and not the former that seems to be getting all of the attention? Probably for a few different reasons. For one thing, I think many liberals and other anti-Trumpers would secretly on some level prefer the Trump-ignores-the-election-results scenario over the other one. It's more dramatic, for one thing. Most Americans have already lived through a presidential election where the courts essentially thwarted the democratic process and installed the Republican as president. A rerun sounds neither appealing nor exciting. On the other hand, a president essentially attempting a coup to stay in power would be a very new thing, and a major break from political reality as we've known it. It's easy to fantasize about what would come next—would this be the event that brings tens of millions of Americans out into the streets in protest? Would we all be faced with a clear choice between saving democracy or living in a world straight out of our favorite dystopian novels? Would Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refuse to accept the wrong that had been done to them, and serve as the leaders for a new opposition movement that wouldn't rest until Trump was defeated? Would the #Resistance finally transform into La Résistance and no longer just be a hashtag? Terrifying as it all may be, it offers the possibility that political life would no longer be dreary and isolated—filling out a ballot every few years, and perhaps donating some money and time to your favorite candidates—but rather full of danger and adventure, and would certainly offer a greater sense of purpose than anything that's been possible under Trump's rule so far. 

Another likely reason that the possibility of a stolen election has been so relatively overlooked is that it requires us to confront some disturbing realities—realities that go far beyond Trump. It means acknowledging that our elections could be undermined and manipulated not by some foreign adversary but by our own elected officials, by our own judiciary, and by a major political organization that has been around for over one and a half centuries (i.e. the Republican Party). It's easy enough to say ex post facto that an election wasn't fair, as an excuse for why your preferred candidate lost. But admitting to yourself in advance that your candidate could be cheated out of victory even if they do everything right is considerably more terrifying. It also makes all of the fervent talk about the importance of voting ring a bit hollow, for obvious reasons. It is, in a way, much less frightening to imagine Trump simply losing the election but refusing to abide by the result. That way, at least his obstruction of democracy would be blatant and likely bring a swift and severe reaction. If the election comes down to some protracted court battle that ultimately results in Trump's reelection, that would certainly result in some protests and a lot of ruffled feathers—but if the 2000 election is anything to go by, we'd still end up suffering through four more years of President Trump. 

This focus on the evils of Donald Trump himself instead of on those of the system that helped saddle us with him has been a consistent throughline of the past four years. It is, no doubt, a big part of the reason we ended up with Joe Biden as the nominee—the candidate who voters perceived as most likely to successfully get rid of Donald Trump, even if he may have been the least likely to seriously disrupt the political status quo. I am one of the many who feel that this shortsighted focus on Trump has already steered us wrong in a major way, and I do not look forward to the ramifications yet to come from it. Whether one is worried about the unlikely possibility of Trump staging a coup or the much likelier one of the Republican Party stealing the election, there is not too much than can be done between now and Election Day. But it couldn't hurt to start thinking more about the corruption of our whole political system instead of obsessing over Trump himself.

*The hosts of the podcast Chapo Trap House, and Matt Christman in particular, have talked pretty extensively about it. When writing this post it was impossible to avoid rehashing some of the points they made, so for the sake of fairness I wanted to give them credit here.

Biden-Harris Offers Personal Diversity but Ideological Uniformity

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images via ET

 

After much (and I really do mean much) deliberation and suspense, Joe Biden has announced that his running mate will be Kamala Harris. This is hardly unexpected: for months, Harris had been talked about as one of the top candidates for the slot. Nonetheless, it is a significant choice, in more ways than one. Perhaps the most obvious significance of the choice has to do with Harris' identity: she is the first Black woman to be chosen for the VP spot on a major-party presidential ticket, and would be both the first female and first Black vice president if she and Biden are victorious in November. In this regard, she brings diversity to the Democratic ticket and serves as a balance of sorts to Joe Biden—an old, white man (who, unlike Harris, boasts a long public career and, therefore, "experience"). But when it comes to actual ideology, Harris brings neither diversity nor balance to the ticket. On the contrary, she brings stark uniformity—a reality that Biden and his handlers surely recognized.

To be clear, personal diversity at the highest levels of government is a worthwhile goal. It is better, both symbolically and probably in terms of measurable effect, for the makeup of the government to reflect that of the population with respect to race, gender, religion, and other aspects of personal identity. But it is also undeniably not everything. A government whose composition is as diverse as that of its country can still be a bad government. It can also still fail to represent the populace it's ruling over: people are more than just their race, or gender, or religion, or sexuality. In fact, ideology is more important in this respect than personal identity. While this might seem like a brash or insensitive claim, it's generally reflected in the opinions of voters throughout the country. Most people would rather be represented in government by someone who shares their opinions and priorities (and who they feel is well qualified), rather than someone who shares some aspect of their personal identity. How else can we explain the fact that, for instance, Black voters in the Democratic primary favored Joe Biden over Cory Booker or Kamala Harris? Or that Latino voters were much likelier to support Bernie Sanders than they were Julián Castro? Or that Pete Buttigieg was unable to carry the LGBTQ vote? And, indeed there is good reason for this: while electing a member of a marginalized group to office may be a valuable and inspiring symbolic victory, their ideology determines how they will wield their power—and how they do so may affect the livelihoods of many millions of people. With this in mind, in terms of real-world impact the ideological similarity between Biden and Harris outweighs their differences in personal identity.

From a hardline left-wing standpoint we could, of course, simply say that (like virtually all politicians in the United States) Biden and Harris are both defenders of capitalism and America's sprawling empire overseas, and be done with it. This is true, but even if we get into the finer details the two are often very much in sync. Let's take Medicare for All, for example. We know Biden's standpoint: consistently and unshakably opposed. How about Harris? Initially, she was actually a cosponsor for Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill. But once her presidential campaign got rolling, she pretty quickly abandoned it. The plan she ultimately ran on would, like Biden's, only offer a "public option" while allowing private health insurers to provide competing plans—a weak and inadequate compromise, for reasons I've explained elsewhere. 

When it comes to higher education, the case is similar. Biden has consistently stopped short of advocating for universal free college (which already exists in a number of similarly wealthy countries). He has also shied away from wide-scale cancellation of student loan debt. During her presidential campaign, Harris offered up a student loan debt forgiveness proposal so narrow as to verge on unintentional comedy. As a CNBC article described it, 

Borrowers will have a lot of boxes to check before they can get the $20,000 in student debt forgiveness on the table in her proposal.

They will have to be 1) a Pell Grant Recipient who 2) starts a business in a disadvantaged community and 3) manages to keep that business afloat for at least three years.

When it came to the cost of college going forward, she only promised to "fight to make community college free, make four-year public college debt-free." Incidentally, how to ensure college is "debt-free" without making it tuition-free is something I have yet to hear adequately explained. 

One of the biggest criticisms of Biden from the left is his often-cozy relationship with the finance industry. Harris is similar here, too. As the Attorney General of California, Harris was strongly urged by her own staff to sue Steve Mnuchin's bank OneWest. The bank foreclosed on tens of thousands of homeowners in the state, in possible violation of an agreement with the FDIC. But despite her staff's "strong recommendations," Harris did not file a case against OneWest. Mnuchin, in turn, donated to Harris' 2016 Senate campaign—making her the only Democratic Senate candidate he gave money to in that election cycle. That case seems to be just one instance of a greater trend: the Wall Street Journal has reported that Wall Street is "sigh[ing] with relief" now that Biden has chosen Harris as his running mate, while CNBC notes that "Wall Street executives are glad" about the pick. 

Nor are Biden and Harris far apart on foreign policy. The Times of Israel  observes that "[u]nlike some of the more liberal members of the caucus...[Harris] has not bucked the [Democratic] party’s traditionally supportive posture toward Israel, or called for fundamental changes to the nature of the alliance" and "has also maintained a close relationship with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)." She has tried to outflank President Trump from the right on the issue of North Korea, excoriating him for canceling joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises and daring to meet face-to-face with Kim Jong-Un. While her presidential campaign website promised to "end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and protracted military engagements in places like Syria," she has hardly taken a strong stance against ongoing U.S. meddling in the region, telling the New York Times that "I believe we should bring back our troops from Afghanistan, but I also believe that we need to have a presence there in terms of supporting what the leaders of Afghanistan want to do in terms of having peace in that region, and certainly suppressing any possibility of ISIS or any other terrorist organization from gaining steam."

While Harris obviously can't match Biden's tough-on-crime record, here there are commonalities as well. She played a significant role in pushing for harsher penalties for truancy when she was running for Attorney General in California, resulting in a new law that would punish the parents of truant kids with up to a year in jail. Although (unlike Biden) she has recently voiced her support for legalizing marijuana, her record on that issue offers reason to be skeptical: when running against a pro-legalization Republican in 2014, Harris literally laughed at his stance, and an investigation found over 1,500 people were sent to California state prisons for marijuana-related offenses from 2011 to 2016, during her tenure as AG. Her treatment of California's prisoners when she held that office is also controversial: she's faced criticism for sending a brief that sought to deny sex reassignment surgery to transgender inmates, although she claims to have only been enforcing existing policy even as she worked behind the scenes to change it; and when a man convicted of murder sought DNA testing that could exculpate him, Harris did not act on the request (it was later granted by Gavin Newsom). She additionally faces accusations of being soft on police misconduct, and of having slow-walked an investigation into misuse of jailhouse informants by deputies and prosecutors. 

On the environment Harris does strike a more progressive posture, having teamed up with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push for climate legislation, cosponsored the Green New Deal resolution and voiced support for a fracking ban. But once more, there are reasons for doubt. Her presidential campaign was advised by Michèle Flournoy, "a career Pen­ta­gon offi­cial who has repeat­ed­ly urged increas­ing domes­tic fos­sil fuel extrac­tion as a key part of U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy, and sup­port­ed sev­er­al poli­cies that have helped turn the U.S. into one of the world’s worst car­bon pol­luters, such as Obama’s repeal of the ban on domes­tic oil exports" (in the words of writer Branko Marcetic). A 2019 Washington Post article noted that Harris had "accepted donations from a top attorney at CITGO Petroleum, among others at natural gas corporations, federal filings show. After an inquiry from The Washington Post, Harris’s campaign said it was in the process of returning a gift from a vice president at Consumers Energy, a Michigan-based natural gas and electricity company."

If all of this feels like picking out the most objectionable bits of Harris' record, that is only because—once again, as with Biden—I find it difficult to discern much in terms of a positive agenda or vision that she really stands for. It would be easier to overlook some of these imperfections if they seemed to be mere blemishes, distractions from the true substance of Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, I find myself unable to discern any true substance that can be separated from the imperfections. 

For many, the historical import of Harris' placement on the ticket—and the promise of a return to the "sanity" of the Obama years—will be enough to win not just their vote but their enthusiasm. I find this response misguided, but those people are entitled to their opinion and I won't scold them for it. However, we should at least be able to retire any claims about Biden running on The Most Progressive Platform Since FDR, or seriously adopting any ideas from the Democratic Party's left flank. A nominee's choice of running mate is always important, and especially so in Biden's case (for obvious reasons). Faced with possibly the most consequential decision of his general election campaign—he may have just picked our 47th president, after all—Biden chose someone who is far closer to him, ideologically, than she is to Bernie Sanders (who was, lest we forget, the first runner-up in the crowded Democratic primary field). That he did so is neither a surprise nor a scandal, but it certainly tells us more about how he would govern than any of the words in his platform do.