Now What?

GENEVA — On a planet already gasping for air while playing nuclear chicken in unwinnable wars between the despotic and the desperate, shunting aside Joe Biden as a doddering has-been would be about the dumbest thing imaginable.

His normal aging is different from the pathology of a malevolent sociopath who feeds off vengeful destruction. Yet the media mainstream relays Donald Trump’s venom with little comment while zeroing in on every tic and twitch of a remarkably effective leader.

In today’s world, there is no time for on-the-job training. If Biden must cede the Oval Office to Kamala Harris, she is ready. Allies and adversaries alike take her seriously. With his counsel, contacts and aides already in place, she can provide vital continuity.

But Democrats squabble over untested candidates — that circular firing squad Barack Obama warned of in 2016. Too many unreliable sources confuse inattentive voters. That favors Trump and a corrupted party with elaborate plans to cripple democracy.

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An absurd electoral system hinges on a few key states where big money allows the greedy to sway the gullible. That, as one analyst put it, is as if turkeys voted for Thanksgiving. Among rich donors, Trump mocks the cultists he plucks.

Anxiety is palpable in Geneva, where Americans took the lead in drafting accords for a better post-war world and global organizations now attempt to confront common crises.

Cogs in the wheels that keep the world turning often gather at the Café du Soleil – experts in climate, trade, human rights, migration, food supply, science. A sampling of their thoughts on what a Trump reign portends ranges from worry to outright panic.

Republican justices have abandoned rule of law to favor an ex-president ready to complete his treacherous coup d’etat. Some of the watchdog Fourth Estate is muzzled. Much of it simply fails to bark.

That CNN debate was the most shameful non-journalism I can remember. From the start, the format stymied Biden. Trump smirked and mugged onscreen throughout in between assertions that were 180 degrees off truth.

Biden masters statecraft in private, with subtlety and blunt hard talk. He can be over-folksy and stiff in public, but he fortifies complete thoughts with documented fact. Jake Tapper, eyes fixed on a stopwatch, frequently cut him off in mid-sentence.

Trump spewed jumbled generality. He took credit for Biden’s successes at home and abroad, ignoring questions about his own calamitous record. With racist slurs and lies, he repeatedly denounced a border surge, the result of his own harsh policies.

Asked about Jan. 6, his Hitlerian big lies beggared belief. He denied any responsibility and claimed Nancy Pelosi refused his offer to dispatch 10,000 troops to impose order.

The world saw it all in real time. He fired up zealots to storm the Capitol, a deadly insurrection with a noose for the vice president. He sat comfortably by for hours in public housing voters had lent him in exchange for an oath to protect the Constitution.

Trump’s treacherous purloining of top-secret documents — including defense plans against a foreign attack and names of clandestine agents — should have him locked away with low-level transgressors now in prison. If that came up, I missed it.

Tapper began the debate with Biden, mentioning high prices and asking what he would tell voters who feel they are worse off than under Trump. The president answered with the obvious.

“We had an economy that was in freefall,” he said. “The pandemic was so badly handled, many people were dying…The economy collapsed. There were no jobs. Unemployment rate rose to 15 percent. It was terrible.”

Studies conclude that more than 500,000 Americans died needlessly during Trump’s term, and his inaction helped variants spread across the world. He played down the threat at first, then pushed quackery over science.

Trump’s disjointed lies in response would have been impossible to set straight even if the format allowed it. Here is an excerpt:

“We got hit with COVID. And when we did, we spent the money necessary so we wouldn’t end up in a Great Depression the likes of which we had in 1929. By the time we finished – so we did a great job. We got a lot of credit for the economy…everything was rocking good. But the thing we never got the credit for, and we should have, is getting us out of that COVID mess. He created mandates; that was a disaster for our country.

“But other than that, we had – we had given them back a – a country where the stock market actually was higher than pre-COVID, and nobody thought that was even possible. The only jobs he created are for illegal immigrants and bounceback jobs; they’re bounced back from the COVID.”

It went downhill from there. Follow-up fact checking can never correct such delirious truth-twisting, particularly in an easily bored society where so many see politics as a minor spectator sport.

February’s Super Bowl kept 123 million Americans watching for hours. Barely 55 million saw the debate. Many caught only low points, excerpted endlessly for days afterward.

On balance, Biden blew it. He fumbled to compress major triumphs into sound spurts: reversing a Covid-wracked economy, containing wars Trump triggered in Ukraine and the Middle East, climate action, restoring dialogue with China and much else.

Biden made a crucial point that neither moderator pursued. Trump boasts he made NATO partners pay the required 2 percent of their GDP in dues. During his term, only nine complied. Biden increased that to 23 and pushed to add Finland and Sweden, expanding the alliance to 32 members.

This week in Washington, Biden opened a NATO summit with a forceful speech, hailing its 75 years of keeping peace. At a Florida rally, Trump repeated his threat that any “delinquent” member could expect no U.S. support if Russia invaded.

(Note Peter Baker’s New York Times piece, attached below.)

CNN hyped the debate nonstop for a week in advance. Two weeks later, its cameras linger on Trump’s unfiltered, uncorrected ravings. Panels of random journalists and political operatives obsess over which little-known Democrat should step in.

Sanjay Gupta, the network’s medical expert, urged intensive cognitive tests for Biden. He did not mention a similar screening for Trump, who boasts of acing a simple test meant to determine whether a borderline subject might be safer in a padded room.

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Trump thrives in a nation increasingly divided since the Reagan ‘80s. Schools dropped civics and critical thinking. News executives focused on profit over principle. Money and religion upended politics. Pointless wars created endless enemies.

People caught up in their daily lives ignored climate collapse and global poverty that force millions to besiege rich-world borders. A self-proclaimed business genius, familiar on TV, struck them as a good bet in 2016.

Trump built his cult with a rabid jackal’s instinct to go for the groin. He is ignorant about the world but so are his followers. To a wealthy few who privately revile him, he is a useful tool for amassing personal riches at the cost of their own progeny’s future.

For generations, allies counted on the United States to champion basic freedoms and a global approach to crises. Its leaders made catastrophic mistakes, but the Constitution ensured long-term stability. During Trump’s term, authoritarians flourished.

Narendra Modi’s India is a democracy, but he barely bothers with a velvet glove over his iron fist when he cracks down on minorities and dissidents. “Nonaligned,” he laments children killed in Ukraine but hugs Vladimir Putin and buys Russian oil.

Angst grips much of the European Union as some rogue leaders undermine basic tenets. Viktor Orbán in Hungary, rotating EU president and a Trump favorite, just visited Xi Jinping to enlist aid in ending the Ukraine war on Putin’s terms.

Giorgia Meloni, who dominates Italy’s tumultuous politics, supports Ukraine and EU integration but makes no bones about channeling Mussolini. She fends off desperate migrants in fragile boats who face drowning in the Mediterranean.

Centrist coalitions mostly hold sway, but far-right parties are gaining ground fast. Germany’s hardline AfD surged to second place in EU parliamentary elections. Its Bundestag is up for grabs in October next year.

The trend is clear in France where President Emmanuel Macron stepped in to rally the West after he gave up trying to make headway with Trump.

Fearing a sharp turn to the right, Macron rolled the dice on a snap election for a new National Assembly. It came up snake eyes – two single dots that could go either way depending on subsequent moves. Craps shooters don’t like the odds.

National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s more housebroken version of her father’s extremist National Front, won a clear majority in the first round. A week later, other parties put aside vast differences and reduced the NR bloc to 142 of the 577 seats.

“We won,” Le Pen proclaimed, declaring that victory was only deferred until the next elections. Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the far left, said the same thing. Their only point of agreement is contempt for what each says is Macron’s arrogant elitism.

Macron must now work with both. The leftists’ loose coalition is likely to collapse. On post-election TV panels, its disparate party leaders shouted over one another until moderators intervened. But the far-right marches in lock step.

Jordan Bardella, a smooth-talking 28-year-old, is the NR’s new face. He strikes a chord among workaday French families, with little hint of the racism and antisemitism that defines so many of the party’s France-first followers.

Anthony Martin, my goodhearted neighbor in Provence, voted for him. Hardly a bigot, he and his family were exceedingly kind to the Jewish American reporter who landed in their midst long ago. His maternal grandmother fled Italy to escape Mussolini.

Anthony, 30, works from dawn until dark — often long past — tending gardens for the city down the mountain, then taking care of olive groves, clearing land and such for his extended family along with a few lucky people like me.

His wife left her job to care for two young children. They keep chickens and a vegetable garden to supplement a meager income.

“It just isn’t fair,” he told me. “People work hard to get by, and now a lot of refugees come here, get all sorts of benefits but refuse to fit in. You see them lounging around collecting welfare and then on the streets shouting, ‘Nique la France.’” Fuck France.

That reflects a troubling big picture. Into the 1980s, les immigrés were mostly from ex-colonies, often with fathers who fought for France in World War II. Rapid-action troops kept peace in Africa and beyond. A nuclear strike force added heft to NATO.

But the Islamist terrorists Trump claims to have defeated singlehandedly are now in West Africa linked up with local jihadists who drove out the French. U.S. troops were forced to leave bases in Niger. Meantime, Beijing dominates a scramble for Africa, which is expected to be more populous than China or India within five years.

In sum, the world is moving back toward a past when Orwellian rule made things simple. Reversing this requires a United States committed to its old principles, not only to help defend democratic choices but also to keep Earth habitable for humans.

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So, now what? Matt Bai offered some wise thoughts in the Washington Post. Biden can prepare for a dignified transition, granting governors or others White House positions that not only enhance their profiles but also equip them to act on a global stage.

“The 2028 primaries are somebody else’s problem,” he wrote. “The job right now is to create the image of an administration that cares more about the next 30 years than the next election.”

But meantime, there is that crazed elephant in the room.

Amid all the TV cross talk, Ana Cabrera, a Mexican American former correspondent during CNN’s better days, cut to the heart of things. Now an analyst at MSNBC, she bristled at clueless conjecture about who should be president.

“Look,” she said, seizing the mic, “If it’s Joe Biden, fine. If it’s Kamala Harris, fine. If it’s Clint Eastwood, empty chair, fine. Just get rid of Donald Trump.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/us/politics/nato-biden-trump.html?searchResultPosition=2