An assassination attempt. An official Republican presidential nominee who is also the most polarizing figure in modern American history. Growing talk that Donald Trump could win in a landslide. His anointing of an heir to realign the parties and sustain Trumpism for years to come. And in the middle of it all, tormented by polls and criticism, able to change the entire dynamic only by sacrificing himself: Biden Agonistes.
What a week! It feels like August 1914, a fulcrum in the sweep of events. These days may have moved the arc of America and the world, with history lurching in competing directions in ways that may shape our course for decades.
“There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen,” Lenin is widely quoted as saying. In fact, he probably didn’t say it; please excuse my effort at fact-checking as a token pushback to our Leninist dialectic of exaggerations, deceptions and conspiracy theories that were all highlighted this week.
To me, the tumult raised fears but also offered hopes and potential turning points — the most significant of which is the prospect of President Biden withdrawing from the race, as it seems he’s considering. Trump had a triumphant and exultant week, but his acceptance speech also underscored his lack of discipline and tendency to hail himself as America’s Caesar. The polls showed his strength against Biden, but his speech also suggested a Biden-like incoherence — a phrase that is somewhat unfair to Biden — and a path to a Democratic victory that might even shake the G.O.P. out of its cultish reverence for Trump.
Biden can borrow the language of President Lyndon Johnson, who on Sunday, March 31, 1968, stunned the nation in a television address, announcing, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” That won Johnson rare praise; in 2024, such a statement might avert disaster in November.
The transcendent problem for America is not Trump himself but the larger poisons, divisions, inequalities and frustrations that he has exploited and that this month came to a head. These are not unique to the United States, for similar forces led to Brexit in Britain, to Marine Le Pen’s rise in France and to a prime minister in Italy whose party has neo-fascist roots. To me, today’s toxins seem to be an echo of the rages that tore apart America and Europe in the 1960s but that ultimately ran their course and allowed us to recover. It’s far from inevitable, but at the end of this week I could squint and see a path ahead that navigates a dangerous autumn but that ultimately repudiates extremism and leads to a new American recovery.
We’re caught in a historical crisis, but think of it this way: The Chinese term for crisis, 危机, or weiji, is made up of the characters for danger (wei) and for opportunity (ji). So we’re in a period of great danger but also one pregnant with opportunity for a new path — if we can seize it.
The assassination attempt, like so much else, should be a wake-up call. It was a near miss for Trump but also for America. It’s easy to imagine riots if the bullet had killed the candidate. It reminds us again of the need for less militant rhetoric and for more sensible gun policies.
As it was, the shooting’s aftermath underscored the penchant for conspiracy theories on both right and left, reflecting our national antagonisms and distrust. Representative Mike Collins, a Republican from Georgia, posted that “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Alex Jones blamed the “deep state,” and Elon Musk suggested (in a post viewed 92 million times) a possibility that “deliberate” action by the Secret Service might have allowed the shooting.
Conversely, some on the left immediately suspected that the assassination attempt was staged. Each side was willing to believe the worst of the other — and to spread untruths.
The shooting reflected undercurrents of violence stirring in our nation, where we not only possess intense political hatreds but also probably have more firearms (perhaps 400 million, though nobody knows) than people (340 million). A horrifying but credible poll this spring found that one-fifth of adults believe that “Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track.”
More Republicans than Democrats took that position. Liberals tend to be quite certain that they are the peaceful ones, but a University of Chicago study by a terrorism expert, Robert Pape, found that more Americans support violence to resist Trump (10 percent) than to back him (7 percent).
The implication is that we on the liberal side, as well as conservatives, need to be more careful to avoid heated rhetoric and bellicose metaphors (like Biden’s call to “put Trump in a bull’s-eye”) that can erode norms and incite violence.
One thing Americans haven’t worried enough about is the risk of extreme polarization and impunity driving political violence. The impunity can come about through law enforcement turning a blind eye (as happened during attacks on civil rights workers in the 1960s), or it can be that juries might have one or more members who refuse to convict because they believe violence is justified.
Such impunity would incentivize more violence and then counter-violence, in cycles that would drive more polarization and impunity and then become difficult to reverse.
But perhaps, after the assassination attempt, we’ll be more cautious and aware.
One of the most pivotal events this week was Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate, for that clarified the future of Trumpism and may have given it a more sustainable path.
Whatever one thinks of Vance, he is very intelligent and capable. At 39, he could be a dominant figure in the G.O.P. for decades to come. Moreover, while Trump has impulses, Vance has an ideology, and I can easily imagine Vance working painstakingly to make Trumpism more effective.
A political realignment has already been underway in America, turning Democrats into the party of the educated and driving many working-class voters to the G.O.P., and Vance seems determined to accelerate it. Instead of denouncing unions, Republicans invited the president of the Teamsters to address the convention, and Vance is unusual in the Republican Party with his support for a higher minimum wage and for stronger antitrust efforts, including breaking up Google and sponsoring the Stop Subsidizing Giant Mergers Act.
In his acceptance on Wednesday evening of the nomination by the party that was once the home of Wall Street and big business, Vance denounced “Wall Street barons” for crashing the economy. He called for “a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike.”
Many working-class Americans are angry at elites, and they have a right to be. Banks were rescued in the 2008 financial crisis, but 10 million people were allowed to lose their homes. Blue-collar wages have stagnated. We accept that poor children will attend poor schools. We embrace trade policies that move factories abroad but don’t try adequately to support the workers or withered communities left behind. Neither party has acted with nearly enough resolve as more than 100,000 Americans die of overdoses annually. I’m a full-throated supporter of more aid to Ukraine, but I understand how left-behind Americans feel that Washington cares more about Ukrainians than it does about them.
Trump and Vance’s policies would make matters worse, I believe, but the last week showed how much they are reaching out to working-class voters that Democrats have too often condescended to. My secret hope is that as they see Republicans winning over working-class voters, Democrats will compete more for them, be less patronizing, be less inclined to dismiss all Trump voters as bigots and work harder to lift them up.
It seemed for much of the past week that we should brace ourselves for four more years of President Trump, and I began weighing the effects. Would Ukraine survive? Would a resurgent and victorious Russia move next on Moldova? Would America pull out of NATO? Would China, seeing America’s allies quarreling and a weakened commitment to global security, move on Taiwan?
At home, would America’s civil service be politicized? Would the military be ordered to suppress protesters or to attack narcotics sites in Mexico? Would millions of undocumented workers in the United States be forced abroad? Would abortion rights be further restricted, and doctors jailed? Would Supreme Court justices be replaced with youthful versions of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, cementing a far-right court for decades to come? Would democracy erode, fostering a Budapest-on-the-Potomac?
Yet at week’s end, as Democrats contemplated the likelihood that Trump would win the White House and perhaps carry with him both houses of Congress, pressure grew on Biden to withdraw. By the Friday deadline for this column, there were signs that Biden was considering retiring from the race.
If Biden does withdraw, that will mark another cataclysm. The last time something parallel happened was Johnson’s withdrawal in 1968. That suggests that this moment of upheaval may drag on, and that’s particularly true if there is an open convention rather than a coronation of the vice president.
I’ve suggested that the strongest pairing might be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey as her running mate. They could run as outsiders and might have an advantage in swing states — and then it would be Democrats sternly raising questions about their rival’s age and mental lapses. As unsettling as this moment is, it is also laden with opportunity.
If in the end Trump loses in November, that would mean Republicans had won the popular vote only once (in 2004) since 1989, and there would probably be calls for the G.O.P. to end the cult of Trump and return to normalcy. In some ways, the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 ended not only the Watergate scandal but also the entire chapter of poisonous discord that encompassed Vietnam, urban riots and assassinations. It ushered in a time of healing and national cleansing. Let’s hope we can find our own off-ramp from our age of extremism, polarization and division.
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