Coop Scoop: Biden is Vulnerable. So is Trump.

Your choice: Biden is 81 yrs old. Trump is 77 and is a Fascist.

November 28, 2023

By Marc Cooper

Are you mentally prepping for a second round of a Donald Trump presidency?  Are you on Google late at night exploring residency in Canada or Costa Rica?  Are you laying in bed imagining columns of disaffected youth marching firmly away from the Biden Democrats while tens of thousands of Michigan Arabs are marching right behind them?

If so, I understand.  You are only reacting to the non-stop garbage being pumped out about the 2024 campaign. As Dan Pfeiffer –former senior advisor to Barack Obama—said in his recent newsletter, the national punditocracy is framing “the entire conversation around the 2024 election [as] happening through the prism of Joe Biden’s weaknesses — his age, approval rating, and public perception of the economy under his watch.”  ,

The whole prevailing media narrative can be summed up as: ”Biden is an ancient 81 years old, his supporters are fleeing in droves, the economy has collapsed, and his poll numbers are headed for the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”

As if there is no candidate running against him.

What has it been, two years now since the media has predicted The Biden recession that fails to materialize and instead is replaced by record job numbers?  

I am acutely aware of the inequities in the American economy.  And it means that a whole lot of people feel under the gun.  Just as they have for the last 50 years and probably will for the next 50 as it is The System not the White House that steers the economy.  I am not about to tell people that they are not feeling what they are feeling.

But the facts contradict the supposed public mood as interpreted by the omniscient beltway columnists: wages are way up, inflation has dramatically stemmed, jobs are plentiful, and even in the most daunting aspect of the economy –housing costs—prices have started falling. Most importantly, one study after another tells us that most Americans are actually “satisfied” about their personal economy but have doubts and fears about the larger economy (once again proving that ¼ through the 21 century most Americans are actually very poorly educated and that their mis-education is re-enforced daily by millionaire anchors reading copy written by their much lower paid minions).   Are Americans so out to lunch that they forgot the pandemic that wiped out 20 million jobs and drove unemployment to stratospheric levels? Are they so entitled they believe they should experience immediate full and bountiful recovery after a global disease that killed millions?  Would they expect green shoots to appear in an H-bomb crater one week after the impact?

I’m not going to bore you with the usual but very cogent disclaimer about the unreliability of polls a year out from the election.  But whatever their flaws or deceptions, it is absolutely undeniable that Biden is politically weak, quite vulnerable, and certainly could lose the election.  (I will say in passing that the fact we are even discussing this when the opposing candidate is a criminal Donald Trump, is a ringing indictment of the last several decades of the Democratic Party that has squandered its working class base and at this juncture ought to be 30 points ahead of the claptrap Clown Shown known as the GOP).

So let’s get that firmly on the record.  Biden is wobbly and could lose.

What’s not being emphasized by our beloved Punditocracy is that while Biden is, indeed, weak his opponent is even weaker and is much more likely to lose the general election than is Biden (Another thought in passing.  Nikki Haley will not prevail over Trump who will be the Republican nominee. Take that to the bank). 

Says Pfeiffer:

“The conversation about 2024 is overly one-sided. Lost is the fact that Donald Trump is an incredibly flawed candidate presiding over a divided party. Political coverage tends to be simplistic and binary — if Biden is weak, Trump must be strong. But that’s not the case — there is ample evidence in the polling crosstabs and basic common sense that Republicans are about to pick a flawed nominee that could cost them a winnable election.”

The best example I can come up with about the absurd stupidity of the current political coverage is with a sports metaphor. Be advised I’m not much of a fan –except for the Dodgers—and you don’t have to be one to get my following point.  Whenever a sports reporter refers to a specific team it is almost always within the larger context of its competitors, the league, and even how it might do in the post-season against this or that other team.  That’s because the San Francisco Giants or the New York Yankees don’t just do batting practice They are teams that compete against other teams.

Biden is not standing in a batting cage where he feebly swings at 95 mph pitches and we all wince. The 2024 election is not formally a referendum on Joe Biden where we have to decide if he is too old to do whatever no matter how hard the GOP tries to make it that way.  It is going to be a choice.

A choice between Biden and Trump.  You know, like between the Rangers and the D-Backs.  Of course, the Republicans, aided by soft-headed pundits, would love to make this an up/down vote on Biden foregoing the small detail that taking him down puts Donald Trump up and back in office.  Any discussion of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses must be made in the context of comparison with the Other Guy because that is what an election is about.  Otherwise, who cares?

Not to mention that we are not electing just an individual to the one office as if he held total power, like a medieval King. We are electing one team or another.  Who sits in the cabinet, who advises the president, who staffs the agencies, who actually runs the government hands on is not the president. It’s rather the 5,000 or so political appointments he makes and, excuse me for complicating the discourse, but shouldn’t we also be thinking about that?  Is Joe Biden being 82 when he would be sworn in any more of a relevant political fact than what sort of fascist bozo Trump would appoint to Defense Secretary? Or FBI chief? Or CIA chief?  Or would populate Congress?

Isn’t the fact that the Republican Party now hews to an explicitly  authoritarian leader and program as important as Biden’s birthday? How about MORE important?

Yes, Joe Biden just turned 81. And Donald Trump just vowed that he would “weaponize” the DOJ to “go after” his critics, he has vowed “revenge” and “retribution” – against whom?  He also says he will use a “special prosecutor” to indict his critics.  He’s not shied away from adapting some Nazi-like verbiage, suggesting his former top US military commander be “executed” and that once back in office, Trumps says he will “root out” the “vermin” eating away at America, the precise language Hitler used about Jews.  He did not specify if that would be before or after his newly announced plan to massively round up immigrants, hold them in “camps” and then deport all of them, nor if it would it proceed or follow his latest proposal to deploy the U.S. Army into urban centers he considers unruly. That’s what General Pinochet did when faced with street dissent.

“I’m hard-pressed to find any candidates anywhere who are so open that they would use the power of the state to go after critics and enemies,” says Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor and co-author of How Democracies Die.

“This is one of the most openly authoritarian campaigns I’ve ever seen. You have to go back to the far-right authoritarians in the 1930s in Europe or in 1970s Latin America to find the kind of dehumanizing and violent language that Trump is starting to consistently use…US, democratic institutions are hard to kill,” notes Levitsky. “But Trump and people around him are better prepared this time. Trump learned he needs to purge and pack an administration with his loyalists. Autocrats have to take state institutions and pack them. Trump has learned from experience which makes him more dangerous.”

But, Biden is 81.  And Trump a spry 77.

Just how weak or wobbly is Donald Trump?  Let me count the ways. 

Yes, he’s ahead in a few polls.  But almost every poll shows a majority of voters saying they don’t want him back in the White House.

The Republican Party, in case, you didn’t notice it, is in the process of a shattering implosion.  It took 15 rounds of voting to elect Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker only so he could then be replaced, after 22 days of chaos, by a guy who is basically an extremist Imam in a suit and tie and Clark Kent glasses.  The MAGA-fication of the GOP is now complete as the party is loyally lining up behind its addled demagogue. The GOP debate have been amazing theater with Trump’s supposed opponents apparently jostling each other to fellate him.

Nikki Haley bucked the trend but she is a totally empty vessel (see Tim Alberta’s withering profile in Politico) but she makes just enough sense, she at least sounds just rational enough, to turn off about 4 out of 5 Republicans and 6 months from now she will be lucky if she’s an asterisk.  Indeed, the big news this week is that Mitt Romney said the country would be better off with a Democratic president and that makes him the first and only high profile Republican to utter such a thing. Everybody else, including, Nikki, says if Trump is the candidate, they will vote for him no matter what.

But not all Republicans.  It’s the elected, congressional Republicans who are our domestic Vichy.  Republican voters – the tens of millions of them—are a little more varied in opinion and enough so to hobble Trump.  A full third of them say that the 2020 election was not stolen and that they are not interested in rehashing it again and again and again.  A Stanford study of the 2022 mid terms revealed that Republican candidates who denied the validity of the 2020 election, on average, got 2.3% fewer votes than Republican candidates who validated the election.  So while the Stop the Steal rhetoric jazzes the knuckle-draggers, somewhat more sober Republicans are turned off by Trump’s continuation of The Big Lie.

And then there’s that abortion issue which refuses to do but continues to kill GOP plans to outlaw it. We don;t know for sure but I am willing to bet the farm that the GOP position is still gonna play in the moderate burbs much like Hitler’s Bar Mitzvah.

Also, hidden in the cross tabs of that New York Times poll is another crucial number. While Trump racking up 91 felony counts has seemed to bolster him in the fanboy primaries, an almost certain conviction, a guilty verdict in the months to come, begins to scramble things.

From The New York Times poll that put Biden behind in most of the swing states:

“If the former president is convicted and sentenced — as many of his allies expect him to be in the Jan. 6-related trial held next year in Washington, D.C. — around 6 percent of voters across Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin say they would switch their votes to Mr. Biden. That would be enough, potentially, to decide the election.”

That’s pretty good news, I would say.

On the other hand, the intent of this note is not to placate your fears.  Fearing what Trump II might mean is actually an obligation we must undertake much more seriously than to date. The threat to American democracy, the threat to many of our civil rights and liberties, the threat to turn American politics into a WWE spectacle, the threat to further coarsen civil discourse, is very real and very near. And we have not even dealt yet (in this newsletter) with the egomaniacal third party candidates – Marianne Williamson, RFK Jr., Cornel West and maybe drilling magnate and part-time Senator Joe Manchin—who can upend the whole show of we are not careful. 

I trash them not because I am some sort of Biden fanatic. I’ve never been much of a fan of his but he has governed better than I expected.  The Democrats might indeed be in a stronger position with a younger more energetic nominee and president.  But it seems too late to change horses and those mentioned above strike me more as donkeys than as thoroughbreds.  That said, it would be comforting if the Democrats finally got a serious campaign going – one that directly addresses the authoritarian threat.  The next pundit who uses the cliché of “kitchen table issues” should get a swift kick in the teeth.

This will be the most consequential political year in decades. 

Joe Biden is 81.  Donald Trump is a fascist.  Your choice, America.  +++

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