August 14, 2024 | Reading Time: 4 minutes
New joy among Democrats comes from flexing their own power
But first came the end of the crazy-making.
The conventional wisdom is Democrats are feeling joy again after months of dread. Joe Biden may be the most transformational president of our lifetimes, but he’s also the oldest. Fair or not, lots of people weren’t feeling it, including lots of Democrats. As long as he was running against Donald Trump, there was a sense that the party was slouching towards doom.
Things are different now. With Kamala Harris and Tim Walz at the top of the ticket, the Democratic Party is again feeling elated. The vice president and Minnesota governor are filling stadiums in swing states, bringing in record donations and inspiring legions of volunteers. (They are even doing well with Trump’s white working-class voters.) At his debut rally, Walz turned to Harris to say: “Thank you for bringing back the joy.” The next day, Harris called themselves the “joyful warriors.”
There’s something to be said about this cause and effect, but I think there’s another constructive way of looking at it, which is this: The Democrats are feeling joy again because they no longer feel crazy.
The vice president seems to understand that if she waits for the press corps to treat Trump’s habitual incoherence with the same scrutiny it gave the Disaster Debate, she will be waiting for a very long time.
To explain, let me take you back to The Disaster Debate in late June. There, we saw Biden struggling mightily for reasons that no longer matter. We also saw Trump struggling mightily, but he did so loudly and confidently, so no one in the Washington press corps noticed that his mental state – though loud and confident – was rapidly declining.
Donald Trump was a mess. He was bowls of word salad and a firehose of lies. He frequently made no sense while turning our shared reality upside down, backwards and prolapsed. You didn’t need to be old, like Biden, to be confounded by it. Yet every time Trump finished, CNN’s moderators would turn politely to the president for his response.
To see how insane this actually was, let’s take The Disaster Debate out of its immediate political context. If Donald Trump spoke, say, Esperanto, and if he answered all his questions in Esperanto, and if CNN’s moderators turned to Biden for a response to statements Trump made in Esperanto, no one – and I mean no sane human being – would expect him to respond, because everyone would say, “the fuck is this?”
Practically speaking, Trump’s bowls of word salad and his firehose of lies constituted a vocabulary that is as alien to most Americans as Esperanto. Yet Trump spoke so loudly and confidently that CNN’s moderators didn’t notice he was speaking words that they did not understand. And despite not understanding a word he said, they expected a response from Biden, as if he were fluent in Esperanto.
That’s crazy.
Crazier was the reaction by the CNN moderators and, later, the rest of the Washington press corps. First, they pretended they understood what Trump was saying, so much so that what he said was scarcely of any importance (not even his repeated vow to accept the results of the election only if he wins.) Then, they acted shocked – shocked! – when Biden did not respond as expected to the insane request to counter statements in a language neither he nor anyone else understood.
Crazier still was the aggressive gaslighting. There’s clearly something wrong with holding one man, no matter his age, responsible for another man’s decisions, while giving a pass to that other man and his habitual incoherence. Yet the press corps and, later, some leaders of the Democratic Party said the only thing wrong was Joe Biden.
Actually, that’s not crazy.
That’s crazy-making.
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Biden’s decision to drop out ended that. So did the vice president’s decision (as I argued Tuesday) to prevent the press corps from being the final arbiter of the rules of politics. She’s doing that by minimizing access for the time being. She’s reserving the right, and the power, to define herself, her campaign and her message to voters. Where the president depended on the press corps to communicate his record of accomplishment in good faith, in the hope of being rewarded for those accomplishments, the vice president presumes no good faith at all.
More than that, she presumes deceit. She seems to understand, and she’s right, that if she waits for the press corps to treat Trump’s habitual incoherence with the same scrutiny it gave the Disaster Debate, she will be waiting for a very long time. So when the chance comes to say his mental state is rapidly declining – he’s speaking Esperanto, as it were, but doesn’t know he’s speaking it – she takes it.
For instance, during a recent interview with Elon Musk, Trump was “slurring his words and is unable to clearly enunciate S-words, in unusually messy ways,” wrote Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien on X. “He has declined and aged noticeably over the last year.” Later, for his column, O’Brien wrote: “After the unhinged Trump-Musk bro-fest on X last night – and last week’s therapy session at Mar-a-Lago – it should be clear to all by now that the man aspiring to lead the US isn’t well.”
Not trusting the rest of the press corps to make Trump’s deteriorating mental state more widely understood, the Harris campaign said: “Donald Trump’s extremism and dangerous Project 2025 agenda is a feature, not a glitch of his campaign, which was on full display for those unlucky enough to listen tonight during whatever that was on X.com.”
Later, in response to Trump’s attempt to cover up for his poor performance, the campaign said: “Trump blames his confused, slur-filled disaster of an interview with Elon Musk on ‘the complexity of modern day equipment,'” with a wink and a nod to his old age.
Then, in a kind of coup de grâce, the Harris campaign released a video compilation, titled “Donald Trump is slurring and confused,” of the many, many times Trump has been “feeble, slurring, and confused.” It’s as if the vice president’s campaign, after having learned from the press corps how to kill off a presidential candidate with a relentless focus on his age, is trying to kill off Trump’s candidacy with a similar focus.
Which is why, right now, Democrats feel so much joy.
It’s not a joy that comes with the end of dread.
It’s a joy that comes with flexing their own power.
John Stoehr is the editor of the Editorial Board. He writes the daily edition. Find him @johnastoehr.
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