Re: 'But His Memory' and the slow train wreck of American democracy

On 26 May 2022, Molly Bolt <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]: 

> What country do you live in, Senator Biden?

Some night around the year 2064, when the ragtag children of the last 
historians huddle around a cave fire and mix up some berries and the blood 
of their groundhog dinner to paint crude images of what the heck ever 
happened to the United States of America, they will probably render a 
depiction of Feb. 8, 2024 — a date which will live in infamy.

There are so many images to choose from — a corrupt and contented black-
robed Supreme Court putting the last rubber stamp of cowardice on a 
nation’s failure to hold a coup leader accountable, or a White House press 
corps shouting like a pack of wild hyenas at President Joe Biden about his 
81-year-old brain while ignoring the orange blob of Donald Trump as he 
plots the betrayal of Europe and a kind of American Kristallnacht against 
immigrants.

To see last Thursday unfold in real time was like watching the wreck of a 
slow-moving train, with democracy heading like Wile E. Coyote toward a 
cliff and nobody — not a Supreme Court bought and paid for by 
billionaires, nor a judiciary too easily gamed by inertia, nor a Congress 
engineered to produce only gridlock and gibberish, nor a gullible news 
media lacking backbone — throwing the switch to stop it. And the American 
people?

No one bothered to get off the couch.

Too many of us looked like the meme of Michael Jackson at the movies, 
shoveling buttered popcorn into our faces while watching the prime-time 
political theater of a suddenly energized White House press corps pummel 
Biden over a special counsel’s report that couldn’t find a crime in his 
mishandling of classified documents so it made over-the-top swipes at the 
octogenarian’s memory. In a nation where more than half of voters can’t 
name all three branches of government, Biden’s inevitable verbal gaffe — 
calling Egypt “Mexico” — was gleefully treated by reporters and MAGA 
partisans alike as if they’d won a Super Bowl prop bet on a Travis Kelce 
touchdown.

The real import of what happened on Feb. 8, 2024, probably won’t be 
understood until it is too late: The Trump train of a U.S. dictatorship 
gained considerable steam. Once upon a time, it was unthinkable that 
anyone would make a serious effort to stop the peaceful transition of 
presidential power. It was unthinkable that the tools we thought existed 
to punish someone who did this — impeachment, constitutional sanctions, 
the courts — would not rise to the occasion. And it was most unthinkable 
of all that the coup plotter could run for president again, and win.

For a lot of folks, the 2024 election is starting to feel like déjà vu all 
over again, a replay of 2016. That year, the news media and a good chunk 
of the political establishment — so convinced America could never elect a 
buffoonish demagogue, determined to show toughness toward the expected 
45th president — turned a mini-scandal over Hillary Clinton’s private 
email server into the second coming of Watergate. Trump’s victory, and the 
media’s complicity, led to a popular meme of a neighborhood flooded by 6 
feet of water with a barely visible road sign, “But Her Emails.”

Eight years later, here we are again.

“But His Memory.”

There are three ways to understand such a pivotal moment for the American 
Experiment. The first is to look with clear eyes at what actually happened 
last Thursday.

— In the morning, a skeptical Supreme Court heard oral arguments on 
whether Trump — after leading the call for an insurrection on Capitol Hill 
on Jan. 6, 2021 — can be disqualified from the ballot by states invoking 
the specific language in the Fourteenth Amendment that aimed to bar an 
insurrectionist from holding federal office. It wasn’t much of a surprise 
that even the “liberal” justices are looking for ways to have voters, and 
not themselves, decide the election.

But hearing the first question from Justice Clarence Thomas — who recently 
recused himself from a case because of his wife’s own involvement in the 
run-up to Jan. 6, but inexplicably not from this case, and whose gifts 
from billionaires have made a mockery of the law — felt like a slap in the 
face of democracy. It all raises the question of whether Trump is actually 
above the law, in a nation too partisan for impeachment and too afraid of 
taking the Constitution literally, and with a judicial system that allows 
Trump’s lawyers to throw sand in the gears until he becomes 47th president 
and makes it all disappear.

— Later that day came the unexpected bombshell: the final report of the 
special counsel, Republican Robert Hur, about the classified documents 
that turned up in Biden’s home and private offices, mirroring similar 
scandals with Trump and his vice president Mike Pence. Hur did a good job 
in explaining why Biden — who cooperated with the investigation from Day 
One — was not charged while Trump, who labored to hide documents from 
probers at Mar-a-Lago, was indicted.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GGD88bIWkAAsSnr?format=png&name=900x900

But the clearly ambitious GOP prosecutor didn’t stop there. Hur’s lengthy 
report was littered with over-the-top and seemingly gratuitous commentary 
about what his team believed about the 81-year-old Biden’s memory lapses, 
explaining at one point it would be useless to later try POTUS 46 since a 
jury would see him as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” It 
was the sentence that launched 1,000 New York Times hot takes, a bumper 
sticker of stunning cynicism.

— Thursday night, the exclamation point came in the form of another Trump 
victory — in a complicated Nevada caucus process that had been rigged by 
party bosses for his benefit — with 99.1% of the tally, a number that 
Saddam Hussein would have envied. It reflected the anxieties of a nation 
where two-thirds of voters say they’re unhappy with the two presumptive 
nominees and yet no serious alternatives have been offered.

A second way to view last week’s events is through the eyes of a flailing 
news media. Hur’s official stamp on the perception among a lot of casual 
voters (although not people who’ve actually dealt with the president, from 
retired Gen. Mark Milley to journalist John Harwood) that Biden is too old 
for another term was an excuse for journalists to party like it’s 2016. 
Especially so at the Times, which littered its home page with a half-dozen 
riffs including the absurdity that Biden might end his campaign.

It’s not just that Trump is nearly as old as Biden and not only makes 
similar gaffes — like referring to Nancy Pelosi as Nikki Haley — but also 
veers into insane digressions like claiming ”they” will rename 
Pennsylvania if he loses here in November. Or that some of the folks 
criticizing Biden last week, like House Speaker Mike Johnson or Fox News’ 
Jesse Watters, also confused nations, or states, proving anyone can do 
this.

It’s the media’s failure to put Biden’s occasional slips into any 
meaningful context. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan helped cement the idea of 
a president as performer-in-chief, when that’s really not the job. The 
person in the White House is CEO of an outfit with a cadre of whip-smart 
top aides and cabinet secretaries overseeing nearly 3 million federal 
employees. They implement policies set by what is in the president’s 
heart, not the speed of the neurons in his brain. No one is going to drop 
a bomb on Norway instead of Syria because POTUS said the wrong word in the 
Oval Office.

You say a jury would find Biden “a well-meaning elderly man?” What will a 
jury — if it ever gets that far — say about Trump, who clearly does not 
mean well?

The press corps’ feeding frenzy over Biden’s brain is maybe the worst 
example we’ve seen in 2024 of reporters playing the odds of a political 
horse race, as defined by media critic Jay Rosen, while ignoring what’s at 
stake between the only actual choices we have, Biden and Trump.

That was driven home in what I would argue was actually the biggest story 
of the week — which, of course, received minimal coverage. That would be 
Trump’s confirmation that he and his anti-immigration guru, Stephen 
Miller, are advancing plans for a Day One policy in January 2025 of large-
scale deportations of undocumented immigrants, bringing dead-of-night 
door-knocking terror to the neighborhoods where people who deserve a path 
toward citizenship are working and raising families. The huge number of 
deportees would require massive detention camps near the Texas border, in 
a grim echo of the worst of modern world history.

The current president thought for a split second that Egypt was Mexico, 
while his would-be replacement wants a war zone on the border with Mexico. 
Anyone see a difference here? And that’s just one of the many stakes of 
electing a wannabe dictator who, among other things, would surely have the 
“well-meaning, elderly” Biden indicted. Sometimes the media does hint at 
the stakes — as with Trump’s seeming greenlight to his pal Vladimir Putin 
to invade Europe, which ran lower on the page than Biden memory mania. But 
it’s not enough.

I want to be clear that, as a journalist and as a voter, I don’t think 
that Trump’s awfulness means that Biden gets a free pass. I was, in fact, 
troubled by something the president said in his Thursday night news 
conference — not the Egypt-Mexico thing, but when he said Israel’s 
murderous assault on civilians in Gaza is “over the top,” without 
addressing the measures like withholding weapons that he as president 
could do to help stop it. These are the stakes, not the odds. So many 
desperate human beings — from Central Americans seeking asylum to children 
in Gaza seeking to grow up — need us to get democracy right.

That’s why it’s painful to feel we are on that couch, watching this slow 
train wreck. If neither Biden’s age nor Trump’s neo-fascist policies are 
viewed in the right perspective, democracy will go over that cliff on Jan. 
20, 2025. We need to listen to the famous words of the 1960s activist 
Mario Savio, that “there’s a time when the operation of the machine 
becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! 
... And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, 
upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!”

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/biden-memory-trump-supreme-
court-20240211.html