We are living in a radically different America than the one we lived in last week.
On Monday, July 1st, the Supreme Court rewrote the constitution to say that a president who commits criminal acts while in office may be immune from prosecution.
Meanwhile, for years, the right has said that Joe Biden is old, feeble, and suffering from dementia. Last Thursday, June 27th, Biden’s performance in his debate with Donald Trump seemed to confirm those claims. Biden was hunched, weak, and often forgot the point of the paragraph he had just begun.
The mainstream media said that Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump, also had a disastrous debate appearance. Instead of facts, Mr. Trump made up lies, at least 30 of them. But this debate was not being measured by truth. It was being measured by strength. And Donald Trump looked far stronger.
That night and for the following five days Democrats panicked. Some wanted Biden to pull out of the race and leave the presidential candidacy to someone younger. To Kamala Harris or to a Democratic governor. Others wanted to give Biden another chance. Those two camps continue to duke it out at this very minute.
Nancy Pelosi, who has worked with Biden for 37 years, says Joe Biden was “masterful in helping to write and to pass” legislation like the Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS high tech funding act, and what the New York Times called “a slew” of other legislation. Said Pelosi, “He has a vision. He has knowledge. He has judgment. He has… strategic thinking.”
And Pelosi asked a vital question. Was Biden’s shocking old-man performance an episode or a condition. Was it temporary or permanent.
The White House said that Biden had a cold and was exhausted by two European trips in quick succession. Talking to donors Tuesday night, Biden explained that because of those trips, at the debate “I almost fell asleep onstage.”
However Republicans hailed Biden’s appalling performance as proof of what they had claimed all along—that Biden is a doddering old man.
But there’s a problem. We were so busy picking Joe Biden apart that we missed the bigger picture. Three days after the presidential debate, France had an election. For the first time since World War II, the right wing won.
In 2014, the National Rally, the winning French right-wing party, had accepted a $10 million loan from Vladimir Putin. In other words, in the Ukrainian crisis, the National Rally may well act as Putin’s pawn.
Meanwhile, in six days, NATO will hold its annual summit in Washington, D.C. That summit will be crucial. As Joe Biden points out, democracy is fighting for its life against autocracy, against dictatorship. Your freedoms and mine are at risk. Biden’s physical strength and mental sharpness will prove crucial to his ability to lead this NATO summit. They will prove crucial to his ability to defend the rights we all cherish.
On the other hand, Donald Trump wants to hand Ukraine over to Russia. If Russia gets Ukraine, many experts believe that Putin will try to invade and conquer the other countries on his shopping list, including Poland and the Baltic states. Mr. Trump doesn’t seem to care.
And when it comes to democracy versus autocracy, democracy versus dictatorship, Mr. Trump loves dictators. He loves North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un. He loves Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has praised China’s dictator Xi Jinping. Even more ominously, he has praised the political manipulations with which Xi made himself China’s dictator for life. Mr. Trump has called those manipulations “great.”
Even more important, Mr. Trump loves Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin.
What’s worse, Trump has a history of giving things away. In 2019, he handed Syria to Moscow. In 2020, he surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban. Then he blamed our exit from Afghanistan on Joe Biden.
And worst of all, Trump has a plan called Project 2025, which will give him powers no president has ever had. Powers so sweeping that the creators of Project 2025 call their blueprint a second American Revolution.
As a Democrat, I hope that Joe Biden’s appearances over the coming week prove that he is strong enough for four more years. Because in the same way that Trump’s supreme court justices changed the constitution to turn our presidents into kings on Monday, July 1st, Donald Trump has given numerous clues to a basic fact: he is looking forward to joining the club of autocrats, the global club of dictators.
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/biden-withdraw-election-debate.html
https://www.newsweek.com/project-2025-heritage-foundation-republicans-american-revolution-1920870
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-travel-debate_n_66849b10e4b038babc7d5cb2
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his eight books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.