Cleaning out my four kitties’ shitboxes Friday night after a day of reckoning with our president’s senility and our Supreme Court’s rabid reversion to 1924, it occurred to me that Joe Biden is our Ahab, Trump is his Moby Dick, and we’re all on the Pequod, at the mercy of two suicide bombers chasing our doom. It’s one of the paradoxes of Melville’s great American novel—that celebration and eulogy for America—that the story doesn’t end well. He saw it then. Who but the blindest Pangloss doesn’t see it now?
I did not watch the debate Thursday. Reading a headline and the top three paragraphs of a news article Friday morning and watching the first 10 minutes of it this morning was enough to realize, like when Jason Robards slumps over in his car as a whatever megaton bomb detonates over Kansas in “The Day After,” that something had gone terribly wrong. But it wasn’t a surprise. It’s as if a Cat 5 were to wipe out Flagler Beach and Palm Coast. We’d be shocked, grieved, demoralized. We wouldn’t be surprised. This is what Emergency Management has been warning us for years to prepare for.
Biden’s emergency management team has known all along that Biden out of his protective cocoon was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Biden himself knew it when in 2019 he wisely saw himself as a one-term president. And what a president he would have been. Restoring the country to health, literally and morally, after Trump’s four-year demolition derby, bringing back dull but effective governance over sycophantic know-nothing narcissism, then ceding the way to the next fresher presidency while he designs the first presidential library on a rolling Amtrak train.
Any presidency has its failings. Biden hasn’t lacked for any from Kabul to Gaza to that brief burst of inflation. Even George Washington was a slow-witted, vainglorious, slaveholding failed farmer and mediocre general who, as Daniel Boorstin reminds us, “was destined to a stature in death which he had never attained in life.” Too bad Biden can’t run on posterity’s judgment. It will be kinder.
What matters now is November 5. A few days ago–and still today, because it hasn’t caught up yet–538’s aggregate of polls had Biden slightly ahead of Trump again, after dropping behind for a while. In coming days the aggregate for Biden will probably look like Down Jones’s graph after the Great Crash of October 1929, or like this:
Biden won’t win. He can’t win. He has lost Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. Even if he holds on to Pennsylvania he loses. Even if he holds on to Pennsylvania and Nevada he still loses. What was a likelihood a few days ago is now a mathematical certainty. If Biden stays in the race, Trump is the next president.
At least we won’t have to worry about an armed rebellion by zombified January Sixers the night of Nov. 5, just a kind of thuggish reality-show autocracy resuming on Jan. 20, this time with most of the judiciary and Congress domesticated. The Heritage Foundation can get to work enacting its Project 2025 in goose step with Trump’s Agenda47, a pair of blueprints that would end democracy as we know it. We’ll be more like a blend between Victor Orban’s Hungary and Sharia law, though our own DeSantistan and the recolonization of Oklahoma as a theocracy have us on the way there.
Biden has a choice. Let it happen, or step aside and let Democrats take the kind of gamble Emmanuel Macron is taking in France: if the extremist right wants in, make a fight of it. Democrats have always had choices that don’t include Kamala Harris, whose vice presidency has managed to be as irrelevant as “the shuffling, do-nothing” presidency of James Buchanan (to quote Frederick Douglass). The choices are these: Gavin Newsom of California, and “that woman from Michigan,” as Moby Dick likes to call Gretchen Whitmer.
Newsom and Whitmer are relative toddlers compared to the two meshuga Methusalas now flapping around. Newsom is 56, Whitmer is 52. Imagine that: she was born right before Nixon’s plumbers burglarized the DNC’s offices at the Watergate and the same year Trump inherited his daddy’s company.
Between the two it’s a political no-brainer. For all his charisma, his smarts, governance as good as his teeth and the fact that we’ve never had a “Gavin” in the White House, Newsom’s got too many liabilities for this particular campaign. For starters, he’ll be too busy arresting 200,000 homeless Californians his mollycoddling liberalism allowed to multiply and that the Supreme Court has now declared to be either non-persons or–if they insist on acting human by sleeping–criminals.
“I survived a recall” is not the best campaign slogan for Newsom even when running against a lying sack of felonies. And if we’re counting electoral votes–which is all this is about, really–California would vote for a Democrat even if he were… well, Joe Biden. It’s a politically useless state in this year’s calculus. California’s only electoral value is giving even a comatose Biden a win of the popular vote as he crashes to defeat by 300 electoral votes.
As for Whitmer, “I survived a kidnapping by Trump’s brownshirts” is a terrific campaign slogan. It may not have the snappiness of “I Like Ike” or the optimism of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” but psychotically disordered times call for someone who’s known psychos firsthand. All seriousness aside, Whitmer is the only Democratic governor with the kind of stellar governance and electoral record she’s pulled off since 2019.
Biden has been hemorrhaging young voters, women voters and Black voters. She would recapture all three and add the Arab-American and Muslim voters who have deservedly abandoned Biden since he signed off on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. She would obviously get Michigan’s 15 electoral votes and with that Midwestern accent of hers would seduce Wisconsin back in and probably put Iowa in play. She’d re-energize moribund Democrats, who’ve had no one nowhere this bracing since Obama (though Obama’s re-endorsement of Biden Friday puts Obama’s mental acuity in question). She would have Trump running so scared that he’d be the one for the Wile E. Coyote clip above.
Meanwhile Biden digs in as petulantly as Ahab dug his ivory leg into the Pequod’s cursed deck. We thought Trump was all narcissistic blubber. Biden’s narcissism is worse, because Biden knows he’s going for mutually assured destruction: he loses, Trump wins, we all lose.
So it is no longer Trump who is the greatest danger to the country, at least not now. It is Biden who, by placing himself–haltingly, decrepitly, pathetically–above the nation’s welfare, is knowingly making Trump’s win a certainty. It is premeditated folly. And if the Democratic Party allows it, it has no more claim to legitimacy going forward than its suicidal forebears of the Confederacy.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive.
