Gunfire prompted the president to recommend turning down the rheostat on political rhetoric, a welcome thought from someone who in 2012 — before Donald Trump normalized enveloping grotesque lies in scabrous language — told an audience, including many African Americans, that Republicans will “put y’all back in chains.” So, perhaps President Biden will end his pattern of wretched excesses, such as:
Calling mild changes to Georgia’s voting laws “Jim Crow 2.0” and “voter suppression” (they presaged 2022’s high Georgia voter turnout) favored by people “on the side of” secessionists and segregationists. And charging that those who, in supporting his 2020 opponent, threatened “the very foundations of our Republic.” And warning that the Jan. 6 rabble that delayed a congressional process for a few hours held “a dagger at the throat of our democracy.” And on and on. Untalented speechwriters produce such rubbish; unworthy politicians proclaim it.
By his rhetorical and policy extravagances, Biden has made himself into a president against whom the nation recoils as strongly as it does against his similarly reckless predecessor — who, unless the Democratic Party acts, is Biden’s likely successor. Biden’s party should, and might yet, retire him. Nothing less would demonstrate that Democrats are experiencing episodes of sincerity when they warn that another Trump presidency would be even more dangerous than embarrassing.
The key danger is Trump’s advertised ambition to wield unilateral, unconstrained executive authority even more aggressively than his successor has done. (See Biden’s student loan forgiveness, immigration law changes, ban-by-increments of vehicles with internal combustion engines, and on and on.) If voters give Trump a chance to intensify the bipartisan drive for presidential grandiosity, the principal defender of the Constitution’s architecture — the separation of powers — will be the federal judiciary.
And especially the Supreme Court, which progressives, in agitation of astonishing shortsightedness, have been trying to delegitimize with, for example, solemn hand-wringing about a justice’s spouse doing something foolish with a flag. The judiciary is the “least dangerous” branch (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 78) because, having neither the power of the sword nor the purse, its strength is in the deference produced by the prestige that comes from public confidence that it reasons judicially rather than politically.
Progressives are rallying around Biden because they probably hope he will remain pliable because of their rallying. And they are railing against the court as a political rather than judicial institution. Trying to nominate an anemic candidate while weakening the court is a recipe for producing a rampant Trump presidency.
Signaling his intention to double down on expanding the MAGA movement, Trump has chosen a running mate who has an aptitude for conversions, and a convert’s pugnacity. J.D. Vance voiced contempt for Trump until a road-to-Damascus moment, perhaps related to his ambition to become a Trump-blessed Senate candidate. Five years ago, he converted to Catholicism. If suburban women blanch because he once defended an abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest (he said the question “is whether a child should be allowed to live even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society”), he can explain that he has had another conversion.
Vance embodies the serrated edge of MAGA politics. He checks many boxes of fealty, from praising a favorite of “national conservatives,” Hungary’s autocrat, Viktor Orban, to what Vance delicately calls “the post-2020 thing”: He says there should have been “alternative slates of electors” to force a Jan. 6 debate on whether the election was stolen. This counts as MAGA moderation.
Trump reportedly thinks the Ohio senator’s beard makes him look like “a young Abraham Lincoln.” (Lincoln grew his beard after the 1860 election, at age 51.) It is unlikely that Vance, a rhetorical brawler in the running mate tradition of Richard M. Nixon in 1960 and Spiro Agnew in 1968, has Lincoln’s ameliorative instincts. (“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies”; “With malice toward none….”)
Last Saturday’s gunfire in Pennsylvania unleashed an epidemic of sociology in the service of the modern instinct to identify social causes for disturbing individual acts. Tentativeness, although unfashionable, is, however, advisable when ascribing a particular act to promptings from the social atmosphere. Still, imagine a happier, safer nation if cable news and social media ax-grinding disappeared for even just a month.
“And silence, like a poultice, comes to heal the blows of sound.” So said Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who heard the sound of gunfire — before, during and after Antietam — in times darker than these.