One American political party has a presidential candidate who is very old and noticeably so, and the other has a presidential candidate who is a convicted felon, a convicted sex abuser, a business fraudster, and a would-be one-day dictator – and he's also very old.
One party is furious with its own candidate and figuring out how to replace him at the last minute; the other party is not.
The highlights this week since the nationally televised debate between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump have cast in sharp relief two political parties that have agreed to be led by flawed candidates whose vulnerabilities have become even more painfully apparent just months before the election.
But the difference in recent weeks has been striking. After Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts by a Manhattan jury in May (the verdict came after a civil judgment for personal and professional misconduct), there was no major movement within the Republican Party to remove him from the race and propel him forward as a less tainted candidate. Many GOP officials and strategists privately disliked Trump, but they went along with it, making clear they would support him no matter how many scandals piled up.
Until last week, Democrats, too, had grown resigned to a candidate many considered far from ideal. Biden and his allies had effectively stifled internal opposition, and Democrats had remained silent despite concerns that his age would hurt the campaign. But after concerns about Biden's mental acuity emerged during last week's debate, the conspiracy of silence was broken. Suddenly, broad swaths of Democrats concluded that Biden was no longer a viable candidate and began to pressure him to step aside in favor of a younger candidate.
“Biden's debate performance was the worst in presidential history, while Trump's was probably the second worst,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “And yet we've heard silence from the Republican Party, even as their presumptive nominee has made incoherent, rambling statements that are completely far from the truth. Oh, and he's also a convicted felon.”
The disparity says something important about the two major political parties after 248 years of the American experiment: Trump has come to control them in a way no modern president has managed to do so thoroughly: crushing internal opposition, punishing dissenters, and forcing loyalty even from those who publicly declared him a danger.
Rather than defending himself against his many political accusations, Trump has gone on the attack, trying to force Republicans to conform to his view of reality that all the allegations, including those that have been substantiated in court, are part of a broader conspiracy of persecution. At least among his own supporters, he has turned a flaw into a strength.
“Republicans don't see Trump's beliefs, rhetoric or threats of retaliation as moral or political weaknesses,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who broke with the party over Trump. “Many see them as strengths. That's why you won't see the kind of family conversations among Republicans we're seeing now among Democrats about questions about President Biden's age and health.”
That all this is happening around Independence Day is a reminder that the Framers of the Constitution never really cared much about political parties to begin with. Alexander Hamilton warned that political parties, or “factions,” as they were then called, were the “most fatal disease” of popular government. George Washington, in his farewell address, said the “frequent and continuing evils” of such factions made it imperative that they be “checked and restrained.”
Political parties today live in a fundamentally different world and interpret the same facts through a fundamentally different lens. What was once cause for disqualification is no longer. Trump was seen as a threat to the Democratic Party, which was willing to accept his candidate despite the risks. Trump imposed his will on the party, and even his primary rivals did not criticize his alleged crimes or his attempts to overturn the election results.
Neither party was surprised by what happened next. It was entirely predictable that by the time voters began to cast their ballots, Biden would be older and older by the time they reached their prime, and Trump would be convicted of a variety of wrongdoings. Both parties recognized the danger they were running by continuing to support Biden and Trump, but neither did enough to prevent it.
“We once worried that partisanship meant choosing party over country,” Engel said. “Now it seems partisanship is again, on both sides, meaning choosing people over the needs of the country.”
Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and leading anti-Trump figure, said the party had succumbed to the demagogue. “The Republican Party is a party of personality that long ago succumbed to Donald Trump,” she said. “The Democratic Party is still largely a functioning party, and there are significant numbers of its members who believe that defeating Trump is an existential issue and therefore merits serious discussion about the best path forward.”
But Trump's supporters say his issues are different from Biden's. “The idea that they're comparable is beyond me,” said David Urban, a veteran Republican strategist who worked on Trump's past campaigns. He likened the situation to a basketball star tearing his anterior cruciate ligament and not being able to play, rather than being nasty or insulting.
“You might not like Trump,” Urban said. “You might think he's mean, you might not like his attitude, you might think he's rude, disrespectful, disrespectful, but you still think he can run the United States, whereas Biden isn't running anything.”
Whether Trump seems more competent than Biden is a matter of perspective. Biden, 81, stuttered, stared blankly and appeared lost during the debate. Trump, 78, whose mental health has been questioned by former advisers and who has spoken at times incoherently in public in recent months, said things during the debate that were hard to understand and often just flat-out untrue. But his voice was strong, he didn't seem weak, and instant polls showed a majority of viewers thought Trump was a better candidate than Biden.
Voters aren't particularly impressed with either man's abilities: In a post-debate poll by The New York Times/Siena College, 74% of voters said Biden is too old for the presidency, compared with 42% who said Trump. The big difference is that many Democrats told pollsters they're ready to remove Biden from office (47% want a different candidate), while Republicans are content to keep Trump in office (83% want him to remain the nominee).
Lynn Vavrec, a professor of American politics at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that's partly down to the surprise element of the debate. Voters knew Biden was older, but were surprised to see that so evident on their living room screens. By comparison, Trump's rule-breaking was already “priced in,” she says. By the time of the New York conviction, voters already knew he'd been impeached twice and indicted four times, and had made up their minds about those allegations.
“People were already factoring the idea that Biden was guilty of these charges into their assessment of him,” said Dr Vavreck, co-author of “The Bitter End,” a book about the 2020 election. “Nobody had factored the idea that Biden was struggling as much as he made clear last week into their assessment of Biden. And importantly, this new information has completely refreshed people's ideas about his chances of winning the November election.”
