Biden rallied his counterparts to accept nothing short of victory in Ukraine. “When this senseless war began, Ukraine was a free country,” the president said, to applause from the world leaders. “Today, it is still a free country, and the war will end with Ukraine remaining a free and independent country. Russia will not prevail.”
In Miami a few hours later, former president Donald Trump assembled supporters at his Doral golf club — another transfer of wealth from his campaign to his personal accounts — and ridiculed NATO partners. “I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was too much before” he became president, Trump told them. “But it didn’t take me long to figure it out, like about two minutes. And the first thing I figured out was they weren’t paying.” He repeated his boast and said he told NATO partners that if they were “delinquent” (there is no such thing in NATO, which does not collect dues), “I will not protect you from Russia.”
Thus did Trump celebrate his willingness to squander the deterrence that has kept the peace for decades, and instead to abandon allies to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin, who just bombed a children’s hospital in Ukraine. Trump says he’ll make Ukraine “settle” with the invading Russians, a surrender that Biden would never allow.
This is exactly what the presidential campaign should be about at this perilous moment: the choice between strong American leadership and appeasement, between democracy and dictatorship.
But this is no longer what the campaign is about. The heavy-handed attempt to force Biden to quit the race after his disastrous debate has, predictably, backfired. Biden has dug in, pitting “elites” against the people. Democrats are fighting among themselves. George Clooney is diagnosing Biden’s mental competence (he played Dr. Doug Ross on “ER,” after all). And Republicans can hardly believe their good fortune, as they portray Biden as a zombie — with no good answer to their attacks.
Trump’s Doral rally was full of endless variations on the “Weekend at Bernie’s” theme. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now in the final round of auditions to become Trump’s running mate, warmed up the crowd by identifying a “conspiracy” to hide Biden’s mental condition. He went on: “We know he’s not calling the shots. … Look, the guy’s a figurehead for a shadow government of leftists that are propping him up.”
Then came Donald Trump Jr. “We’re running against a party that wants to take away your AR-15, but they gave a vegetable the nuclear codes,” he began. He tried another: “If Joe Biden showed up to pick you up in an Uber, would you get in the car? … Would you let your worst enemy get in that car? Maybe. Maybe. Dumb ways to die, right folks?”
Trump lawyer Alina Habba sampled a line on the crowd: “He cannot spell ‘Bob’ backwards.”
And Trump himself made Biden’s purported feeblemindedness — always an element of his stump speech — the dominant theme. He mockingly challenged Biden to another debate. Pretending to be Biden struggling with a golf club, he also challenged the president to an 18-hole match, offering Biden a 20-stroke lead. “They all knew this guy was grossly incompetent, and every Democrat in the House and the Senate was in on it,” he alleged. “It was a scam. The American people can never trust this group of liars ever again. They put our country at great risk and danger.”
Trump joked about Biden taking naps and struggling to lift a beach chair. He floated the idea that “Hunter is in the White House running government right now, they say.” Seizing on an Axios report that Biden is only “dependably engaged” between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., Trump claimed: “He can’t work because he’s mentally no good. He’s shot.”
The insults continued. “Cognitively impaired.” “Mentally incompetent.” “In no condition to lead.” Biden “has no idea where the hell he is.” His “facelift didn’t work.” As for Biden’s (accurate) argument that Trump threatens democracy, Trump said Biden “doesn’t even know what the hell the term is.”
“He has no clue what he’s doing or where he is, and next will be World War III because he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Trump accused.
Alas, this is what the rest of the campaign is likely to be about if Biden remains in the race. Some of this is the fault of congenitally anxious Democrats and their allies rushing to force him from the race, which has understandably caused Biden to resist. Some is the fault of my colleagues in the news media, breathlessly keeping a deathwatch and tallying the (relatively few) Democratic lawmakers who have publicly called for him to quit. But Biden created this situation when his stunning debate collapse left serious and legitimate doubts about his fitness.
It’s not at all clear that Democrats would be better off without Biden on the ticket. But this much is clear: As president, Biden has invariably acted in the best interest of the country. I suspect that, if he sees more data coming in showing that he no longer can beat Trump, he will graciously bow out. If he does so, he will be remembered for the most substantial record of accomplishment of any president in decades. If he holds on in the face of mounting evidence that he can’t win, he will be remembered for selfishness — a trait incompatible with his character.
In a news conference Thursday night after the NATO summit, Biden reiterated his determination to stay in the race, but he was not categorical. At the very end of the hour-long session, he suggested he would reconsider his candidacy if his advisers “came back and said, ‘there’s no way you can win.’” He quickly added: “No poll says that.” But he acknowledged that “a lot can happen” over the next four months, and he accurately stated the Democrats’ predicament: “There are other people who could beat Trump, too, but it’s awful hard to start from scratch.”
Biden was solid and clear during the session, discussing foreign policy in fluid detail. But any benefit from that may have been lost when he said “Vice President Trump” when he meant “Vice President Harris,” after earlier introducing Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” Predictably, almost all of the questioners asked him about his mental acuity and the wisdom of remaining in the race.
At the moment, it’s difficult to see the national discussion shifting back to where it should be: on Trump’s fitness for office.
This week, the MAGA-occupied Republican National Committee forced through a “platform” that looks more like one of Trump’s social media posts, in all caps and with curious punctuation. Only two of 20 items in the platform get exclamation points: “NO TAX ON TIPS!” and “MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINANT ENERGY PRODUCER IN THE WORLD, BY FAR!” This implies that both of those priorities are more important than, say, “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE” and “DEFEND OUR CONSTITUTION,” which were not so punctuated. It abolished any mention of the national debt and tiptoed around abortion.
Also this week, longtime Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka told Newsmax that Vice President Harris is “a DEI hire, right? She’s a woman. She’s colored.”
And this was the week in which Trump issued his comical denial that “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” The project, essentially an outsourcing of Trump’s policy operation, calls for banning abortion pills, eliminating the Education Department, deporting the “dreamers,” reversing support for renewable energy, dismantling independent agencies and firing vast numbers of nonpartisan federal workers to replace them with political operatives.
In reality, Project 2025 has been championed by former (and likely future) Trump advisers such as Russ Vought, John McEntee and Stephen Miller. The Guardian calculated that, of the 38 people involved in the writing and editing of Project 2025, 31 of them were nominated to positions in Trump’s administration or transition team. At the Doral rally, Trump told the crowd: “By the way, were bringing back Tom Homan” — a Project 2025 author who served in Trump’s administration.
Were the nation’s focus not on what is going on between Biden’s ears, voters would be hearing more about the truly batty things coming out of Trump’s mouth, and those of his top allies. “It’s really a pretty simple question,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) said to the crowd at Trump’s Doral rally. “Was America better off four years ago under Donald Trump?” Four years ago, the economy had collapsed, hospitals were overflowing and hundreds of thousands of people were needlessly dying because of Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
Things were off from the start of the rally, when a halting rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance ended in “with justice and liberty for all.” It continued when Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) induced the crowd to boo Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the ailing Senate Republican leader. It got worse when Rubio tried to attack the vice president but could do no better than saying Harris “wants to ban plastic straws. Those paper straws suck.” And it got deeply weird when Eric Trump told the crowd that people were trying to kill him: “I will stand on this stage, no matter how many bullets that they launch at me.”
As president, Trump had tried to make Doral the site of the 2020 Group of Seven meeting, thereby putting millions in his own pockets. Now Eric Trump was selling it again, calling it “one of the greatest properties in the world” — three times. His father soon joined in, letting supporters know they stood on the “beautiful” 10th hole, alongside a “beautiful” lake, on “one of the greatest golf courses on earth.”
The former president’s remarks could be charitably described as bizarre. He remarked on the looks of a “beautiful waitress” and again referred to Chris Christie as a “fat pig.” Gangster Al Capone was a “very nice gentleman, very fine man,” and fictitious serial killer Hannibal Lecter “was a lovely man.” His son Don Jr., who is engaged but not married, “has a great wife.” Tourists who go to see the Jefferson Memorial or the Washington Monument “end up getting shot, mugged, raped.”
He was as erratic as usual, at one point stopping in his speech for a full 10 seconds without explanation. He spoke of himself in the third person, asking if the United States can be “energy dominant” (it already is): “‘Yes, oh, yes, and quickly,’ says President Trump,” he said. He complained that he was “being drenched” because of the heat, protesting that the crowd had “water spots” but he did not. He swung wildly from mothers watching “their child hopelessly dying in their arms, screaming, ‘What can I do?’” into a complaint about airport delays. He garbled words, saying, “Our econo — we — er — our economy will be at a level that will equal and even surpass what it was four years ago.” Four years ago at this time, gross domestic product had plunged 31.4 percent and unemployment was 13 percent.
Trump spun tales of pure fantasy, in which “real inflation is way over 50 percent” (actual rate: 3 percent), Biden would quintuple taxes and Biden has “more homes than I do.” Perhaps misreading his teleprompter, Trump announced that, “under Crooked Joe, 109 percent of all net job creation over the last year has gone to migrants.” One hundred and nine percent?
With eerie music in the background, Trump called the United States “a Third World nation” and “a joke.” Though the stock market has set repeated records amid 42 months of consecutive job growth, Trump declared that the “economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin.”
Less amusingly, he said those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were “hostages, unfairly imprisoned,” who “should be out soon” because of the Supreme Court. And he announced that “we have nuclear submarines and five warships in Cuba.” Was Trump publicly divulging the location of U.S. nuclear assets? Or when he said “we,” did he mean Russia? Neither one was a good look.
The morning after this reign of error at Doral, Trump posted on his Truth Social site about the “GREAT RALLY” that was. “WOW, it was really Special — the Enthusiasm was off the chard.”
He did not specify whether he meant Swiss chard or rainbow.
From beginning to end, it was disqualifying. But apparently this is not what the voters are going to be hearing about for the next four months. Will Biden, the Democrats and the commentariat really allow this to happen? As a shrewd political observer once said: C’mon, man.