This Crew Is Totally Beatable

At the climax of the Republican National Convention last night, former President Donald Trump’s nomination-acceptance speech was a disheveled mess, endless and boring. He spoke for 93 minutes, the longest such speech on record. The runner-up was another Trump speech, in 2016, but that earlier effort had a certain sinister energy to it. This one limped from dull to duller.

Somebody seems to have instructed Trump that he was supposed to have been spiritually transformed by the attempt on his life, so he delivered the opening segment of his address in a dreary monotone, the Trump version of pious solemnity. After that prologue, the speech meandered along bizarre byways to pointless destinations. A few minutes before midnight eastern time, Trump pronounced a heavy “to conclude”—and then kept going for another nine minutes. Perhaps it was the disorienting aftereffect of shock, perhaps the numbing side effect of painkillers.

Whatever the explanation, Trump demonstrated in Milwaukee that President Joe Biden is not the only national politician diminished by the years. Trump too is dwindling into himself, even more isolated from such facts about the external world as elapsed time and audience impatience.

Formless and digressive as it was, the speech did have one major theme—a theme that underscores why and how the Democrats should be winning this race.

Trump stood on the podium in Milwaukee to sell nostalgia for his term in office. In fact, the Trump presidency ended in disaster, by many measures the worst fourth year of a presidency since Herbert Hoover’s in 1932: pandemic, mass death, economic collapse, rioting, and a surge in violent crime. By contrast, Biden’s presidency is delivering the best fourth year since … Whose? Bill Clinton’s in 1996? Ronald Reagan’s in 1984? Calvin Coolidge’s in 1924?

Unemployment has reached the lowest level in more than half a century. The post-pandemic inflation has stopped and gone into reverse. The stock market has soared to record highs. Social indicators too are improving from the chaos left behind by Trump. In each year of the Trump presidency—not just in pandemic 2020, but for each of the three years before that—the rate of marriages and childbirths in the United States dropped. Under Biden, marriages and childbirths are rising again, Drug overdose deaths are lessening. The Trump-era violent-crime wave is receding at last.

The contrast could not be starker. Yet, if the polls are correct, it’s not helping Biden.

The Trump theory of his presidency is that Trump deserves credit for the good times of 2017, 2018, and 2019 and no discredit for the crisis of 2020. But both halves of that are backwards. the economy started growing fast in 2014, so Trump arrived in office just in time to claim credit for work that had been done by his predecessors. And then, managing crises is what Americans hire presidents to do. Trump’s crisis management was almost uniquely bad. He responded to the pandemic with a blend of denial, callousness, and quackery; then he responded to 2020’s nationwide spasm of riots and the crime spike that occurred on his watch by casting blame upon others.

One of Trump’s skills is that he is a superb marketer of terrible products. Anybody can promote a great steak or an elegant hotel, but Trump’s a genius at touting bad steaks and tacky resorts as if they were actually quality items. He’s doing the same with his record as president. He wants accolades for the strong economy in place when he arrived, while he effaces the memory of the wreck he bequeathed.

The truth is that Trump’s record as president was the same as his record as a businessman: rich until the inheritance ran out.

Why can’t Democrats make more effective use of the catastrophe left behind by the Trump presidency? Two reasons: one incidental; the other arising from defects in the party’s values and organization.

Here’s the incidental reason:

The job of defining what a presidency is all about—in other words, what it wants to do and what it has accomplished—is inescapably the president’s and his alone. If he cannot do that, he concedes the game before it has started. Trump was an unfathomably lazy president. He idled away the equivalent of almost a full year of his presidency on golf courses. When not golfing, he wasted hours upon hours watching—and complaining about—cable news. But however little time he committed to work, one task he did not shirk: demanding and getting credit for good news on his watch.

Come a strong jobs report or a new stock market record and Trump would boast and brag and ballyhoo. Nothing positive went unadvertised by a president who understood mass media better than the mass media understood themselves.

That has not been Biden’s way. He has seldom succeeded in directing the nation’s attention where he wanted to go. Frequently, he did not try to do so. He worked more than Trump, but somehow mattered less. Jobs and wages might go up; voter opinions about the economy went down. By the summer of 2023, real wages were rising faster than at any time under Trump. Yet Americans continued to express negative assessments of the economy deep into 2024. The Biden presidency has too often disappeared into that gap between perception and reality, a gap that a different president might have closed.

Compare two election-year State of the Union addresses: Clinton’s in 1996 and Biden’s in 2024. Clinton began his economic report within the very first minute of his speech:

Biden also had good news to tell:

But Biden took a quarter of an hour to get to that news.

This Clinton-Biden disparity reveals something bigger than a difference in presidential style. The Democratic Party has profoundly changed since the 1990s. Today, tremendous power within the party has been amassed by groups and factions that speak for grievances. Good news is contrary to their principles and their purpose. Nobody can be happy if anybody is unhappy. They seem to believe that the way to re-elect an administration is to detail all the things still wrong after four years of holding office. Here’s the advice Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut was offering Biden on the eve of his disastrous first debate with Donald Trump: “You should spend 80% of the time telling the story of how the drug companies screwed people, and 20% of the time explaining the solution. We do the opposite.”

Last year, the Washington Post’s Paul Waldman remarked upon the Biden administration’s “fear of being seen as out of touch—or their fear of being scolded by participants in an elite debate that is invisible to most of the electorate.” That latter observation was exactly correct. Above all else, the Biden administration feared scolding by progressive interest groups. Those groups gain clout within the Democratic universe by accusing and disparaging. They imagine that the same techniques might work for an incumbent Democratic president with a record to defend, seeking to persuade swing voters. They don’t, and they won’t.

The Republican National Convention cast a bright light on the Trump party’s weaknesses: its extremism, its cultishness, its lack of welcome to the majority of Americans. The central idea implicit in the vice-presidential nominee’s speech was the superior Americanness of those with seven generations of ancestors buried in U.S. ground over those whose ancestors are buried in other places. The central idea in the presidential nominee’s speech was “me, me, me, me, me” for more than an hour and a half.

This crew is as beatable as any reactionary minority faction ever was beatable.

Democrats seem to be persuaded by the hope that the way to inflict the beating is to change leadership. But the biggest defect of the present Democratic leadership was imposed by the Democratic followership: the reluctance to accept the fact that four years of non-Trump leadership have accomplished an enormous amount that is worth defending.

With a predator’s cunning, Trump has always understood that the first step to winning the confidence of others is to project confidence in oneself. Trump has used that understanding for his own crooked and criminal purposes. But the same understanding can be put to good use by better people.

Believe! Or lose.