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In Defense of Biden and Trump Oliver Wiseman

Published

11 months ago

February 15, 2024

“There are people out there who believe Biden’s age isn’t an insurmountable problem—and that Trump is bang on about NATO.” (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images)

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Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump have had a great week.

Recent headlines—about the president’s age (81), and his predecessor’s freewheeling approach to foreign policy (saying Russia should “do whatever the hell they want” with freeloading members of NATO)—trigger our worst fears about the two men we’ll likely be forced to choose between come November 5. I know they do for me.

But there are people out there who believe Biden’s age isn’t an insurmountable problem—and that Trump is bang on about NATO.

Today, we bring you two people brave enough to make these arguments to you.

Up first: Matt Bennett on Biden’s age.

Matt is a moderate Democratic strategist who worked in Bill Clinton’s White House and today runs Third Way, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

While many Democrats have been in full freak-out mode since last Thursday’s Justice Department report painted a scathing picture of Biden’s mental faculties—calling him “an elderly man with a poor memory”—Matt is sleeping just fine.

Here, he explains why the age issue isn’t a problem—and why he’s confident the American people will give Biden another four years in the White House.

Voters are undoubtedly worried about Biden’s age, but by the time we get to November, it will be a choice between two old men. And let’s face it: they are both very old. They are just three years apart. And the question is—what has age meant for them? For Joe Biden it has meant he looks older, he’s slowed down, and he occasionally forgets things. But it has also meant deep experience, wisdom, and empathy. Whereas for Trump it has meant the opposite—a chaotic, angry nastiness that is overwhelmingly evident in everything he does.

Remember: incumbent presidents generally win, especially when they’ve done a good job. And Joe Biden has done a very good job. His achievements are starting to make themselves felt even in the lives of people who don’t pay attention to politics.

The economy is incredibly strong, inflation is easing, and while things have been difficult for people, the future is very bright. The misery index, which is a combination of unemployment and inflation, is projected by Goldman Sachs to be the lowest on record this year. Any president running with these economic numbers has a very good chance of getting reelected.

In the meantime, Democrats need to let go of the idea that there’s some better alternative to Joe Biden out there. Whether he steps aside is up to him and him alone—and there’s zero evidence that he wants to. And while a last-minute change would be good news for political journalists, it would be bad news for Democrats: a chaotic spectacle that would generate hard feelings on the part of the losers and their supporters.

One very heartening thing for Democrats at the moment is that, apart from one gadfly congressman from Minnesota challenging Biden in the primary, everyone in Democratic politics is united behind the president. And the last seven days have not changed that.

If you lean right, we suspect you are ready to throw your phone across the room. But wait! Now it’s time to hear the other side of things. Donald Trump triggered global uproar over the weekend when, at a rally in South Carolina, he said that he once warned NATO allies that he’d advise Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if alliance members failed to meet their defense spending target of 2 percent of their countries’ GDP.

Biden called the comments “un-American,” and many agreed Trump’s remarks were a sign he cannot be expected to defend some of America’s closest allies.

But here, Elbridge Colby, the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict who helped devise the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, explains why the ex-president’s position on NATO is completely right.

The fact of the matter is that Russia under Vladimir Putin is a very dangerous state. It has embarked on an evil invasion of Ukraine. And it is reverting large sectors of its economy to military production. The United States cannot simultaneously take the lead in dealing with that real threat from Russia in Europe while also preparing for the very real possibility of confrontation with China in the Pacific, let alone get into a large war in the Middle East.

China is a far stronger power than Russia; Asia is a larger and more rapidly growing part of the global economy than Europe; and the United States does not have a military that is capable of fighting multiple large wars at the same time. The United States needs to prioritize its military effort on China and Asia.

If that leaves a gap in Europe, the solution is not to wail and gnash teeth, but rather for NATO members to get sober and serious about meeting their commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense—if not more. As General Christopher G. Cavoli, the NATO commander, has pointed out, that 2 percent is supposed to be a floor—not a ceiling.

The fact that the Americans have been carrying a disproportionate degree of the burden is unsustainable. And anybody who is pretending otherwise is ultimately harming European defense. So those of us who are saying “Europe, you need to do more” are keeping Europe safer than those who refuse to acknowledge reality.

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor at The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

4 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.

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January 16, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

7 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

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Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health- insurance-denials/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/which-big-tech-ceos-will-be-at-trumps-inauguration-see-the-full-list/6110692/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-us-treasury-pick-bessent-says-extending-tax-cuts-top-priority-2025-01-16/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/