Substacks
Inside the Biden Bubble Olivia Reingold
“Please join me in welcoming the President of the United States, Joe Biden.”
About two hundred Democratic donors, LGBTQ activists, and celebrities leap from their seats to get a better view of the president shuffling across a makeshift stage inside a tent erected on a Greenwich Village street. A gray-haired woman unleashes a roar from beneath an N95 mask.
Less than 24 hours earlier, the majority of the 51 million Americans who watched Biden’s debate against Trump had formed a clear consensus: the 81-year-old president is too old for the job—or possibly any job. Even the legacy press, which had dismissed video evidence of Biden’s decline as “cheapfakes” a few days prior, was quickly walking back its position dismissing those concerns, with even The New York Times editorial board declaring, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.” But on Friday afternoon, at the opening ceremony for Stonewall National Monument, a new tourist center honoring the gay rights movement, there was not panic but bliss.
“I personally am a fan of Biden,” a man in his 50s gushed to me. “I love Biden and I want him to be president of the United States.”
When I asked the man, who would identify himself only as an “LGBTQIA labor activist,” why he wanted four more years of Biden, he pointed in the direction of the Stonewall Inn, the New York City bar associated with the start of the gay rights movement. Through the thick of celebrities such as Jonathan Groff, Michael Kors, and Neil Patrick Harris, and the display of Pride flags waving in the wind, I can almost see its brick facade.
“I came out seven years after Stonewall,” he shared. “So, to see the president of the United States acknowledging the LGBTQ. . . ” he stumbles for a moment, “plus IA. . . I never thought I’d see that in my lifetime.”
As a tinny rendition of Hail to the Chief blares through the speaker system, the president emerges from behind a set of velvet curtains. He shadowboxes the air as he goes in to hug Ann Marie Gothard, the activist who introduced him as “someone who has championed LGBTQ+ equality.”
“Hello everyone, happy Pride,” Biden strains, pivoting at the podium like C-3PO. “It’s your love for each other and your vision for this community, and for our country, that brought this center to life.”
For the next seven minutes, the president harks back to the 1969 uprising at Stonewall (“the soul of the nation was literally tested”), details the first time he saw two men kiss as a teenager in Wilmington, Delaware, and gives a shout-out to the local gay community—“especially trans women of color.”
“We’re in the battle for the soul of America,” he said, repeating a version of his signature line for the fourth time that afternoon. “Well, I look around at the pride, hope, and light that all of you—all of you bring—and I know it’s a battle we’re going to win and continue to make progress.”
A voice from the back fills the tent: “I will with you.”
This is Biden’s second appearance of the day. Hours earlier, he’d been at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, where the press claimed the president “jogged toward the microphone” and “gave clear and concise descriptions of his positions on abortion, immigration, taxes, and race.” Guess you had to be there. Instead, I appeared to be the lone reporter who had escaped the press pen to witness his commemoration of the National Park System’s first LGBTQ+ visitor center. Only once did he hint at his disastrous performance the night before, at the end, when said, “I want to say a hell of a lot more, but I’m not going to.”
Then he pivots: “Because I want to hear a guy, you know, there’s a guy that you’ve probably heard about.” He concludes, “Please welcome El-in Jaaahn.”
Suddenly, Elton John saunters onstage and positions himself behind a shiny grand piano, launching into a rousing performance of “Bennie and the Jets.”
Earlier that evening, Katy Perry, the Grammy-nominated pop star, was walking through a metal detector, her long black hair swaying behind her. When I ask if she watched the debate, she frowns beneath her silver sunglasses.
“I still think that the most decent man wins,” she replies.
I ask her if Biden is the “most decent man.”
“Of course,” she said. “Is that a rhetorical?”
By the porta potties—top of the line, by the way, even including running water—I do find one critic. He’s a 28-year-old social media manager from Philadelphia named Jabari Cherry. Dressed in monochromatic layers of brown, Cherry tells me there is one thing Biden could do to make him “more comfortable” voting for the clear loser of Thursday’s debate.
“I like Biden,” he shrugs. “But I guess my critique is that Biden could’ve been a little faster shooting down what Trump said.”
“If he could be a little more concise,” he continued, “I think that would dispel all the confusion that Trump seems to put out.”
Chenault Spence, an 85-year-old operatic lighting designer, tells me he woke up that morning and tried to puzzle through the lesson of the presidential debate with his partner.
“We tried to figure out this morning what the job of the president is. And what we came up with was that—we did it pretty well—it’s to make reasoned judgments, from a philosophy and point of view, to serve the country. It’s not a contest.”
When I remind him that it literally is a contest, and one in which 60 percent of voters now want Biden replaced as the nominee, he tells me that he meant there’s no competition for his vote—it’s going straight to Biden.
“Making reasoned judgments is done quietly with aides and input, not by performing on a stage,” he said.
The previous night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes made a similar point during the network’s post-debate roundtable, saying, “The job of the president is making decisions. The job of a presidential candidate is to communicate.” The television host added, “I think Joe Biden has a very good record on making decisions. And I think he’s a very poor communicator right now.”
Spence, who told me he’s an MSNBC viewer, said the best way to parse what happened on Thursday night is to read a transcript—“that is what one should do,” he said.
“I was so focused on the substance on one side,” he said, referring to Biden, “and the lack of it on the other. I didn’t notice there was a problem.”
When I ask how that’s possible, he pointed to the hearing aids tucked behind his ears.
“I have hearing problems,” he said. “I saw that it was slower and not as animated as usual. But every point was made.”
Later that evening, the president attended a Midtown fundraiser where cocktails went for $17 a pop. The next day, he met with more donors at a billionaire’s house in the Hamptons. By Sunday, he was on his way to Camp David with his family for a scheduled photo session with celebrity snapper Annie Leibovitz. Meanwhile, as wars continue to rage in Ukraine and Gaza, the number of Americans who have faith in the president is dropping—a whopping 72 percent think he is not mentally and physically fit for the job.
It appears everyone inside the Biden bubble has a hearing problem.
Olivia Reingold is a field reporter at The Free Press. Follow her on X @Olivia_Reingold and read her piece “Could Trump Turn the Bronx Red?”
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When Nellie asked me to fill in while she is off birthing a persons, I said yes but only on slow news weeks. She assured me that no news ever drops the first week of July and I’d be able to paste in a few of my favorite Mormon mommy TikTokers, write a sentence or two about Seattle’s annual Independence Day Flag Burning Parade, and then go soak my feet in the pool. She lied. It’s been a hell of a week, and Nellie said no takes backs, so I guess you’re stuck with me. Let’s go.
→ Will he or won’t he? The New York Times reports that Biden told an ally that he is weighing whether to continue in the race. What they don’t say is that ally is actually the nice Bulgarian woman who helps him into the shower. Either way, last week’s disaster of a debate continues to roil the Democratic Party, which is now tasked with trying to figure out who is the least terrible candidate: a historically unpopular VP or the guy who starts sundowning around noon. Or maybe somebody else?
The Dems are in a tough position. Biden’s most trusted advisers (read: Hunter) want him to stay in the race, but everyone else is desperately trying to think of someone, anyone, who can win against Trump while also sparing the old man’s feelings.
So far, most of the freakout is happening behind closed doors. Publicly, most Democrats are standing by their man—for now. Just three Dems in Congress have called on Biden to step aside. And, barring that chat with the ally, the president himself seems to be in full “I’m not quitting” mode.
Not that he has done anything this week to demonstrate his fitness for office. While the president laid low, his press secretary said that it was really just a cold, plus maybe a bit of jet lag. White House aides told Axios that the president is “dependably engaged” from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. In a meeting with concerned Democratic governors who flew in to check on the old guy at the top of the ballot, he said all he needs is to work less, sleep more, and be able to clock out after 8 p.m. In that same meeting, the president is reported to have said: “It’s just my brain.” This is supposed to reassure us? What’s even more troubling is that longtime friends of the Bidens told New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi that they were “shocked to find that the president did not remember their names.” Incoming statement from the White House: “Guys, it’s just face blindness.”
I get it: Biden is a beloved elder statesman, and no one wants to hurt the old man’s feelings. So just do what they did at the retirement home when my grandpa had dementia: tell him whatever he wants to hear. Good news, Mr. President, you won the election! We’ll get Gorbachev on the line for you right after dinner. More ice cream? It’s chocolate chip. Seriously, this works.
→ Or maybe it’s just the media? Nothing to see here, folks! Just when we thought the spell had been broken and most of the media was finally willing to report on what’s been happening before our very eyes, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is now advising the Biden campaign, claimed on MSNBC that the media is rigging this whole thing. In this case, the former mayor was referring to her hometown paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which published an editorial calling for Biden to exit stage left.
“Let me just say I was very disappointed with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” Bottoms told Chris Jansing. “As we have talked about making sure we’re protecting elections and making sure there’s no undue influence, this was undue influence by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or an attempt to influence.”
As Jansing pointed out, it’s an editorial board. Attempting to influence elections is their literal job. Then again, Bottoms is a political operative. Spin is her literal job too.
→ Speaking of spin: The New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn sent a note out to staff, congratulating everyone on their coverage of Biden’s age: “What I’ve seen and what our readers have experienced from our team is steadfast, fact-based reporting. . . . We have stayed on that story with every turn, always with nuance and context, through today’s outstanding report.”
See, now that a critical mass sees that Biden is plainly too old, we’ve shifted straight into revisionism. We’ve been telling you the truth the whole time. Except, in March, the Gray Lady was likening Biden’s age to just a new, later in life style—like Scorsese with The Irishman (s/o Jon Levine for re-upping this). And those videos of his many senior moments before the debate? Misleading! Bad faith! You aren’t watching an old man be old, they said. Those are deepfakes and cheapfakes.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the Associated Press offered up 2024’s answer to “mostly peaceful” riots:
→ KHive, assemble: Personally, I vote Al Franken as Biden’s replacement. He’s smart, funny, Midwestern, and he loves women. But Vegas has Kamala as the probable Democratic nominee. And I guess that makes sense, given that she’s the vice president and all. “It’s her party now,” read the banner headline on Drudge this past Wednesday.
Monday, July 1, was a busy day. That morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that gives the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts. On the same day, Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon began a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Before he began serving his sentence, he swore he would “be more powerful in prison than I am now.”
“On July 2, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, went onto Bannon’s webcast War Room to hearten Bannon’s right-wing followers after Bannon’s incarceration. Former representative Dave Brat (R-VA) was sitting in for Bannon and conducted the interview.
“[W]e are going to win,” Roberts told them. “We’re in the process of taking this country back…. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.”
“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the radical left…has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts took over the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in 2021, and he shifted it from a conservative think tank to an organization devoted to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Central to that project for Roberts has been working to bring the policies of Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, to the United States.
In 2023, Roberts brought the Heritage Foundation into a formal partnership with Hungary’s Danube Institute, a think tank overseen by a foundation that is directly funded by the Hungarian government; as journalist Casey Michel reported, it is, “for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.” The Danube Institute has given grants to far-right figures in the U.S., and, Michel noted in March, “we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation.” Roberts has called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”
Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.” He is moving Hungary away from the stabilizing international systems supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his far-right political party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists, who attacked immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. While Hungary still holds elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for the people of Hungary to remove him from power.
Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.
The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure. In January 2024, Roberts told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times that Project 2025 was designed to jump-start a right-wing takeover of the government. “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Roberts said. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”
Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace: the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”
In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.
The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”
Dismantling the administrative state starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce—about 2 million people work for the U.S. government—and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.
The plan asserts “the existential need” for an authoritarian leader to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, the plan says the national government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.”
It attacks “America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture,” for their embrace of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and for their willingness to work with other countries. It calls for abandoning all of those partnerships and alliances.
Also on July 1, Orbán took over the rotating presidency of the European Union. He will be operating for six months in that position under a slogan taken from Trump and adapted to Europe: “Make Europe Great Again.” The day before taking that office, Orbán announced that his political party was forming a new alliance with far-right parties in Austria and the Czech Republic in order to launch a “new era of European politics.”
Tomorrow, Orbán will travel to Moscow to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin. On July 2, Orbán met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where he urged Zelensky to accept a “ceasefire.” In the U.S., Trump’s team has suggested that, if reelected, Trump will call for an immediate ceasefire and will negotiate with Putin over how much of Ukraine Putin can keep while also rejecting Ukraine for NATO membership and scaling back U.S. commitment to NATO.
“I would expect a very quick end to the conflict,” Kevin Roberts said. Putin says he supports Trump’s plan.
Roberts’s “second American revolution,” which would destroy American democracy in an echo of a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders, seems a lot less patriotic than the first American Revolution.
For my part, I will stand with the words written 248 years ago today, saying that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
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Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/01/politics/steve-bannon-report-to-prison/index.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/179776/heritage-foundation-viktor-orban-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-orban-visit-kyiv-ukraine-peace-putin-zelenskiy/33022024.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/02/europe/viktor-orban-visits-kyiv-intl/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/02/nato-second-trump-term-00164517
Khrystyna Bondarieva, “Putin on Trump’s proposal to quickly end war in Ukraine: Russia supports it,” Ukrainska Pravda, July 4, 2024.
On our nation’s 248th birthday, Joe Biden faces the wrath of a thousand pundits. The whole world watched the elected leader of the world’s oldest republic befogged, slack-jawed, and mentally vacant in a debate he had to win. A recent poll from CBS showed that after Biden’s performance last week, 72 percent of registered voters believed the man lacked the cognitive ability to be president.
Even his closest friends and sycophants are pleading for the old man to hang it up. The New York Times editorial board. Former advisers to Barack Obama. Columnist and Biden’s personal friend, Tom Friedman, said he wept in a hotel room in Portugal while watching the debate. They’ve seen enough. Joe Biden, for the good of your country, step down.
And yet, Biden’s White House is shrugging it off. It was just a debate, they tell us. Don’t let 90 minutes define years of accomplishments.
But it was not just a debate. It was indelible and undeniable proof that the leader of the free world lacks the stamina and acuity to do the job for four more months, let alone four more years.
As Biden weighs his decision, he may well think back to when he was a young man and then-president Lyndon Baines Johnson found himself in a similar position. Johnson was losing the country, and in the middle of the primary he decided to bow out.
Today, Free Press writer Eli Lake hosts a special episode about what happened in 1968 when President Johnson decided he was not fit for reapplying for his job. He listened to his critics and backed away from the White House, allowing the Democrats an opportunity to stage an open convention to choose their next candidate for the presidency. But why did the party want him gone so badly? And how did this seismic decision work out? It’s a tale of murder, war, and riots that culminated in the most explosive convention in the history of America.
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