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Will He? Or Won’t He? Plus. . . Oliver Wiseman
On today’s Front Page from The Free Press, Joe Nocera on how Anthony Fauci went from hero to zero, the Democrats pay the price for DEI, France’s rightward turn, and much more. But first, the latest on the president.
I hope some of you have looked up from the news over the past seventy-two hours. I haven’t. All screen-time limits have been out the window since Thursday’s debate. My eyes are bleeding and show no signs of stopping.
Since the moment Trump and Biden walked off that stage—or in Biden’s case, was escorted off by a wife who later, somehow, made matters worse when she praised him for answering every question—American politics has been stuck in limbo.
Will he? Or won’t he?
Every hour brings a new development. Obama backed Biden, posting that “bad debate nights happen.” Okay, Biden’s in! He’s definitely in. Then half of the The New York Times editorial page roster, as well as the paper itself in an editorial, called on Biden to quit. Okay, Biden’s out! Only a matter of time before he makes the announcement.
For those of you who have lives and better things to do other than doomscroll all weekend, a quick recap of what’s gone down as of press time:
Thirty minutes into the debate, when it was clear Biden was bombing, the first spin dropped: he has a cold.
On Friday, Biden managed to deliver prepared remarks, read from a teleprompter in front of a fired-up crowd of supporters—and this was supposed to be a sign that all was well and Thursday night was just a blip. Bob Woodward said it wasn’t a blip but a “political H-bomb.”
Meanwhile, in the Hamptons on Saturday, Biden reportedly needed a teleprompter for five-minute remarks at a rich guy’s house.
In a report on “the two Bidens,” White House aides explained to Axios’s Alex Thompson that from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. the president is “dependably engaged.” (Good thing the job of the president only requires the hours of a dentist.)
The Biden campaign issued a memo citing snap polls immediately after the debate that suggested no major changes in public opinion. The memo also cautioned that “if we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls.” (Never mind that most polls and models show that Biden is already losing the race. And never mind the poll published Sunday that shows a jump in the percentage of voters who do not think Biden is mentally or physically fit for the job of president to 72 percent.)
The Biden campaign sent a fundraising email that included a chart showing that Biden leads other Democrats in head-to-head matchups against Trump. (The extraordinary thing about this is not that it shows Biden outperforming various untested Democrats, but that Biden’s team decided to include it in a fundraising email at all.)
The media pile-on continued throughout the weekend with everyone from the Times, the house organ of the Democratic Party, to The New Yorker (ditto), to The Economist adding to the chorus of voices calling for Biden to step down. (“It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it,” wrote New Yorker editor David Remnick. Ouch.)
And here’s a taste of the enthusiasm from Democrats sticking by Biden. The best David Axelrod could muster was to post on X: “Unless the @POTUS, himself, decides to quit—which he won’t—that issue is settled. The discussion that is going on now was timely a year ago, when few wanted to have it. It’s largely irrelevant today.”
Democratic congressman Ro Khanna defended the president by comparing the leader of the free world to the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa: “Rocky wasn’t the most eloquent in speech. But he was a fighter.” Is this supposed to make us feel better?
By Sunday, Biden had spun through his fundraisers and made it to Camp David for a prearranged family meeting, complete with a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz for Vogue. Biden was reportedly eager for ideas from family and advisers on how to proceed and is mulling an interview or press conference to address the age issue head on.
According to some accounts, the strongest voices urging Biden to stay the course are his son Hunter, who “wants Americans to see the version of his father that he knows—scrappy and in command of the facts—rather than the stumbling, aging president Americans saw on Thursday night.” The family blames Biden’s top advisers for the mess and are calling for heads to roll.
Amid all the furious spin, some 300 million Americans are wondering: who will be on the ballot come November? Who is running the country right now?
We don’t know the answer to either.
Is this all too negative? To use the Bidenworld parlance, are Democrats who want Biden to drop out just the “bedwetting brigade”? On Friday, Olivia Reingold headed to New York City’s Stonewall Inn, where Biden commemorated a new monument celebrating gay pride, and got another perspective: that the president’s superfans are standing by him after Thursday’s disaster.
Are they right to keep calm and carry on? Or do those inside the Biden bubble have a hearing problem? Here’s Olivia’s dispatch from “Inside the Biden Bubble.”
On the record, everyone important in the Democratic Party is behind Joe Biden. Privately, it’s a very different story.
Peter Savodnik spent the weekend speaking to more than 20 Democratic activists, strategists, and donors who are panicked and plotting in the event that Joe Biden announces he isn’t seeking re-election.
“Secretly, most of the donors are worried sick and would like to see someone else on the ticket,” a Democratic fundraiser told The Free Press. “They’re not going to speak against him publicly, but they’re very worried—they’re sending specific suggestions about who should replace him.”
I’m allowing myself one more plug for a response to Niall Ferguson’s conversation-driving Free Press essay on why “We’re All Soviets Now.” And only because it’s from the Grey Lady’s always-interesting conservative-in-residence, Ross Douthat. His takeaway: conservatives should be optimists, not doomers. (New York Times)
And for more cheeriness about the United States—we need it right now—here are six charts from Bruce Mehlman that will have you yelling, “America, fuck yeah!” (Age of Disruption)
Foreign officials knew from their meetings with the president what the White House has been trying to hide—and what we all saw on Thursday night. “The reading in Europe is that this has been an unmitigated disaster.” (WSJ)
“At night, I prayed I wouldn’t survive to the next day.” A Ukrainian describes life as a prisoner of war in Russia. (Spiegel International)
In the latest evidence that nothing is safe from attack in the culture wars, a scheme funded by the universally beloved Dolly Parton to give free books to kids has been attacked as “white saviorism.” (The Telegraph)
There are lots of lessons for the far left from Jamaal Bowman’s primary defeat last Wednesday, argues Michael Powell. Whether they’ll bother to learn them is another matter. (The Atlantic)
Top hospitals are offering Long Covid clinics. After studying these programs for a new paper, Vinay Prasad suspects they are little more than scams. (Substack)
Kanye West, the prolific rapper turned prolific antisemite was spotted in Russia this past weekend, where he reportedly shopped, checked out the Red Square, and celebrated the birthday of his fashion designer friend. (Times of Israel)
Almost half a decade after the start of the pandemic, just 6 percent of federal workers are working full-time in their offices and 30 percent are fully remote. Some government agencies are using just 10 percent of their office space. (Washington Post)
Kinky Friedman, the satirical musician, author, and onetime Texas gubernatorial candidate, died last week at 79. (Variety) If you want to unplug from the current news cycle, I recommend Matt Labash’s 2006 profile of Friedman on the campaign trail.
Up next, Joe Nocera reads Anthony Fauci’s new memoir—and is struck by the gap between the public health bureaucrat who got everything right back in the 1980s and the man who flubbed it when Covid hit in 2020.
In his new memoir, On Call, Anthony Fauci devotes tremendous energy and space to his role during the AIDS crisis—with good reason. Despite having spent, at that point, more than a decade as a government health bureaucrat, the 44-year-old scientist could see that the federal government wasn’t devoting enough resources to AIDS research, and that the hurdles required to get a new drug approved made little sense when so many young gay men were dying without access to drugs that just might help them stay alive.
Fauci successfully fought for more research dollars, and he also helped tear down those hurdles so that AIDS patients could try drugs even though they didn’t have the final stamp of approval from the Food and Drug Administration. He portrays himself as a hero in his book—and he was.
Fauci also devotes tremendous energy and space to his role during the Covid crisis. By then, he was 79 years old, with 52 years in government, including the last 36 as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He was the government’s chief scientific voice during the pandemic, and he again portrays himself as a hero of the crisis in his book.
But this time he absolutely was not. In fact, his role in the crisis is a big reason why public health officials are now held in such low esteem.
The man who tackled the AIDS crisis was very different from the man who advised presidents—and the country—about Covid-19. The country would have been far better served during the pandemic with the man I’ve come to think of as “AIDS Fauci” rather than “Covid Fauci.” Read on for the full tale of two Faucis.
→ Biden Democrats hobbled by DEI: Over the weekend, Spectator columnist Melissa Chen posted on X that “one of the major reasons the Democrats are in this bind is because of DEI.” She argued that the diversity, equity, and inclusion craze, with its emphasis on identity over capability, is what forced Biden’s team to pick Kamala Harris as his running mate four years ago. “Instead of being responsive to the desires of ordinary people,” Chen writes, “Biden unnecessarily hamstrung himself—and the rest of the country—by announcing the criteria that his VP will be a BIPOC woman. Yes, this was 2020 when everybody was trying to outperform everybody else on how anti-racist they were. Crazy times.” As a result, “we ended up with an inauthentic word salad VP whom no one likes. And the Dems are finding themselves paying the price for not bothering to listen to the people. The stakes are high for the choice of who gets to occupy the highest office in the land. They used DEI to pick a VP, and they eschewed the normal primary process which allows feedback from voters. What we got was a sanitized, highly managed political process, where the candidate of choice was foisted upon us.” Her comments echo that of Free Press columnist Kat Rosenfield, who predicted back in May that this would happen. Sadly for the Dems, the polls suggest that 59-year-old Harris has an even slimmer chance of beating Donald Trump than Joe Biden. “Buckle up,” Chen concludes in her post, “it’s going to be a wild ride till November.”
→ France goes right: Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party won 34 percent of the vote in the first round of France’s parliamentary elections yesterday. For weeks, polls had predicted Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc would be surpassed by the radical right and left—and that is exactly what early projections suggest happened. The far-left New Popular Front won 28 percent of the vote and Macron’s Ensemble bloc came third with 20 percent. This outcome is exactly the result the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy feared when he wrote in The Free Press last week that “we urgently need a union of principled democrats of the left, the right, and the center.” France will vote again this Sunday: in districts where no candidate secured 50 percent in the first round, any candidate who won more than 12.5 percent goes to the second vote. And so the week ahead will involve horse trading and unpredictable three-way votes before we learn how many seats Le Pen’s party really gets, and whether Macron and the far right will have to find a way to share power.
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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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.”
—
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.
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