Yes, Biden Flopped. But Let’s Not Overreact.
The United States is in a very bad place. Just not as bad as people think.
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One candidate lied repeatedly, and the other could barely make his way through a single sentence. Each man mocked the other as unfit for world leadership and then bizarrely, as if they were a pair of doddering Florida retirees, bickered over who had the lower golf handicap. If there were ever a lower moment in the history of U.S. presidential politics—and there have been plenty of low moments over 248 years—I’m not sure what it was.
Yet in the longer run, Thursday night’s debate between U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump probably won’t matter all that much—and not just because we’ll all be dead. The reality is that the fundamentals of the republic remain strong, and the United States remains the world’s premier superpower.
But first things first. In the race to the bottom that is the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Thursday night felt like a true nosedive into the ground, an actual air disaster, with all the smoke and fire and debris and attendant loss of life. The most obvious casualty was Biden, whose campaign pushed for the unusually early debate in an effort to demonstrate that he is, at age 81, up for a second term.
Biden delivered the opposite message: With his frozen, senescent face and his jumbled and often incoherent answers, the president looked and sounded more than any previous time like a man on the verge of dementia. It was the Democrats’ worst nightmare.
Almost from the first moments of the debate, with Biden hoarse and stumbling from the start, his poor performance resurrected all the familiar calls for him to step aside. “The collective freak-out from Democrats is at the highest level you can imagine,” political pundit Amy Walter said on PBS News Hour. But Biden, who has rebuffed all previous suggestions that he’s too old to run again, appeared unready to admit defeat. “I think we did well,” he told reporters afterward, although when asked if he was feeling ill, Biden responded: “I have a sore throat.”
Sore? The next four months until the election are going to hurt like hell. So let’s take stock of how badly we really are hurting.
Trump, who was already leading in many polls, may well be elected president again. Many Americans believe that would be a disaster. Some think it will mean the end of the republic.
But perhaps a little perspective is in order here. The utterly dysfunctional politics at the heart of the American experiment—the fact that a healthy portion of the country doesn’t think either candidate should be president—may not matter as much as what’s going on in the rest of the country and the world.
Why? The United States continues to be the unchallenged superpower, with China and Europe flagging economically and Russia mired in an utter disaster in Ukraine. Yes, Trump is the most successful demagogue in U.S. history—the fulfillment of all the fears that swirled around previous would-be authoritarians such as Aaron Burr and Huey Long in their heyday.
A second Trump presidency may well mean that Abraham Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory”—the honored traditions keeping the republic intact—will be strained to the breaking point. Internationally, it may also mean a bad peace deal for Ukraine, an existential challenge to NATO, a renewed trade war with China, and possibly much worse.
But the republic will survive—and more handily than one might think. Trump is 78 himself and can’t go on indefinitely. The courts and the checks and balances in the system are still strong enough to fight off his worst authoritarian impulses.
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And one thing Trump said Thursday was actually true: He didn’t start any wars in his four years as president. Trump would probably not just pull out of NATO; he and his advocates are already spinning the pledges of additional spending by NATO allies as a victory. He may cut a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the Ukraine war, but many people on both sides believe some sort of compromise is necessary anyway.
The Europeans and Japan will stick by Washington no matter what: Even though many pundits predicted doom for the United States throughout the Trump era, Europe only fell further behind. As Fareed Zakaria wrote in the Washington Post recently, in less than 20 years since the 2008 Great Recession (started, by the way, due to huge political errors by Washington), the U.S. economy has gone from being roughly the size of the eurozone to nearly twice as big.
“The U.S. economy towers above Europe’s these days,” Zakaria wrote. “The United States’ technology companies dominate the continent. U.S. banks are far more profitable than European ones. U.S. energy production has created a boom in manufacturing which is luring many European companies to the United States.”
Of all the false things Trump said during the debate—and there were dozens—the most absurd was this: “Throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. … We’ve become like a Third World nation.” It may look and feel that way in Washington, but it doesn’t elsewhere.
Moreover, the harsh exchanges between Trump and Biden belie the fact that on many issues related to America’s place in the world—trade, immigration, China, neoprotectionism, and the new “make it in America” fervor that has overtaken both parties—they agree about a lot, if not everything.
Trump repeatedly attacked Biden for the ugly and humiliating way the president pulled out of Afghanistan, but it was Trump who set in motion the policy to sidestep the Afghan government and negotiate directly with the Taliban, which led to the disaster. And Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping—who have more or less joined forces to try to eclipse U.S. hegemony—have their hands full with their own domestic problems.
Among the many awful moments of the debate, both Trump and Biden—an ex-president and a current one—accused the other of being the author of imminent disaster. “He will drive us into World War III,” Trump said. Biden responded: “You want World War III? Let [Trump] win, and let him tell Putin to do whatever the hell he wants to NATO.” Neither scenario is likely to happen.
Much of the debate in Washington over the next several days will focus on renewed efforts by Democratic Party grandees to persuade Biden to step aside for a younger person. This will very likely not happen, either. As one longtime politics maven told Politico Playbook, Biden is “not going to step aside and there is no clear process for replacing him. So we’ll have a few days of frenzy. Then everyone will realize the main contours of the race haven’t really changed.”
What also hasn’t changed is that the United States has been through far worse turmoil than this. As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in her most recent book, An Unfinished Love Story, quoting her late husband, the legendary presidential speechwriter Richard Goodwin, “The end of our country has loomed many times before. America is not as fragile as it seems.”
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Michael Hirsh is a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books: Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street and At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World. Twitter: @michaelphirsh