‘If he runs, it’s over. Period’.
(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-07-09)
JUSTIN SULLIVAN - GETTY IMAGES; ANDREW CABALLEROREYNOLDS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
‘If he runs, it’s over, period’ — the text glared at me from my phone, and I was at a loss for words. We had just left my local Ralph’s grocery store, the evening breeze offering a welcome break from the relentless summer heat of Southern California. A young couple stood by the fast food truck, intently listening to the CNN Presidential debate on the young man’s smartphone. They didn’t appear Eastern-European, and those who did weren’t paying attention to either Donald Trump or Joe Biden, instead going about their day — shopping, chatting at outdoor restaurant tables in Armenian or Russian, or hurrying home. My phone was buzzing with messages from my older Jewish friend in New York: ‘Are you watching the debate? We are in deep shit.’
As a progressive liberal and longtime Bernie Sanders supporter, she wasn’t shocked but was still devastated by Biden’s weak performance, thinking ‘maybe he has Parkinson’s.’ She saw Trump ripe for the taking, yet Biden ‘couldn’t do anything,’ summing it up that a Trump victory in November’s election was almost inevitable, even if the Democrats picked a different nominee. Another friend originally from the UK – but living here for decades – quickly followed with her concise decision on the event as ‘A shit show…unbelievable’. Later, back in my apartment, the MSNBC coverage of the televised debate might as well have been set to Chopin’s Funeral March, as hosts and pundits found a hundred ways to agree that the 81-year-old Joe Biden had miserably failed to clear the low bar of proving his age shouldn’t be an issue for voters.
In the week since then, the media has been obsessed on whether Joe Biden will run, should run, or can run, with few focusing on some other extraordinary takeaways from the debate. The moderators — experienced CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash — failed miserably to hold Donald Trump to account. His urging of rioters to invade the Capitol and stop the transfer of power on January 6, 2021, was effectively ignored, even when it was brought up in a toothless question by Tapper. Trump’s outright denial of having sex with porn star Stormy Daniels — even as he was convicted of its cover-up — was similarly bypassed by Tapper and Bash. While not constrained by the strict TV debate format, such blatant ignoring of reality would surely have pushed Miriam O’Callaghan or Mishal Husain to engage further on the topic. However, here, both men are being treated (and judged) to very different standards.
While Trump only cares about personal aggrandisement, he is a charismatic salesman, mixing off-the-cuff stand-up comedy with populist mud-slinging and a brazen disregard for the truth. But he also has the secret weapon most politicians lack: a gaping void where a conscience should be (with perhaps just a note saying ‘ask Daddy’). It’s a cliché that all politicians are liars, manipulators of the truth, and beyond embarrassment. Still, in reality, most political leaders contort themselves into spaghetti junctions of cul-de-sacs to justify contradictory statements they’ve made, trying to present recent pronouncements as truthful and consistent. Most of us actually do this to some extent, in an attempt to silence our inner little voice and help us sleep at night.
However, unburdened by any such consideration, Trump torches any cerebral effort of ‘normal politicians’ by simply making up whatever serves his needs in that particular moment, regardless of what he said before or will say later. This is why he’s so difficult to fact-check by CNN moderators or news anchors, even when they have the facts at hand. Trump DOES NOT CARE, and his MAGA followers love it. He literally knows no shame of having his dubious claims called out by unambiguous facts, where almost anyone else would be paralysed by it.
Popular leaders have long been constrained by shame, or rather the upholding of their public ‘honour,’ to curtail any nefarious instincts to abuse their position in society. As noted by David Wilson in his 2004 M.A. thesis, ‘Honour and Early Irish Society’, ‘the early Irish idea of ‘honour’ is expressed by the term enech, which means both ‘face’ and ‘honour.’ Essentially, shame is supposed to disfigure someone both figuratively and literally so that it appeared ‘on his cheeks.’ So, a Gaelic warrior’s face revealed the dishonour that was an outward manifestation of the shame felt within, on having their non-conformity to ‘social or martial norms and truthfulness in general’ publicly revealed, especially by satirising poets. In short, they blushed with shame. That doesn’t mean the Gaels thought blushing was enough to dissuade someone from an egregious act, but the reddened cheeks revealed that their owner knew what it was.[1]
Donald Trump doesn’t blush to my knowledge, and that is his superpower, though it’s genuinely hard to tell underneath his perennial orange makeup. He has rarely felt the repercussions of his misstatements either externally or internally, thus emboldening him to make more extreme claims, including that he would ‘be a dictator on day one’. Though he has been unnaturally quiet since the debate and was notably circumspect during it — probably realizing that Biden’s campaign needs no goading as it twists in the political wind of soon-to-be-revealed public opinion polls.
In a week where the US Supreme Court crossed a Rubicon in ruling that a US president is effectively a king above the law when carrying out his official duties, the next incumbent of the Oval Office has rarely been so pivotal for international affairs. Yet, to coldly put it, at a time of global geopolitical crisis, the leadership of the most powerful country the world has ever seen has come down to a binary choice of an old man dead on the outside versus an old man dead on the inside. However, how much America actually cares about each man remains to be seen. As my wife discovered, no one in her shop displayed any interest or knowledge in the CNN public debate last Thursday. Yet surely Biden’s sad performance will be spliced into bite-sized social media memes for TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube during the months to come, where most news is actually now digested.
I write as Independence Day beckons and fireworks are already sounding through the nighttime sky above the LA traffic. My Jewish friend has texted me again, this time with a simple quotation by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth’. If the best defence of the American Dream is what the country was presented with last Thursday night and since, then history may indeed invoke Sartre to surmise that this dream was never true to begin with. Bereft of any comforting reply for her, I simply, impotently replied, ‘Sad. And utterly true’.
[1] David Wilson, ‘Honour and Early Irish Society: a Study of the Táin Bó Cúalnge’ (MA thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, 2004), pp 15–6.