The Worst Choice Ever
Donald Trump is a disaster, but Joe Biden's party is democratic in name
only. Why this year's election is a vomit milkshake
Matt Taibbi
9 hr
1,020
My colleagues at Rolling Stone recently endorsed Joe Biden for president:
Biden's lived experience and expansive empathy make him not just a good, but
an outstanding candidate. This is a fight between light and darkness.
Joe Biden is a corpse with hair plugs whose idea of "empathy" is to jam
fingers in the sternums of people who ask the wrong questions, or call them
"fat" or "full of shit," or dare them to "try me" - and that's if he
remembers what state he's in. Is he a better human than Donald Trump?
Probably, but his mental decline has hit Lloyd Bridges-in-Hot-Shots! levels
and he shares troubling characteristics with the president, beginning with a
pathological struggle with truth.
Biden spent much of 2020 lying about everything from his Iraq War vote to
his educational history to a fantasy about being arrested in South Africa
with Nelson Mandela. The same press that killed him for this behavior in the
past let it all slide this time. Same with the growing ledger of
handsy-uncle incidents that had adolescent girls and campaigning politicians
alike wondering why a Vice President needs to smell their hair or plant
lingering kisses on their heads while cameras flash.
Biden's entire argument for the presidency, and it's a powerful one, is his
opponent. This week's election is not a choice between "light or darkness,"
but "pretty much anything or Donald Trump," and only in that context is this
disintegrating, bilious iteration of Scranton Joe even distantly credible as
a choice for the world's most powerful office.
Donald Trump is going to be a difficult case for future historians because
he's simultaneously the biggest liar and the most lied-about politician in
American history. The standard propaganda lines about Trump are all
incorrect. The usual technique involves sticking his name in headlines next
to absurd disqualifying descriptors: "fascist," "traitor," "dictator," and
so on.
"18 Ways Trump Might Be a Russian Asset" is a typical example of what passed
for commentary at outlets like the Washington Post in the Trump years. Such
hot takes were a sure way to get TV invites:
Trump may have played cartoon Mussolini on the stump and reached for
Hitlerian cliches in his campaign videos, but the dirty secret of the last
four years - hidden from the broad mass of voters by both conservative and
mainstream media - was that the president's much ballyhooed strongman
leanings were a fraud. Trump the Terrible was great TV, but away from
cameras he was a fake despot who proved repeatedly that he didn't know the
first thing about how to exercise presidential power, even in his own
defense.
Trump entered the White House buried in scandals that had been foisted upon
him by officials in his own government who were openly betraying him,
illegally leaking intelligence about his administration to the press on a
weekly if not daily basis. Not to say it would have been a good idea, but he
could have hauled every last one of these leakers off to jail, legally, and
in a few cases could even have done what Barack Obama did, and used secrecy
laws to go after press antagonists as well.
Ask James Rosen, the Fox correspondent who saw himself declared an enemy of
the state, his source thrown in jail, for reporting on an Obama-era leak
about a North Korean nuclear test. "Nothing that we've seen so far from the
Trump administration," Rosen said early in Trump's tenure, "rises to that
level of seriousness."
Obama crushed the record by using the Espionage Act to pursue at least ten
leakers for crimes like disclosing details of America's use of torture,
revealing the extent of illegal surveillance programs, even publicizing
details of efforts to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.
Instead of using these imperial powers to send commandos rappelling through
the windows of people like Jim Comey, John Brennan or even David Ignatius in
message-sending pre-dawn raids, the "fascist" Trump did nothing. Before
inauguration, he sat like the dope he is in the Trump Tower while Comey
pulled a J. Edgar Hoover to his face, promising to keep "close" a damaging
report about a pee tape in a supposedly top secret meeting whose details
would be on CNN within about ten minutes.
Trump lacked the sense to fire Comey in that moment, and as for the dozens
of officials who afterward leaked classified intelligence to fuel what by
then was an open campaign aimed at putting him, Trump, in jail, Trump was
mostly too stupefied to root out and fire these people, much less arrest
them. Meanwhile it was his Democratic opponents, and proxies like Special
Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who were executing dramatic raids against people
like Paul Manafort and even Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen.
Democratic Senators like Mark Warner of Virginia and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii
had the bright idea to threaten Internet platforms like Facebook with
regulation unless they accepted direction on "ferreting out" content that
foments "discord." Had Trump pushed his Justice Department's Antitrust
Division to do something similar, we might have been looking at bans of the
New York Times in recent weeks instead of the New York Post. In other words:
in this and other areas, if Trump had even a drop of LBJ in his
constitution, we'd have been in serious trouble. Instead, when Trump finally
unholstered the Espionage Act to go after a political actor, it was to
prosecute a sort-of ally in Julian Assange.
Trump prior to arriving in Washington spent decades managing his image in
New York by buying local pols with contributions and promises of development
deals, while pocketing newspaper editors with gossip and invites to
booze-and-poon-tang parties.
I've heard tales from New York reporters who had adverse Trump stories in
the queue back in the day, only to be told by editors to go visit "the boss"
for better "insight." One former Big Apple print reporter laughed as he
described being dispatched to Trump, who spent the meeting bragging about
what a great ass his wife had. This was how our president was used to
dealing with press. He was way out of his league in Washington.
Trump may not have been a dictator, but was guilty of near-total ignorance
and incompetence, qualities that shone through during the Covid-19 pandemic.
He took personal offense at scientific and media rhetoric about mask use,
interpreting all of it as criticism of his presidency, and as a result spent
much of the summer creating viral hot spots everywhere he went, in an "I'll
show them!" televised trail of death. No sooner had he recovered from the
bug than he was back on the campaign, chucking his mask into huge crowds of
gushing partisans, like Justin Bieber throwing his tank top to squealing
teens:
The Hill
@thehill
President Trump opened his rally by flinging masks to his fans.
October 13th 2020
43 Retweets147 Likes
To blame Trump for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in this country is to
assume the government could have stopped all of them, but his messaging just
on this one issue has been insane. Herman Cain right now is playing
shuffleboard in the great beyond after going to an indoor Trump rally. Trump
isn't the only politician who's been irresponsible here - the Democrats'
decision to force long lines of voters into cramped indoor voting areas in
order to get March primaries in Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, and Florida in the
books while Biden had momentum was the same kind of insanity - but Trump's
inability to grapple with coronavirus highlighted his fatal weakness as a
politician, his lunatic narcissism.
When he says things like, "Don't be afraid of Covid," or that the disease
affects "virtually nobody" or "nobody young" or just "elderly people," it's
because he's lost the ability to see the pandemic as anything but a Democrat
talking point concocted to hurt his electoral chances.
Most of what Trump actually did in office was lend his loopy signature to
exactly the kind of initiatives the "swamp" of elite interests he supposedly
ran against in 2016 secretly wanted anyway: a monstrous $1.9 trillion tax
giveaway from 2017, this year's multi-trillion, no-questions-asked bailout
of the financial sector, the gutting of regulatory agencies like the EPA and
OSHA beyond the wildest dreams of prior Republican administrations, an $82
billion one-year increase in the military budget, the heightening of drone
strikes, even indicting Assange. It all testified to the fact that Trump's
image as a fist-shaking enemy of the establishment was as fraudulent as the
degrees his online diploma-mill University used to give out.
Trump played populist in public, but his presidency was spent parked limp
and hostage-like in a robe before a TV somewhere in the White House,
watching in horror as the anchors of shows like Fox and Friends informed him
about the Beltway power machine's latest successful effort to shit all over
him. His response, every time, was to sob into Twitter by his lonesome,
often deep into the night. He seemed not to have a clue he was president,
which again was mostly a good thing. Just this weekend, in his latest
race-baiting campaign to accuse "Squad" members Ilhan Omar and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez of being illegal people, he asked out loud, "Where is our
Justice Department?" No one in the audience had the heart to cry out, "In
your Executive Branch?"
Trump is so totally insecure - and said to be especially terrified of other
men - that he was unable to maintain loyal teams of operatives for any
length of time, with one aide after another quickly pulling the pin to rip
him in tell-all book deals. This dynamic indicated Trump is such a pain in
the ass that not even the lure of vast political power can make serving him
worth it for more than a few months or weeks.
This left him to go the presidency mostly alone, or with a few fleeting
partnerships with ghouls like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and Stephen
Miller. The efforts of such people to try to "accomplish" something without
the assent of existing Washington/corporate interests were eccentric,
vicious, pointless, often illegal, and almost without exception ultimately
unsuccessful and/or overturned. The "Muslim Ban" survived, but his
villainous border policy that used the threat of family separations to try
to deter illegal immigration was a more typically failed Trump gambit.
Conservatives anxious to point out that prior administrations also employed
policies that sometimes left kids in cages are correct, but it isn't
blue-state propaganda to note that Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration
policy was specifically designed to increase the chances of parents being
separated from their children, because the idiots in Trump's inner circle
genuinely thought this was smart. Trump had so few people with a clue in his
White House that a lot of his policy decisions ended up sounding like
money-making schemes hatched in the basement by between-jobs poker buddies,
whispering so their wives won't hear.
"We need to take children away," said Jeff Sessions, who spent most of his
career as the dumbest member of the United States Senate, but entered the
Trump White House as the administration's most accomplished expert on almost
everything. They tried a vile policy, made an attempt for a while to insist
in the face of bad press it was a good idea, then ultimately abandoned the
plan and pretended they were never for it. This pattern, of stepping on a
rake before even getting to do the bad thing at scale, was a chief
characteristic of the Trump presidency.
In modern America the president's most important job might be using his or
her voice to reassure the country. Trump not only lacks this ability, he
finds ways to make huge portions of the population feel like passengers in a
pilotless, plummeting jetliner every time he opens his mouth.
Even if you accept the most generous interpretation of outbursts about
"shithole countries" or the "disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" in
Baltimore. actually I'm not sure what the generous interpretation of those
statements might be, but surely the moral power of the presidency is not
being exercised when kids in Baltimore turn on TVs to see the golf-playing
scion of inherited wealth dumping on their hometown from the White House.
Imagine being Trump's ambassador to Nigeria or Mexico and having to come up
with new ways to explain the boss's Tweets every morning. He was the Ugly
American caricature - an ignorant, self-centered, tasteless bigot -
amplified to the scale of colossal art.
In sum, this man who secured the presidency because voters thought his
blunt, unvarnished persona might prove a corrective to unchecked elite
corruption proved incapable in office of doing anything except complain into
his phone, and abuse himself like a zoo gorilla every time a camera was
pointed in his direction. Used to getting his way as a petty corporate boss,
he was uniquely toolless as a Beltway operator, a man who in a thousand
years couldn't figure out how to use the office to achieve something
positive.
For all that, Trump comes perilously close to being a better choice than his
Democratic opponent. That's how revolting our situation is.
While the American political establishment disregarding human rights to
retain influence is an old story around the world, our powers that be have
never had to show their hand in quite the same way at home. The
extraordinary accident of Trump winning the presidency in 2016 put imperial
America out of the White House for the first time. They didn't handle the
news well.
The last four years have been a ceaseless tantrum of security state hacks,
media lackeys, and Beltway nomenklatura who from day one openly sought to
jail our Clown-in-Chief for the unforgivable crime of getting elected
without their permission. Their behavior is the only reason the Tuesday
could turn out to be close.
Again, Trump was a dud as a leader, but many of the things that came out of
his mouth - claiming to seek closer relations with North Korea, Russia, and
Syria, for instance, or asking why we're footing the bill for a NATO
military alliance that hasn't been relevant or useful since 1991, or
referring to NAFTA in tones suggesting something less than religious awe -
made him not just a pain in the ass to the D.C. Brahmins, but our very own
domestic version of the "Hitler of the Month" club, a
Noriega/Milosevic/Saddam/Assad-style mad interloper requiring immediate
removal.
Our imperial government-in-exile spent four years engaged in a protracted
prosecution, a mega-Benghazi that involved political spying, open
interference of foreign intelligence services in domestic politics, constant
lies to the public about nonexistent conspiracies, and the cheering of so
many norms violations that things like breaking attorney-client privilege
for a sitting president, or a judge refusing to let prosecutors dismiss a
case, barely rated notice. They spent almost all of their time on political
schemes to oust Trump, and almost none coming up with better solutions for
problems like declining incomes, rising inequality and debt, and inadequate
health care.
While TV channels increasingly filled their on-air ranks with former CIA and
FBI officials, another telltale sign of authoritarian drift, a whole range
of private press interests were accused of treasonous collaboration and
threatened with new forms of suppression. This turned out not to be
necessary, as most private news companies voluntarily accepted the logic of
denouncing news adverse to the Democratic Party cause as foreign subversion.
As a Washington Post columnist put it about the latest New York Post expose:
We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence
operation - even if they probably aren't.
When Facebook and Twitter took the amazing step of suppressing a potentially
damaging story about the Democratic candidate just before an election, party
leaders were near-unanimous in praise.
I grew up in New England at a time when being a "Massachusetts liberal"
meant being proud to be accused of being a "card-carrying member of the
ACLU." Today Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey says he hopes speech
suppression incidents like the New York Post intervention were just a
beginning. "The issue today is not that the companies are taking too many
posts down," Markey said. "The issue today is that companies are leaving too
many posts up." In past decades Republicans trafficked in the language of
McCarthy. In the Trump years Democrats took over the honor, with people like
California's Adam Schiff even returning red-scare phrases like "disloyalty
to country" to the mainstream.
The unknown factor is how much more of this lay ahead in a Biden White
House. The obvious first concerns would be increased political surveillance,
much more aggressive and coordinated propaganda, more McCarthyite manias,
and harsher punishments for Assange/Snowden type figures accused of leaking
"misinformation" (now re-defined as true adverse information). As a member
of the press, the drift toward a Chinese-style digital media landscape,
policed by armies of political truth-scorers, probably bothers me more than
most, but that's on the table. There are going to be a lot of people coming
back to Washington who are going to insist that something like Trump not be
allowed to happen again, even if it means snipping a passage or four out of
the Constitution.
Remember years ago, when tape leaked of Hillary Clinton complaining about a
U.S. decision to encourage elections in Palestinian territories? "If we were
going to push for an election," she said, "then we should have made sure
that we did something to determine who was going to win."
I think we're headed toward that vision of American democracy familiar to
most of the rest of the world, where we have the freedom to vote, but only
the right way. Certainly the idea that there's more than one legitimate
political choice has already been excised from most upper-class discourse,
with not only Trump and the Republicans but also every actor from the Green
Party to Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders denounced across the corporate
press as favorites of foreign enemies.
It's no accident the doddering Biden is the nominee. In 2016 Hillary Clinton
thought her verbal mastery and nineteen-point plans would impress. In fact
they frightened voters, the cool robotic delivery reminding many that she
was running as the face of a vast bloodless system they'd already grown to
despise. Biden's grabby hands and nutty-gramps speeches-to-nowhere create
the illusion of vulnerability and humanity, concealing the fact that what
we'll actually be doing this week is voting the empire back, only this time,
it's had four years to think about loopholes at home that need closing.
Trump's incompetence and influence on the darkest part of the national
character make it morally impossible to vote for him. But his opponents are
lying, witch-hunting scum in their own right, a club of censorious
bureaucrats whose instincts for democracy and free speech hover somewhere
between the mid-seventies GDR and the Church of Scientology. I thought all
year I'd be able to do it, but I wake up this week unable to talk myself
into voting for these people, even against Trump. What choices they give us!
Thank God at least it's about to be over. If it's about to be over. Please,
let it be over.
