In 1952 and 1968, unpopular Democratic incumbents renounced their claims to reelection, in both cases against a backdrop of low unemployment and brutal, pointless wars. But despite such parallels, Joe Biden now reminds one more of Richard Nixon than of Truman or LBJ. In March 1968 – reeling from the Tet Offensive, a gold crisis, and Eugene McCarthy’s near-upset in New Hampshire, LBJ complained that ‘the establishment bastards have bailed out’. Yet he didn’t resist. Faced with a similar set of problems, Nixon ordered his men to break into the Brookings Institution (though not, as he briefly considered, to firebomb the think tank). Biden hasn’t bombed anyone in this country yet. But after his disastrous debate performance on 27 June, he has engaged in a level of intra-elite conflict – with certain donors, large sections of his own party, and above all, the media – which the country has not witnessed since 1974.

To a degree which is hard to exaggerate, the media reaction to the debate was swift and unanimous. Shock and panic were understandable, since the clearest implication of the debate was that Trump was now heavily favoured to win in November. Mixed with this were expressions of personal betrayal from people who, by their own account, had looked away from earlier signs of mental decline because they trusted the assurances issued privately by Biden’s camp. Ron Klain, one of Biden’s three or four closest non-family associates, reportedly told a New York Times journalist ‘a couple months ago’ to set aside ‘age concerns’ because ‘we haven’t had a campaign yet. Watch him campaign, watch the debates’. As Matthew Zeitlin predicted correctly the day after the debate, ‘A lot of reporters feel like they were gaslit, bullied, unfairly attacked for bringing up Biden’s age and will now feel absolutely emboldened to talk about it nonstop and won’t feel any need to respect the campaign and White House’s arguments for why they shouldn’t.’ 

As the tide went out, you could suddenly see which figures in the media were the most firmly anchored in defence of Biden, even the version of him on display at the debate. Chris Hayes of MSNBC offered a good example. On 6 July, Hayes interviewed Congressman Mike Quigley, one of the first to call for Biden to step down. In describing his own feelings to Quigley, Hayes identified himself frankly as a partisan: ‘I think I’ve been pretty honest about this – you talk about working your way through this. I feel somewhat similarly; differently because I’m a journalist, I’m not an elected member, but I have a deep stake in the prospering of American democracy and its future’. Casting about for defences of Biden, Hayes tried the following:  

There’s been a few moments [in earlier presidential races] where if you went up to anyone who’s a political practitioner they would be like he’s toast, he’s done, and then he wasn’t. So there’s some sense in which there’s some part of me sympathetic to the argument of like don’t get caught up in the moment, things can change, this like don’t, don’t get too, because you don’t – you never know what’s gonna happen.

This is a reasonable way to talk to yourself when your favourite team is losing a baseball game. As an argument about Biden’s fitness, it is stunningly vacant – and blithe, given that the future of American democracy is said to be at stake. Even Hayes had trouble believing it. When Quigley responded that ‘Four years ago you saw a different Joe Biden’, the host had to agree this was ‘incontrovertible’. By this week, Hayes had come around to Quigley’s view, though he made sure to say that ‘this is not a scandal’ and that Biden ‘is a decent man who has done nothing wrong’. Flattery has been a consistent feature of the appeals to Biden; despite its limited success so far, one can’t say for sure it won’t have any effect on a man with such a high view of himself.

Inevitably, journalists have described the succession drama as ‘Shakespearean’. If there’s a ghost haunting this feast of cliches, it is probably a starving Gazan. There has been strikingly little discussion of any connection between Biden’s reversal of political fortunes and his support for the ongoing Israeli assault on Palestine. But watching White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre get into a shouting match with journalists over Biden’s health, it is impossible not to think about the credibility gap that has grown wider with every press briefing about Gaza. 

On 8 July, the NYT reported, ‘The White House briefing room devolved into shouting on Monday as the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, repeatedly dodged and refused to answer questions about the president’s health, and whether visits to the White House by a Parkinson’s doctor were about the president.’ The next day, a journalist asked another Biden flack, Matthew Miller, about the death toll in Gaza. As Miller delivered a typical non-answer, the journalist interrupted. Here is the exchange that followed, as reported in the State Department’s transcript:  

QUESTION: You’re smirking. You’re smirking as you say that.

MR MILLER: No, excuse – go ahead with another question, Said.

QUESTION: You are smirking as you say –

MR MILLER: Absolutely not. I’m not going to – I’m not even going to entertain that.

QUESTION: Let me finish my – let me finish – let me finish my question, please.

MR MILLER: I’m not even going to entertain that.

Said, go ahead with another question.

QUESTION: Matt, you’re smirking.

MR MILLER: That’s ridiculous.

There was a reason the journalist was asking about the death toll. The Lancet had just published a letter estimating that the Israeli ‘war’ has killed at least one in twelve people in Gaza – close to a decimation in the strict sense. The estimate is necessarily crude given the destruction of medical and communications capacity in Gaza. We have a more precise measure of Washington’s support for an openly genocidal government since 7 October: $6.5 billion. 

It is a scandal, but at this point not a surprise, that large swathes of the US media and political elite have made their peace with both of these numbers. What is harder to understand is the media’s continued lack of interest in a related question: given the new consensus on the President’s inability to rule, who is making decisions about foreign policy? It is not as if such decisions have been suspended since the debate. On 10 July, the day after AOC burned the emperor’s incense – declaring that ‘He is in this race, and I support him’ – an ‘administration official’ told the Wall Street Journal that the US ‘will soon begin shipping to Israel the 500-pound bombs that the Biden administration had previously suspended, ending a two-month pause it had imposed in a bid to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza’. On the Ukraine front, the liberalization of the administration’s restrictions on the use of American weaponry is likely to continue. Since the Russian bombing of a hospital in Kyiv, one hears calls for the removal of all restrictions.  

Who has been making and will continue to make these decisions? As Bruce Cumings wrote at the dawn of the Second Cold War, there are certain questions which one can only study by squinting at ‘the fine print of our dominant newspapers, pursuing a Washingtonology that can reveal the hidden struggle’. Is it significant that three of the first legislators to come out against Biden were Quigley, who co-chairs the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, plus Adam Smith and Seth Moulton, both members of the House Armed Services Committee? It is well known there are sections of the national security establishment who have not forgiven Biden and Jake Sullivan for the Afghanistan withdrawal; even those who got over this may want a more legitimate figure in office to deal with NATO and – dare anyone hope? – prevent the reelection of Trump and the presumable consequences for Ukraine.     

What do we make of the timing when, on 9 July, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines put out a press release claiming that ‘Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza’? Just a week earlier, right after the debate, ex-Obama Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson said that ‘A presidency is more than just one man. I would take Joe Biden at his worst day at age 86 so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines’. Johnson earned his cabinet position in 2008, when he led Obama’s effort to compete with Hillary Clinton for money from New York financial circles; reportedly, Johnson and Obama sought specifically ‘to draw from pools that barely existed four years ago, particularly hedge fund and private-equity fund principals’. After leaving the Obama administration, Johnson became a proud recipient of the Ronald Reagan Peace Through Strength Award. He is on the boards of Lockheed Martin and US Steel, a trustee of Columbia University, and a major figure within the network of corporate law firms, some of which are openly blacklisting anyone who has mouthed the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’.

Two statements, with opposing implications about the attitude of the national security apparatus toward the president. They may mean nothing, or they may represent the iceberg-tips of deep politics. How is anyone to know? Reportedly, Mao Zedong believed that Watergate was the result of ‘too much freedom of political expression in the United States’. For those of us living in the US, it is no small comfort that this freedom still exists, at least formally. It is good that we still have newspapers, and that they still report these details in the fine print. It would be better if they gave us more help in putting it all together. 

Read on: Richard Beck, ‘Bidenism Abroad’, NLR 146.