The biggest news of all was mostly missing from the mainstream political coverage of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race on Sunday.
The biggest news is this: A second Donald Trump presidency, which had been looking almost inevitable, is now quite possibly avoidable.
With Biden as a candidate, democracy appeared to be doomed. Now there’s a potential path to victory.
That’s huge. And yet it was subsumed in most of the news coverage, which focused on the details of Biden’s decision, his decision-making, his legacy, and the consolidation of support for Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement as the Democratic presidential nominee.
I’m not suggesting those aren’t hugely newsworthy things. Of course they are. They’re nothing short of historic.
But it’s the context that makes it an even more epic story.
This move by Biden may prevent the country from going down a possibly irreversible path towards authoritarianism and chaos.
Nevertheless, at the Washington Post, Dan Balz focused not on how Trump is now possibly beatable, but on how the move “sets the Democrats on an uncertain course.”
He described “the nervous aspirations of a party that seems to have gotten its wish and now must live with the consequences.”
And he warned that Harris will be tested “ in ways nothing else in her life has tested her,” and will be faced with “the kinds of criticism that will be heaped on her by Trump’s operation, all in a compressed time frame never seen in the modern era.”
To his credit, Peter Baker, in the New York Times, acknowledged in his lead that beating Trump was the central goal:
President Biden on Sunday abruptly abandoned his campaign for a second term under intense pressure from fellow Democrats and threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris to lead their party in a dramatic last-minute bid to stop former President Donald J. Trump from returning to the White House.
But rather than contextualizing the race as one between autocracy and democracy, Baker blithely predicted “a raucous and unpredictable campaign unlike any in modern times.”
In his New York Times “news analysis,” Shane Goldmacher wrote that the “tight timeline will magnify any missteps Ms. Harris might make but also minimize the chances for a stumble.”
He described Harris’s role as “the ultimate X-factor” in a race that Trump “had been on a trajectory to win.”
But Harris is not simply a new variable. That is underselling her significance. She is a plausible alternative to a would-be fascist dictator.
Chris Megerian of the Associated Press actually described the battle between autocracy and democracy as a “monotonous slog”:
For the past year, the presidential campaign seemed destined to be a monotonous slog featuring two candidates, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, who voters didn’t really want.
But that all changed on a quiet Sunday afternoon just 107 days before the election.
He focused on how Harris is younger than Trump, and a woman of color – not on the stakes.
Andrew Restuccia, Annie Linskey, and Catherine Lucey led their story in the Wall Street Journal by describing Biden’s decision as “one of the most monumental political collapses in American history.”
As in many other news stories, there was plenty of tick-tock but little to no what-this-all-means.
For a change, the New York Times editorial board got it exactly right, writing:
By agreeing to step down when his term ends in January, [Biden] is greatly increasing the chance that his party is able to protect the nation from the dangers of returning Donald Trump to the presidency….
Mr. Biden’s departure gives Democrats an opportunity to refocus public attention from questions about the president’s fitness to the manifest moral and temperamental unfitness of Mr. Trump — and to the dangers of rearming him with the considerable powers of the presidency.
Biden’s departure gives the political media that same opportunity. Indeed, the transformation of the Republican Party into an extremist, authoritarian personality cult has been, remains, and will be the dominant story of the 2024 election.
Will they seize that opportunity? That’s unclear. Over the weekend, the corporate media ignored a new bizarre and rambling Trump riff lauding strongmen around the world — hailing Xi Jinping of China as “brilliant” for controlling 1.4 billion people “with an iron fist,” and describing Xi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as “tough” and “smart.” That’s not a good sign.
Great article!!