Biden is not irreplaceable. Trump must be defeated | Opinion

Everyone is debating whether Joe Biden should withdraw from the presidential race because his debate performance seemed to confirm the suspicion of his intellectual disability. Many people are approaching this issue with their hearts and not their heads. We understand politicians, some of us like Biden, and we don’t want to disappoint him. But the only thing that matters is defeating former President Donald Trump.

Biden is a very successful man. He’s spent most of his adult life in public service, which is a euphemism for impacting other people’s lives while earning a decent salary and self-satisfied perks. Biden has been a powerful senator, served two terms as vice president, and is president well past the age at which most Americans would be forced to retire. He’s had some personal tragedies, of course, but career-wise he’s had a pretty spectacular run.

How was his performance as president? Critics say he performed badly, supporters argue he was simply bad at trumpeting his amazing successes. In today’s polarized world, people don’t know which story to believe, so most people fall back on their side and those in the middle are just confused.

This is an important question because if he is truly that good, some risk may be justified given the other factors that make him more likely to beat Trump. Is there something about Biden’s decisiveness that America needs?

My interpretation is that Biden has been a pretty decent, if center-left, president on domestic policy, but not great. Policies like the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the climate change bill (misnamed the Inflation Control Act) have paid off, and the economy is growing well, far surpassing that of the European Union. Inflation is partly the fault of the administration, but not entirely. The administration’s stimulus packages accelerated inflation, but they saved the post-COVID economy, and inflation was a global phenomenon but is now falling.

But at the same time, the leaky southern border and all the messaging around it has done his own disservice: Trump has done little to combat or criticize the ultra-progressive policies in some Democrat-run cities that most Americans despise and that give Republicans electoral benefits.

Worst of all, Trump’s reluctance to be seen in public means the public remains largely ignorant of his accomplishments and his story — a death sentence for any politician. Moreover, Trump has been unable to articulate a big vision, making little impact on big issues like health care and gun control. He is not engaging with the public, and he and his party have been unable to capitalize on the gains made by the Republican Party’s intervention on the abortion issue.

Foreign policy has been a mix of good and bad, but the bad parts have mostly been down to bad luck. America’s role in the world is so important, and our allies so unsettled by the possibility of a Trump return, that it’s worth examining closely.

• The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a fiasco, but that was an endgame engineered by the Trump administration, and Biden’s generals only slightly undermined it. But the bottom line was the immediate collapse of the Afghan army and government that the US engineered, and that is the fault of everyone involved in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion to oust the now-resurgent Taliban. So Trump’s criticism of Biden’s withdrawal is unfair and hypocritical (and therefore unsurprising).
• On the issue of Gaza, Biden’s support for Israel has been brave and politically very damaging, but he has done little to bring Israel’s fractious leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, into line, especially in his attempts to shatter Israeli democracy, which he believes preceded and led to the Gaza war by dividing Israeli society, showing weakness, and inviting the October 7 Hamas attack. Like liberals around the world, Biden seems to be having trouble fighting with a big stick.
• On the Ukraine issue, it is hard to criticize Biden. He has staunchly supported President Volodymyr Zelensky, but has refused important arms requests and tried to adjust so as not to trigger World War III. Economic sanctions have not been able to make Russia comply, because completely removing Russian oil from the world market would have caused a global recession. It is not easy to stare down a madman like Russian President Vladimir Putin, and most presidents would have done much the same as Biden. Given his love affair with Putin, is Trump right that the invasion might not have happened if he had won in 2020? Probably. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
• With regard to China, Biden says the US will defend Taiwan, which may be more than we can expect from Trump (so his return would greatly increase the risk of a Chinese attack, and by extension, tempt Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev to invade Armenia). Xi Jinping may be planning an invasion of Taiwan, but then he might try to make the issue go away by saying something nice about former First Lady Melania Trump. On the economic front, Biden’s tariffs are essentially Trump’s tariffs. The main difference is that even a weakened Biden would understand that it’s the US consumer who pays the cash, whereas Trump probably doesn’t.

What does that mean? As a politician, a B, maybe a B-minus. As a politician, a C. His debate performance, which was meant to grade Biden’s overall viability rather than the debate, would probably be a D.

This is probably not how you want to go about taking on Trump, because as a politician the former president gets an A+. Of course, this suggests a dark and uncomfortable truth about human nature, because as a person Trump gets an F: he is immoral, a liar, uncurious, petty, simple-minded, self-centered and vindictive.

On policy, Trump gets a grade worse than an F (whatever that may be) — if you’re close to the center of America and think dispassionately, you can see that Trump will further erode abortion rights, double inequality, do nothing about gun control insanity, and undermine democracy.

And if you evaluate the US-led liberal world order, which has more or less kept the peace since 1945, you would be right to think of panic. One of the oddities of US history is that, quite unlike many other countries, the foreign policies of the major parties have not differed much since then. Trump, on the other hand, is clearly inclined to burn the house down. Compared to all previous administrations, he is arguing for a series of major shifts.

• From a paradigm that combined values ​​and profits to pure transactionalism with a personal twist born of what could be called delusions of grandeur.
• From multilateralism to bilateralism, because Trump hates alliances he doesn’t control.
• From practicality to political vendetta, Trump is expected to reverse any policy he sees as that of his predecessor, such as the way world powers disastrously withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran.
• From an instinct to support our democratic allies to an instinct to support dictators who are causing chaos globally.
• From limited interventionism to near isolationism.
• From process and expertise to instinct, ego and emotion.

His return would be a global emergency. I have been attending geopolitical conferences in London and Yerevan over the past month and I can assure you that our allies are panicking. The stakes are too high to risk defeat in November because we are concerned about Biden’s feelings.

Of course, the logistics of that would be complicated. It would be better if he didn’t seem like he was being pushed out. And VP Kamala Harris is a bit of a problem. But there’s a lot of depth in the Democratic Party. I’m thinking of the battleground state trio of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock (and maybe Georgia’s Stacey Abrams). California Governor Gavin Newsom is weak in his lack of awareness and isn’t from a battleground state, but he seems suited to national politics, too. And there are others.

It is unclear who should lead the nomination, but as things stand, if Biden steps down for any reason, the Democratic Party should field a very impressive line-up of candidates, including military and business leaders, a sort of shadow government, as opposed to the specter of Trump.

Dan Perry is a former Middle East editor for The Associated Press based in Cairo and Europe/Africa editor based in London. danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.