American press corps faces a test of its own

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BERKELEY – US President Joe Biden has declined the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. He has done so despite being “the best president of my lifetime,” as the economist Noah Smith put it, and because he concluded that his vice president, Kamala Harris, would be a good president, too.

I agree with Smith and hope someday to write a commentary about how great Biden’s presidency has been. For now, however, I will focus on someone else who is old and visibly failing, and whose vice-presidential running mate would have a much better chance of governing effectively. Of course, I am referring to Donald Trump, who should follow Biden’s example by declining the Republican Party’s nomination and endorsing his running mate, J.D. Vance.

In this context, the American press corps now faces a test of its own. Will it relentlessly press the “Is he competent” question, as it did with Biden? Or will it continue its standard operating procedure of interviewing ill-informed, easily grifted people in diners, covering Mar-a-Lago court intrigues, and saying as little as possible about the damage that another Trump presidency would do to the United States and the world? We will see.

Obviously, Trump would never even consider passing the torch, because that would mean that he cares one iota about the policies he purports to espouse and the party he purports to represent. Nobody believes that, nor does anybody think that professional Republicans would engage in the kind of internal conversation that professional Democrats held before July 21.

Those debates were difficult because Biden’s supporters had a point: If he could just make it past the election, he would still be a good president for the next couple of years. Since the same cannot be said for Trump, the Republicans’ internal debate would be much easier.

It won’t happen, though, because the Republican Party is now a cult. Professional Republicans would have to exhibit a modicum of what the great fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun called the virtue of asabiyya: a willingness to leave your back bare to protect the backs of your comrades, knowing that they will have your back in return.

Professional Democrats do have asabiyya, as do those Republicans, like Liz Cheney, who have been cast out. Professional Republicans who remain in the fold are, by definition, grifters who are in it for themselves. Consider former South Carolina Governor and US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who used to say things like:

“The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election.”

“You’ve got a Donald Trump who’s unhinged, and he’s more unhinged than he ever was. And why are we settling for that when the country is in disarray and the world is on fire?”

“I know the American people are not going to vote for a convicted criminal.”

“[Trump’s] made it chaotic. He’s made it self-absorbed. He’s made people dislike and judge each other. He’s left that a president should have moral clarity, and know the difference between right or wrong, and he’s just toxic.”

“I feel no need to kiss the ring. I have no fear of Trump’s retribution. I’m not looking for anything from him. My own political future is of zero concern. So I hear what the political class says. But I hear from the American people, too.”

“We’re talking about the most demanding job in human history. You don’t give it to someone who’s at risk of dementia.”

She will not say anything like that again. And nor will Vance ever repeat any of these previous statements about Trump:

“My God, what an idiot.”

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

“I don’t think [Trump] actually cares about folks. I think he just recognizes that there was a hole in the conversation and that hole is that people from these regions of the country, they feel ignored.”

“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.”

But what profits a man or woman if he shall gain the whole world and lose his or her soul? Worse yet, to lose it for Trump.

J. Bradford DeLong, a former deputy assistant US Treasury secretary, is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 2022).