Biden's Ceauşescu Balcony Moment

The Debate Was Not Just A Crisis For The President, Though

Jon Stewart: ‘A lot of people have Resting 25th Amendment face.’

I’m late with today’s newsletter because I sat up all night to watch the debate, and only woke up at noon. I’m glad I did, in all honesty, because what I saw — what we all saw — was historic. President Joe Biden’s self-destruction on stage was so raw and undeniable that I could only nod when a friend watching back in the US texted to say, “This is like Ceauşescu’s balcony speech.”

He refers to the elderly Romanian dictator’s 1989 address to the masses from Communist Party headquarters in Bucharest, in which the vast crowd turned on him, and marked the end of his rule. Seriously, watch the clip (I’ve cued it to the moment.) It’s a great comparison. History changed in that speech. Obviously Joe and Jill Biden aren’t going to have to flee for their lives, but it is now clear that, as with Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu, Biden’s presidency is suddenly and dramatically over.

Here, in a post-debate rally, is the First Lady speaking to the President of the United States like he’s a toddler and she’s his mommy. The one quote that everybody who saw the debate will remember is this:

There it was. That was the whole debate right there.

Now, it is true that Trump was … Trump. He blustered, he bragged, he exaggerated, he lied, he evaded direct answers, the whole thing. We’re used to that. What was different this time was that he stood on the stage with an enfeebled opponent, whose catastrophic weakness made Trump seem confident and in control.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Trump better in this kind of setting, to be honest. I know that’s a low bar, but he really did seem to have self-control this time (maybe it was the CNN format, which allowed moderators to cut off candidate’s mikes). Recall in one of his 2020 debates with Biden, his big mouth made him seem like a bully. This time, he seemed content to let Biden wreck himself. By contrast, Trump seemed lively and engaged.

I was actually surprised by how smart Trump’s answer on abortion was. Sure, he could have been a lot better, but it’s actually good politics to talk about how the issue has been returned to the states — and to point out that the Democrats would allow unborn children to be killed up to the point of birth, and even after. Biden blustered that Roe v. Wade wouldn’t allow that, but that is completely untrue. Trump was right.

Still, it was jarring to hear Biden rattle off fact after fact (Trump did this too). Who cares?! In a perfect world, we should care. But that’s not how people vote in the visual media age. Most people, I would wager, lack the information to judge these kinds of claims, and don’t think much about it. They go with their gut. It’s visceral. I don’t like it, and you probably don’t either, but that’s the world we live in, and have lived in for some time.

I recall back in 1984, arguing with my Reagan-loving dad about why Walter Mondale was the better choice (I know, I know; I was seventeen.) I hit Daddy with a poll that showed that on most issues, Americans preferred the Democratic position — even as they strongly preferred Reagan. My dad looked at me like I was some kind of nut. Obviously Reagan was the better candidate — have you seen that Mondale, boy? I was very, very frustrated by that, but see, this was my problem. My father was doing what most people do in the visual age: going with his gut. This is a constant problem for intellectuals, who like to believe that sweet Reason alone decides these matters. There is that funny anecdote about liberal Adlai Stevenson running for president in the 1950s. A supporter in the crowd told him he has the vote of “every thinking man.” To which Stevenson replied something like, “I’m afraid that won’t do — I need a majority.”

I’m not saying that Mondale actually would have made a better president, or Stevenson. As a middle-aged guy, I’m embarrassed by my teenage Mondale enthusiasm. My point is that intellectual types are forever deceiving themselves about how politics in a democracy actually works.

I was annoyed that there wasn’t a single question from CNN about woke issues (including transgenderism and free speech), or about the rampant, violent anti-Semitism we have seen in America this year. Trump allowed Biden to get away with yammering about Charlottesville, when almost every week pro-Palestinian demonstrators all over the country do as bad or worse. Yes, I know Trump brought it up, but he should have centered that attack. More to the point, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash should have made an issue of it. Still, it was jarring to listen to how out of date Biden’s carrying on about Charlottesville, and even January 6, was in light of the violence, the hatred, and the chaos that has swept across parts of America this year. Trump did bring up the BLM 2020 riots, but he could have been more effective at that.

But look, we are at a point in American history in which a presidential nominee can say in a freaking presidential debate, “I did not have sex with a porn star,” and nobody even blinks. What does that tell you?

I could go on, but really, why? Everybody saw how awful that was for Biden. Here, for example, is Regime Media big Chuck Todd saying on TV last night that what the entire nation saw last night on TV was that the claims conservatives have been making about Biden’s cognitive decline is … true. That’s why the papers and the Internet is churning right now with Democratic bigs saying that they’ve got to figure a way to get him off the ticket. The theory was that Biden wanted this early debate to reset the fall campaign, and to settle concerns that he wasn’t fit. If true, that was a catastrophe. The digital front page of The Atlantic, the parish newsletter of the centrist Establishment and therefore a barometer of what the Cathedral thinks, has three separate articles now calling on Biden to go. Until last night, the most insane and self-destructive presidential decision of 2024 was Emmanuel Macron’s calling a snap parliamentary election after the European parliament vote.

However, I think it might have been the case that Democratic Party elites pushed this early debate because they knew how it would go, and they wanted to give themselves time to implement a Plan B. But what could it be? They all know that the highly unpopular Kamala Harris would be a disaster. California Gov. Gavin Newsom? Far as I can see, the only way to get someone Not Kamala Harris on the ticket is to have an open convention in Chicago, and allow delegates to horse-trade until they agree on somebody. But as someone observed on Twitter last night, with violent pro-Hamas demonstrators expected to cause chaos outside the convention, is it really the chaos that the Democrats want to risk a hot mess inside the hall too? I don’t see where they have any real choice in the matter. If they stick with Biden, they’re going to lose.

But consider this, from an account you really should follow:

And from another good account:

The crisis we all saw revealed undeniably last night goes beyond Biden’s haplessness. Even though anti-Biden partisans like your diarist were pleased by the result, it is very, very hard for anyone outside the MAGA faithful to take uncomplicated pleasure in what happened. At one point late in the debate, the two old men running to be President of the United States fell into arguing about their golf handicaps. This really happened. Both Trump and Biden were very far from the kind of men you want running America. Even as I cheered Biden’s self-immolation, I kept thinking, “We could have had Ron DeSantis.” But that’s not who Republican primary voters wanted.

Once again, Carlo Lancelotti:

Can anybody not all-in on the Trump personality cult really believe that the garrulous braggart who helped Biden demolish himself last night is the best we can do? I watched the debate with a conservative European friend, who said sadly at one point, “I feel very sorry for you Americans.”

The presidency is more than the president. It’s policy. With Trump back in the White House, we will not have radical loonies like Admiral Rachel Levine, gaming the system to do insane things like casting aside scientific standards to make it easier to chemically castrate children, in the name of achieving a trans utopia. That’s reason enough to vote for Trump, in my view. When Biden said twice last night that a big group of presidential historians voted Trump the worst president in American history, I laughed out loud. Oh? It was also the case that over 50 former top US intelligence officials signed off on the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Who believes in these institutional authorities anymore?

Joe Biden is the walking embodiment of the exhausted American Establishment. More and more people have simply lost their faith in our Ruling Class. You could scarcely have a more potent symbol of its impotence. Biden represents one form of American decline.

Donald Trump represents a different, more vigorous, version of the same thing. He’s not a serious person. He is the barstool’s idea of a strong leader — all egotistical smack-talk. It’s impossible to believe he has convictions, a moral and intellectual foundation, and a plan to do what democracies need their chief executive to do. Again, if you vote for him, as I would if I were going to be in America, you do so out of the hope that he would appoint people who would be a lot better at policy than the other guy’s people.

But look, the United States now faces a world more complex and hostile to its interests than at any time in the postwar period. True, there is no opponent as ferocious as the Soviet Empire was during the Cold War, but then again, that world was far more manageable. The lines were clear. It’s like a Slovak priest said about the new soft totalitarianism: “Under Communism, the Gospel shined a light in the darkness. Now, that light strikes only fog.”

America needs a president, and a ruling class, that can manage, and even reverse, the country’s decline relative to other powers. Russia is once again a major challenge — not the challenge it was in the Soviet period, but also not the weak post-Soviet state it used to be. China is another thing entirely. And the rapidly changing threat from Islamic terrorism still exists. Besides which, the entire West, of which the United States is the leading state, faces immense internal problems, most of all from mass immigration, but also from internal strife and decadence.

It takes a lot more faith than I have to believe that Donald Trump is the answer to these massive challenges. At some point last night, you just had to check out from his incessant claims that when he was president “we had the best ___ in American history,” and so forth. Who believes this crap? Who believes that Trump will settle the Russia-Ukraine war before he’s even inaugurated? One can believe that things were better under Trump than under Biden, and would be again, without having to accept this inane used car salesman pitch. Too many Trump voters are eager to have him pee on their leg and tell them that it’s raining.

This, I think, is what Prof. Lancellotti means by America’s crisis being a cultural and historical turning point. If American liberal democracy has brought us to last night’s debate, between two candidates of that caliber, then people aren’t wrong to wonder if the system is still fit for purpose.

In his excellent New York Times analysis of the recent European parliamentary elections, Christopher Caldwell pointed out that the European Union and its bureaucratic structure was created for a world that no longer exists. In a similar way, I wonder about the American system — not in the same way I question the EU (whose structure is as much or more of the problem than its ruling-class personnel), but rather in a more organic way. I don’t see that in America, our problems are primarily about the structure of the system (again, in Europe, it plainly is, with the EU concentrating power in an unaccountable Brussels elite). With us, I think, it’s more a problem of who we are, not the mechanics of the system.

Here’s an example:

Now, there is no structural reason why the US mainstream media can’t deliver accurate information to the public, including ruling elites. We are not the Soviet Union, in which the media were designed to be ideological organs supporting the Communist system. But it just so happens that the media elites have made themselves into this deformed and blinkered version of journalism. As I’ve said recently in this space, all throughout the institutions of the American system, the managerial class has cut itself off from the kind of information it needs to respond to the actual challenges facing it. The Adm. Levine intervention in the deliberations of WPATH, lobbying successfully for the medical institution to cast aside scientific doubts to implement a politically favorable “solution,” is a paradigmatic example. The fact that the mainstream media by and large still aren’t reporting on this shocking scandal is part of the problem: they don’t want to see problems that make them anxious.

It’s not just the left-liberal regime. If you’ve ever tried to have a critical private conversation with someone all-in for MAGA, you will know what it’s like to confront someone who is ideologically committed to a Narrative, and who will not admit information that challenges it. So many times since 2016, I’ve clashed in conversation with MAGA folks, who cannot allow themselves to conceive of how anyone in good faith could criticize Trump. If you disallow all criticism as in bad faith, then you will not permit yourself to have real-world information that your politician needs to know to do his job. Not every MAGA person is like this, but boy, have I ever run into a slew of them over the years who, in a mirror image of the woke liberals, assume that any questioning at all of the leader and his program is a function of bias or bigotry.

It is this kind of thing that is near to the heart of the systemic crisis. See, this is at the heart of what I call “soft totalitarianism”: it’s not imposed on us by a system that is structurally totalitarian, as in the USSR, but emerges from within liberal democratic institutions and polities. Here is investor Bill Ackman reading the riot act to the mainstream media for lying for Joe Biden by omission. He says that the elite media perfectly well knew how senile Biden was, but either said nothing about it, or echoed the Democratic Party line that such claims were GOP propaganda. More:

The Big Lie is so audacious that people accept it as truth because it is repeated so often that how can it be that something so important and material could be an outright falsehood? In this case the Big Lie was our president’s fitness for office, let alone a second term.

A media organization is not supposed to be a branch of the Democratic Party. The media have a profound obligation to tell the truth to the American people, particularly about something as critical for the country as the president’s mental and physical health. People very close to me, my closest family and friends, trusted the media on Biden until the @CNN commentators finally owned up to the truth about Biden last night.

This approach is widespread throughout our institutions, especially in academia, where to offer an opinion dissenting from the increasingly radical leftist Narrative is to risk your career. Reality will always re-assert itself, as it did on the stage in Atlanta last night. As our institutions are dominated now by the assumptions of wokeness, this is going to hurt them the most.

I chortled cynically last night when Biden claimed that the United States of America is respected all around the world, trusted by its allies, and has a military strong enough to do whatever it wants. I bet he really believes that. The Houthis would like a word. So would the Hungarians, NATO allies who constantly bear the brunt of the US Establishment’s slanders and attacks. And so would very many of the people throughout what we used to call the Third World, who no longer respect or fear America. And you know, so would the many traditional military families in the US itself, who discourage their children from considering a military career because they have lost faith in the politicized leadership of the Armed Forces.

But: if you really believe that returning Trump to the White House is going to fix all this, you are dreaming. Again, the crisis facing the US is so deep that I don’t believe conservatives have the choice of making the ideal the enemy of the good enough for now (“Vote For The Crook: It’s Important”). Yet a vote for Trump is, as I see it, not a vote for making America great again, but merely a vote to try to avoid the elites driving the country off a cliff. Even if my guy, the stable and sensible anti-woke Republican Ron DeSantis, had been the GOP nominee, and was cruising to a November landslide, we would be in pretty much the same position. Trump and Biden, in their separate ways, symbolize American decline. If we were looking at a more robust and sane fall election — DeSantis vs. Newsom, say — all the problems of our decaying order would remain.

So: we are about to see something amazing, as the Democratic Party struggles to figure a way out of the mess it created. The election rules in Ohio mean that they have only forty days to replace the old man and still make the ballot in that key state. Meanwhile, here in Europe, France this weekend begins its two-round parliamentary election, which culminates with the July 7 runoff. It is more than possible that the National Rally — what Regime Media want you to think of as “far right” — will win an outright majority in the parliament. Whatever happens, though, politics in one of Europe’s two most important countries (Germany being the other) will be massively unsettled for some time to come. It is possible that France will become ungovernable.

This is happening entirely because of the failure of French and European managerial elites. Seriously, it is. They created, maintained, and benefited by a system that has done poorly for majorities of Europeans — especially in that it opened the door to mass migration. They trusted in their own wisdom, their own goodness, and their own strategies for marginalizing, even demonizing, critics. Ergo, like the institutionalists of both parties in the United States prior to the Trump era, they have helped to bring about a fundamental crisis of the system.

Final point: everybody saw, live on national television, how incapacitated Joe Biden is. You gotta ask: who is running the country? Who has been running the country?

This is why the Ceauşescu Moment comparison is so apt: that speech was the moment in which the light went on for the Romanians, and they all understood, on live TV, who and what their leader was — and what the system that propped him up was. Watch:

By The Beautiful Sea

I leave you this weekend with this shot my friend Anna took of her children on the Adriatic seashore — the first time the kids ever saw the sea. I love the detail of her little boy glaring in the lower right corner, while his sister flies a kite. This image gives me so much hope. Maybe it will for you too. Great weekend, everybody!