It’s common for political prognosticators, pundits, and amateurs like myself to rely on historical analogs to explain current events and provide some insight into how the future might unfold, but here, after a sitting President has withdrawn himself as candidate a full month after the primary process has been completed, we have none, because nothing close has ever occurred in American history.
For years, we’ve been told that former President Donald Trump is uniquely unfit for office because of his chaotic nature and contempt for democratic principles if not big “D” Democracy itself. CNN, for example, opined in April this year that “Trump is recreating his web of chaos at home and abroad.” Stephen Collinson began by claiming, “Some top Democrats worry that Americans have forgotten the chaos that raged every day Donald Trump was president, and that voters’ faded recall of the uproar will end up handing him a second term…After storming to the Republican nomination, Trump is again the epicenter of controversy. His volatile personality, loyalty tests, rampant falsehoods, thirst to serve his political self-interest and the aftershocks of his first term are compromising attempts to govern the country. And the election is still seven months away.” In February, The Atlantic proclaimed, “Welcome Back to the Chaos of the Trump Era,” citing the “disarray on Capitol Hill, in the courts, and at the Republican National Committee.” The former President’s penchant for chaos was said to be so dire that even his contenders in the Republican primary saw fit to mention it as a critique, frequently to applause from much of the mainstream media. “I agree with a lot of his policies, but the truth is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him,” former Ambassador to the United Nations and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who ultimately went on to endorse President Trump, said last December. “We have too much division in this country, and too many threats around the world to be sitting in chaos once again.” In the lead up to last month’s presidential debate, Democrats insisted that President Biden will reveal Trump as chaotic and unfit for all America to observe in real-time. Jonathan Lemire, Politico White House bureau chief and a former correspondent on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” claimed the President would “provoke” the “Donald Trump we see every day at a rally and that sort of more chaotic Donald Trump that they think will not play well with the viewers who are still going back and forth between the two candidates.” President Biden himself, going back to at least the 2020 campaign, has insisted that President Trump “sows chaos” and is “rooting for chaos.” In comparison, President Biden promised a return to normalcy and an end to the endless drama. As Vox.com put it in 2019, “Joe Biden isn’t promising a political revolution. He’s not promising to drain the swamp, restructure the Senate, remake capitalism, or usher in socialism. What Biden is promising is a return to normalcy.”
Even before his dramatic withdrawal from the 2024 race on Sunday, completed via a bizarre statement posted on X rather than the public address such dire circumstances call for, many would say he failed to deliver, but after, there can be no doubt that the President and his Democrat allies are officially an entire party of chaos as opposed to a single candidate. It’s common for political prognosticators, pundits, and amateurs like myself to rely on historical analogs to explain current events and provide some insight into how the future might unfold, looking for something that has happened in the past and attempting to divine what it might mean in the present. Here, however, the news that a sitting President has withdrawn himself as candidate less than a month before the convention and a full month after the primary process has been completed, we have none, because nothing close has ever occurred in American history. Some are making comparisons to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s withdrawal from the Democrat primary in 1968. On March 31 of that year, he told the nation, “There is division in the American house now.” “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day,” he continued, “I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the Presidency of your country.” Then, as now, President Johnson’s hopes to win a second term were considered slim. After ushering in landmark civil rights and entitlement legislation, conservatives attacked him as going too far, too fast, while liberals were outraged about his conduct in the Vietnam War. Many, even among his own advisors, didn’t believe he would prevail in the primary much less the general election, but crucially, he withdrew before the primary was completed and when voters still had a chance to decide for themselves. After anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy came within six points of beating President Johnson in New Hampshire, Robert F. Kennedy formally declared that he would contest the nomination, making it a real race of both unique politicians and their ideas. The convention itself, where the nominee would be formally declared, was still almost five months away at this point, and there was every reason to believe the next nominee would be selected by Democrat voters through the regular primary process. Further, there was no reason to believe that Johnson was withdrawing because he was cognitively incapable of doing the job. No one doubted his ability to be Commander in Chief. Most doubted his ability to continue leading a country that he himself had helped divide because of his domestic and international policy. While the end result was a contested convention after Kennedy was assassinated in June, the chaos was caused by divisions within the party itself, rather than the party conspiring against its own voters to hide the mental state of their preferred candidate and, once those lies were no longer sustainable, plunging the country into a self-inflicted crisis because they believe their political prospects are better with another candidate.
In other words, Democrats have willfully, intentionally, and selfishly plunged the country – and the entire world – into unprecedented political chaos purely because they think it serves their interest and, moreover, they seek to take advantage of that chaos for their own gain by refusing to select their nominee until after the August convention, leaving less than three months for voters to compare the two candidates and for Republicans to mount a proper campaign. To a large extent, the modern primary system, which dismantled the old convention regime, was designed specifically to avoid this kind of chaos, offering voters of both parties a series of contests spread out over a six-month period to observe the candidates in action, how they comport themselves, debate, what policy positions they endorse, reject, or have changed their minds about, and to evaluate how they react to world events and shifts in the political and international environment. It’s a chance to “live” with a candidate for a while before choosing whether that person should be given the power to influence your lives, your families lives, your countries lives, and the world at large in matters of war and peace. The American people have now been denied that right because Democrats have decided on their own that their candidate can no longer win – after lying about their candidate’s prospects for years, dismissing any and all concerns including a report from his own Department of Justice. Last December was the time for President Biden to withdraw from the race to allow another candidate to emerge during the normal primary process, facing voters as every candidate in the modern era has had to do, and in a democracy of the kind they claim to love so much, the process itself counts as almost as much as the outcome. When we say we support the primacy of the rule of law and adherence to democratic norms in conducting our affairs, we are explicitly rejecting the idea that the end justifies the means. The process itself offers both the necessary transparency and the checks and balances for people to trust the outcome even if they would’ve preferred a different result. President Biden is not unique in history, either at the national, state, or local level, in facing poor electoral prospects after rightfully winning his party’s primary. Many Republicans infamously noted that they should have nominated Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter after the future President’s speech at the 1976 convention. Four years later, the Democrat’s nominee, Walter Mondale was headed towards a crushing defeat, and in another four years, Michael Dukakis’ prospects were almost equally bleak. There were undoubtedly many at the time who would’ve preferred to put in a pinch hitter, so to speak, for the very same reasons President Biden has been forced from the race, but that’s not how democracy works, or at least it’s not supposed to be how democracy works – until now.
Thus, Democrats have placed themselves and the country in the never–before-seen position of having a likely candidate for President who has not faced a single voter or earned a single vote, completely ignoring the will of the over 14 million citizens who properly voted for President Joe Biden in their state’s primaries. Whether they ultimately choose Vice President Kamala Harris*, Governor Gavin Newsom, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever else might emerge over the next four weeks, the American people will have no say in who represents the Democrat Party, no opportunity to learn about them or understand their agenda, no chance to question them, no chance to probe them, and none to vet them. They will be anointed by the party elite, through a process determined and conducted entirely by that same elite, who will then promptly tell the entire country this person deserves their vote, undoubtedly with the aid of a complicit media despite having done nothing to earn it and with no sense of irony or self awareness. In fact, they are so immune to irony that only Republicans seem to have noticed that President Biden saw fit to make this announcement on X, tweeting about a matter of vast national and international importance without feeling the need to appear before the public and answer critical questions. Of course, when Trump was President, governing by Twitter (as it was known at the time) was considered beneath the dignity of the office, a fact that contributed to the chaos he created. Instead of applying the same standard to President Biden, they’ve proclaimed him a hero and one of the most successful one term Presidents in history. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson described it, “President Joe Biden ran for reelection to save democracy. In the end, he came to the shattering realization he could only do so by ceding power himself…In offering to hand over power in service of what he saw as the national interest, he struck a contrast with former President Donald Trump, who fought bitterly against leaving office after losing a free and fair election to Biden in 2020.” Democrat politicians have been even more effusive in their praise for a man who deceived the country about his mental state for months if not years, creating a crisis of his own making and ultimately subverting the democracy he purported to preserve because of his desperation to cling to power. Former President Barack Obama called him a “patriot of the highest order…It’s a testament to Joe Biden’s love of country — and a historic example of a genuine public servant once again putting the interests of the American people ahead of his own that future generations of leaders will do well to follow.” Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed his withdrawal “capped his extraordinary career of service…We join millions of Americans in thanking President Biden for all he has accomplished, standing up for America time and again, with his North Star always being what’s best for the country.” Governor Newsom insisted “President Biden has been an extraordinary, history-making president — a leader who has fought hard for working people and delivered astonishing results for all Americans.”
The American people, I am almost certain, will be far less enthused. You cannot run against chaos and the subversion of democracy by actively creating it and thwarting it. You cannot intentionally create a so-called black swan event, one which has never before occurred, and expect to be rewarded for it. You cannot call the political equivalent of a mulligan and simply introduce a new candidate without repercussion. You cannot resign from the race, but not the office for mental health reasons and expect everyone to laud you as a hero. The bizarre nature of the announcement itself is worth mentioning again. President Biden hasn’t been seen in public since July 17. The idea that he would make such an unprecedented announcement on social media in the middle of random Sunday, mere hours after his campaign team were on the talk shows insisting he remained in the race to win, without speaking directly to voters and reassuring the world that someone, anyone is in charge is frightening on its own, a sign in and of itself of the disdain he and his fellow Democrats have for the American people and the very principles they claim are at risk. Democrats will insist otherwise, of course, and are already actively trying to claim they’re conspiring against democracy to save it. Here’s Vox.com twisting themselves into logical knots, asserting that there’s no threat to democracy here despite how it might seem on the surface. “There may arguably be something a bit uncomfortable about the role of Democratic power brokers and donors in pushing Biden aside after his primary win. But while they’re doing this without voters’ explicit say, they’re doing so in an attempt to (belatedly) respond to voters’ beliefs that Biden is too old to serve another term. So it may be undemocratic in practice, but in a sense it’s democratic in intention. Because the party isn’t avoiding an election, they’re trying to win one, by picking a nominee who (they hope) can win more people’s votes.” The American people, however, will make the ultimate decision. Democrat voters may well have been deceived and their desires thwarted. It seems inconceivable, to me at least, that all voters will not end this insanity by rejecting the official party of chaos and contempt of democracy.
*As of this writing, CNN is reporting that Vice President Harris has secured enough delegates to “win” the nomination, meaning that in less than 48 hours, without giving a single speech, answering any questions, or addressing voters at all, she will be the next nominee. A prime Teddy Roosevelt could not pull off such a feat. I am not sure what this is, but it is certainly not democracy.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 