US President Joe Biden invited me to the White House for lunch. But it was all off the record, so I can’t reveal anything he said.
But I can tell you two things: what I ate and how I felt afterwards. I had a tuna and tomato salad sandwich on whole-wheat bread, a bowl of mixed fruit, and for dessert, a chocolate milkshake so good it should be illegal.
What I felt next was this: All you Fox idiots who say Biden can’t put two coherent sentences together, know that the president has just joined NATO, Europe and the entire western alliance — from Canada to Finland and beyond. to Japan—to help Ukraine protect its nascent democracy against the fascist onslaught of Vladimir Putin.
This enabled Kiev to inflict substantial losses on the Russian army, thanks to a rapid deployment of US and NATO trainers and massive transfers of precision weapons. Not a single American soldier lost his life.
It’s the best example of managing and building alliances seen since another president I’ve covered and admired — and about whom there were also those who said he was incapable of putting two sentences together: George HW Bush. Bush Sr. helped manage the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany without firing a shot and without the loss of a single American life.
Unfortunately, though, I left our lunch with a full stomach but a heavy heart. Biden didn’t say so explicitly, but it wasn’t necessary. I could hear between the lines: even though he has reunified the West, he fears that he may not be able to reunite the US.
This is clearly its priority, more than any measure contained in the Build Back Better program, which provides for social and environmental reforms.
And Biden knows that’s why he was elected: because a majority feared the country was falling apart and thought this old war horse named Biden, with his bipartisan instincts, would be the best person for a rapprochement. That’s why he decided to run in the first place, because he knows that without some fundamental unity of purpose and willingness to compromise, nothing else is possible.
But with each passing day, each massacre, each covert racist message, each “defunding the police” initiative, each Supreme Court decision that splits the nation, each speaker expelled from a campus, each false allegation of electoral fraud, I I question whether Biden will actually be able to bring us together again. I wonder if it’s already too late.
I’m afraid that very soon we’re going to break something very valuable. And once we’ve broken it, it’s gone. And we may never be able to get it back.
I’m talking about our ability to transfer power peacefully and legitimately, an ability we’ve demonstrated since the founding of this country. This is the cornerstone of American democracy. If we break it, none of our institutions will continue to function for long and we will be plunged into political and financial chaos.
Right now we’re looking straight into that chasm because it’s one thing to elect Donald Trump and pro-Trump candidates who want to limit immigration, ban abortion, cut corporate taxes, extract more oil, limit sex education in schools, and free citizens from obligation to wear masks in a pandemic. These are public policies in relation to which it is possible to have legitimate differences of opinion, which are the matter that makes up the policy.
But recent primaries and investigations into the Jan. 6 uprising on Capitol Hill are revealing a movement by Trump and his supporters that is driven not by any coherent set of public policy, but by a gigantic lie — that Biden does not won the most votes in the Electoral College freely and fairly and who is therefore an illegitimate president.
Thus, the priority is to install candidates in power whose main allegiance is to Trump and his big lie – not to the Constitution. And they are more than hinting that, in the event of a close election in 2024 — or not that close — they will be willing to turn their backs on the rules and declare victory for Trump or other Republicans who had not received the number. highest number of votes. They’re not whispering this platform, they’re basing their campaigns on it.
We are witnessing a national movement that publicly and loudly tells us: “LET’S DARE TO DO THIS”. And that terrifies me because I’ve seen it happen before.
My formative experience in journalism was watching Lebanese politicians daring to do so in the late 1970s and plunging their fragile democracy into a protracted civil war. So don’t tell me that couldn’t happen here. Not when people like Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano — an election denier who marched on Capitol Hill in January 2021 — has just won the primary, becoming the Republican nominee for governor.
Make no mistake: these people will never do what Al Gore did in 2000—accept a court ruling in an extremely close election and recognize their opponent as the legitimate president. And they will not do what principled Republicans did after 2020: accept the votes as they were tabulated, accept court orders that confirmed there were no significant wrongdoings, and allow Biden to legitimately assume power.
It’s stomach-churning to see the number of Trumpists basing campaigns on Trump’s big lie claim — we know they know we know they know they don’t believe a word they say. Dr. Oz, JD Vance and so many others. Even so, they are willing to hitch a ride on Trump’s trolley to power, and they do so without blushing.
All of this brings me back to lunch with Biden. Clearly he is concerned that we have built a global alliance to support Ukraine and uphold fundamental American principles on the international stage, while at home the GOP is abandoning most cherished principles.
That’s why so many Allied leaders have been telling Biden privately, as he and his team have revived the Western alliance from the cracked pieces Trump left it in, “Thank God America is back.” But then they ask, “For how long?” Biden has no way of answering that question, because we have no way of answering it.
He is not blameless in this dilemma, and neither is the Democratic Party — especially its most left wing. Under pressure to breathe new life into the economy and faced with overwhelming demands from the ultra-left, Biden spent far too much time on expansive spending.
And House Democrats have tarnished one of Biden’s most important bipartisan achievements — a giant infrastructure bill — by holding him hostage to other demands for overspending. In addition, the ultra-left has harmed Biden and all Democratic candidates with radical proposals such as “defunding the police”, an insane idea that, if implemented, would have mainly harmed the black and Hispanic base of the party.
All we need to defeat Trumpism is, say, 10% of Republicans leaving their party and allying themselves with a center-left Biden, which is what he was elected to be and what he still is at heart. But if the general perception is that the future of the Democratic Party will be defined by the ultra-left, we may not get even 1% of Republicans on board.
That’s why I left my lunch with the president with a full stomach but a heavy heart.
