Wayne O'Leary

Trump’s Bunker and Biden’s Box

Neither of our presumptive 2020 presidential candidates covered himself with glory during the tumultuous days of late May and early June. Each seemed unprepared to deal with either the issues unleashed by the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis or the new fractious America one of them will shortly have to manage.

As usual, current occupant Donald Trump had plenty to say, but none of it was remotely constructive — and his actions were worse. Joe Biden, for his part, was nowhere to be seen or heard, having transitioned from a front-porch campaign for nomination to a basement campaign for election.

Trump showed once and for all his total unfitness for office. With the country figuratively burning again, as in 1968, he first retreated to his bunker under the White House, drawing unavoidable comparisons to two other famous residents of underground bunkers, Adolph Hitler and Richard Nixon.

Once it became apparent the dear leader was safe from immediate attack by his loyal subjects, he emerged to spew nonsense at the assembled TV cameras. He was the “president of law and order,” he said, before authorizing his Justice Department mini-me, Attorney General Bill Barr, to forcibly clear the immediate environs of nonviolent protesters exercising their First Amendment right of peaceful assembly — a clear violation itself of constitutional law and order.

This exercise in Gestapo tactics led to the infamous Lafayette Square photo-op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, during which the most irreligious of presidents waved a Bible around to please the evangelical portion of his base, then waddled back to the nearby White House to continue ranting about “weak” governors failing to “dominate” supposedly criminal and terroristic left-wing protesters, and threatening legally questionable unilateral military action against American citizens.

In the meantime, an expanded security perimeter featuring tall fencing was erected around the presidential residence to insulate the wannabe dictator from his fellow Americans. At least one big, beautiful Trump wall was thereby completed by the president, though not the one advertised ad infinitum. Rather than walling the undocumented out, he’s walled himself in, becoming, like Dick Nixon at his paranoid worst, a virtual prisoner in the capital when not on the MAGA rally circuit.

With Trump’s increasingly psychopathic behavior and burgeoning fascist tendencies as a backdrop, the path to a Democratic victory and a Biden presidency would seem to be assured. Yet even as the Donald appears on the verge of self-destruction — the polls as of mid-June had him fading fast — nagging questions swirl around the head of the Democratic ticket.

Supposedly, we will see a new, vibrant Joe Biden by election time, as the centrist leopard gradually changes his spots, but disquieting thoughts remain. What’s needed, of course, is another Franklin Roosevelt leading the forces of a modern-day New Deal, but there are doubts the aging Democratic Lochinvar is up to the moment. Bernie Sanders certainly was, but the party’s primary-season electorate, marinated for a generation in political centrism, couldn’t bring itself to trust the self-proclaimed democratic socialist, even though the coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences now all but scream out for social-democratic solutions.

To his credit, Biden seems to be trying his best to seize the initiative. The former veep’s proposal to address the COVID-19 crisis, outlined in late May, is a case in point. Biden would give overall responsibility for coronavirus testing to the federal government, ending Trump’s chaotic state-by-state approach and making expanded nationwide testing the prerequisite for fully opening up the economy.

The Biden plan would create a public-private pandemic-testing board, modelled on FDR’s War Production Board of World War II, to oversee test manufacturing, coordinate distribution, set up testing sites, and increase laboratory capacity. In addition, Biden would task the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) with enforcing comprehensive workplace testing, and establish a US Public Health Jobs Corps of 100,000 contact tracers to identify people exposed to the virus. Polls say these moves would find favor with two-thirds of the public.

Other Biden proposals include the establishment of policy task forces on subjects ranging from the economy and health care to climate change and immigration, with an eye toward economic transformation in particular. Although discredited figures from Democratic administrations past (e.g. Lawrence Summers, Gene Sperling and Rahm Emanuel) continue to hover around his camp, the former vice president has been quietly soliciting ideas from such progressives as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, economist Gabriel Zucman, and union heads Mary Kay Henry of the SEIU and Lee Saunders of AFSCME, among others.

It all sounds promising except for one caveat: No one other than Democratic insiders, political journalists and Internet nerds have heard anything about Biden’s plans; they exist right now in a vacuum, due to the ex-veep’s nonexistent public presence. Biden has been running a lethargic stealth campaign, spending March, April and May largely sequestered in his home, issuing periodic pronouncements and occasional policy proposals few have heard about because he can’t break through the white noise called Trump.

The president, a genius at dominating the conversation, monopolized the media in 2016, and he’s doing it again. To date, Biden is the candidate who isn’t there. Not even his thoughtful but low-key remarks in Philadelphia June 2 on the racial turmoil, his first formal speech in months, made much of an impact.

Then, there’s Biden’s box, a potential trap of his own creation. Having allowed himself to be pressured ahead of time into choosing not the very best person available for vice president in a time of national crisis, but rather a running mate who must be female and must probably be black, the Democratic nominee has severely restricted his options. In the process, he’s reinforced his party’s modern reputation as the captive of special-interest identity politics.

The George Floyd affair has already redirected the 2020 political narrative away from the coronavirus threat and the collapsing economy, and toward the politics of racial symbolism. Will the Biden campaign spend the fall discussing reparations, Juneteenth as a national holiday, the renaming of Southern military bases, and the removal of Confederate statues? If so, frustrated voters could still opt to reelect the despicable devil they know. Democrats may assume Trump will inevitably fall of his own weight, but that’s what they thought four years ago.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2020

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