Six Weeks in America

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

It was the best of summers, it was the worst of summers.

Depends who you ask.

Looking at just six weeks in America, it’s a wonder we’re not all on benzodiazepines.

Week One (June 23-29): In the lead-up to the presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on June 27, there is the sense among Democrats that things are looking OK for the president. His poll numbers and approval ratings are inching up, and while nobody is chilling the champagne, there is the sense that the president, coupled with ex-President Trump’s legal problems — he is about to be sentenced on his felony convictions in New York — is in decent shape heading into the last lap of the 2024 election. But then, on debate night, a tentative Joe Biden shuffles across the stage in Atlanta like Tim Conway’s “Old Man” from The Carol Burnett Show, and the disaster has begun.

Afterward, during a debate in which millions of Democrats sat in living rooms and bars wondering what the hell it was they just saw, commentators sympathetic to Biden talk about how the real story was Trump lies and how, actually, Biden had a good second half of the debate. But it is clear: Joe Biden isn’t Joe Biden anymore — and it has nothing to do with fact-checking. Some immediately intimate the president should drop out of the race.

Week Two (June 30-July 6): The Supreme Court issues Donald Trump a stack of “Get Out of Jail Free” cards in Trump v. United States. The sentencing phase of his New York criminal case is postponed until September. As the week progresses, the intimations from Democrats that Biden should drop out are now whispers. On July 5, Biden does a taped interview with ABC’’s George Stephanopoulos, which not only doesn’t stem the bleeding, it reminds Democrats why there’s so much blood. Biden blames his poor debate performance on it being a bad night, on being tired from cycling, sick, distracted by the madman next to him. He challenges Stephanopoulos. He is petty. He sounds like Trump. And while the poll numbers aren’t cratering, they are crumbling. Minnesota and New Mexico are now toss-ups. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Arizona look terrible.

By the end of the week, the whispers are now guest editorials.

Week Three (July 8-13): Donald Trump survives an assassination attempt, emerging, literally, bloody and defiant. He is now not just supported by the GOP, he is worshipped. He has been sent and spared by God to save America. Democratic officials are now begging Biden for the sake of American democracy to step aside, while rank-and-file Democrats on social media skewer one another for defending/abandoning the president. 

Week Four (July 14-20): Trump picks J.D. Vance to be his vice president, and Milwaukee, which is hosting the GOP National Convention, runs out of ear gauze. Aileen Cannon, a Florida federal judge, dismisses the classified-documents case against the ex-president. Later in the week, the White House announces President Biden has contracted COVID-19. Democrats are wondering why the gods hate them. Trump’s acceptance speech at the convention is long, repetitive, unfocused, interminable, and mendacious. He doesn’t get a post-convention bump, but he doesn’t need one.

Week Five (July 21-27): Biden announces he is stepping out of the race and anoints his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the party’s standard-bearer, an announcement that inexplicably unites Democrats who had otherwise hoped for Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, Michelle Obama, George Clooney, or a contested convention. Suddenly, it is remembered that three years ago, Vance said something about cat ladies. He once called Trump “America’s Hitler,” and that Trump should fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state.” There are stories about a sofa, and how Vance loves his wife, even if she’s not White. They’re ridiculous, taken out of context, patently false, but the narrative doesn’t go away. Vance, who was born with one name and changed it to another before settling on this last iteration, looks ridiculous, and Trump, like Jack Woltz in “The Godfather,” cannot be made to look ridiculous. Trump is reportedly having second thoughts about Vance. This is not the rollout the campaign wanted. The totality of GOP media strategy, all designed to destroy Biden, has to be scrapped and reconfigured. Harris rakes in more than $200 million during her first week as the party’s nominee, many from first-time donors. Minnesota is suddenly blue again.

The run of GOP good weeks is over.

Week Six (July 28-August 3): Donald Trump tells a Christian group that, after November, there will be no need to vote again. Republican leaders say he’s joking. A deep dive into the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 reveals its desire to end overtime pay and contraception, and for America to embrace Christianity and a time when Robert Young came home from work on Father Knows Best with only a lesson he could give Bud. It’s New Coca-Cola. Nobody likes it. Trump, his ear healed, distances himself from the plan, even though his vice president wrote the foreword for it. Trump then goes before the National Association of Black Journalists and mocks and disparages the identity and upbringing of Kamala Harris, whose father is Jamaican and whose mother was Indian. Days later, Joe Biden negotiates the release of American hostages, including Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal. Trump had previously said that only he could get Gershkovich returned because of his special relationship with Vladimir Putin — but he’d do so, Trump added, only if he’s re-elected.

It’s only August, so who knows the ebbs and flows that are coming, but Kamala Harris, the new leader of an emboldened, energetic, well-funded Democratic Party, will receive the nomination in Chicago at a convention that suddenly has hope, light. 

August for Republicans could be what July was for Democrats.

In early September, Donald Trump will be sentenced for those 34 felonies.

If there’s another presidential debate — and Trump has agreed, canceled, proposed another one, and give an ultimatum about yet another — Kamala Harris will walk to the podium and stand feet away from the only old man left in the race.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter — quit laughing — and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. His books include “Jack Sh*t: Volume One: Voluptuous Bagels and other Concerns of Jack Friedman,” and the follow-up, “Jack Sh*t, Volume 2: Wait For The Movie. It’s In Color,” which was released in June. In addition, he is the author of “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later,” “The Joke Was On Me,” and a novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages.” See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2024

Populist.com