Election Countdown, 110 Days to Go: History Happening All at Once.
How should we act, when we can't know what will happen? Spoiler: we have to keep trying our best.
On February 15, 1933, a few weeks before his first swearing-in as president, Franklin D. Roosevelt greeted a crowd in Miami from the back of an open car. Moments after this photo was taken, an assassin with a pistol began firing from almost as close as this photographer was.
If the assassin’s aim had been better, the US might have had a history with no “the only thing we have to fear” inaugural address, no Fireside Chats beginning “My friends…,” no New Deal, no Roosevelt-Churchill alliance against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. History is a matter of huge global forces, and of chance differences of inches. (Getty Images.)
Things just keep happening. Here is a summary of the points in this post.
No one knows whether the assassination attempt on Donald Trump will “matter,” in political terms. Assassinations have been fundamental turning points in American history. Attempted assassinations, strikingly and weirdly, have mostly slipped from public memory. (Everyone knows about Ronald Reagan. That’s an exception illustrating the rule. Details below.) Anyone who pretends to know where this past weekend’s near-tragedy will lead is making it up.
No one knows whether Trump’s selection of JD Vance will “matter” in the election. But it’s worth remembering why Vance is such a dangerous and fraudulent figure.
No one knows whether Joe Biden’s latest Covid diagnosis will “matter,” nor the reported entreaties by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries that he step aside. But Democrats are aware of the “prisoner’s dilemma” Biden has created for them, and that their time for change has just about run out.
No one knows how long Aileen Cannon, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito will continue their unaccountable intervention in electoral politics. But they are reminders of what’s at stake in this next election.
No one knows what will happen 110 days from now. But the only decent option is to act each day as if the outcome is still in all of our hands.
Now, the details.
1) History as a matter of inches.
When you study history you learn about big, sweeping forces. The Rise of the West. The Rise of China. Demographic pressures. Environmental crises. And so on.
When you live through history you see how much of it is also pure chance—a roll of the dice, a few inches’ difference one way or another in a bullet’s path1. What if Abraham Lincoln had suddenly shifted or stood up as John Wilkes Booth was pulling the trigger? What if Martin Luther King Jr. had suddenly remembered he’d left something in his motel room, and turned away from the Lorraine Motel balcony just as James Earl Ray was taking aim? What if John F. Kennedy had reached down to scratch his leg?
Everyone knows those cases, in which the difference of inches broke the wrong way. But very few people have heard of the cases where fate broke in the other direction:
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, when an assassin’s bullet missed him and instead hit and killed the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, who was standing next to FDR. Harry Truman in 1950, who was on the second floor of his residence at Blair House when armed gunmen stormed the front door. Gerald Ford in 1975, who in a space of three weeks survived two separate gun-assassination attempts, both with pistols at close range.2
This is the American norm—near-misses that recede from public and political memory, once it’s clear that the intended target has survived. With his jaunty and joking demeanor after being shot in Washington in 1981, Ronald Reagan became the main exception. Will the attempt on Donald Trump be another such long-remembered case?
Right now no one can say. The one thing we know for sure (based on current info), is that again by a matter of inches, the country avoided what could have been a major civic catastrophe. John F. Kennedy happened not to turn his head at a crucial moment. Donald Trump happened to turn his. Thank God. I want Donald Trump to lose at the ballot box. I shudder for the country at the thought of his being murdered while on the stump.
But what the Trump attack will ultimately “mean” absolutely no one can say at the moment. (Also what no one knows: What kind of injury, exactly, Donald Trump suffered, since there has been no medical briefing whatsoever.) Not the NYT columnist who within two days of the shooting confidently declared3 that Trump’s survival marked him as “a man of destiny.” And certainly not the newly prominent JD Vance. Who within hours of the shooting, before any information had emerged about the killer, announced this to the world:
Perhaps the lasting “meaning” of this event will be what JD Vance revealed about his character and temperament at that moment. He could not possibly know what happened, since no one did. But he leapt to the interpretation that was most damaging and divisive for the country—and the one most crassly calculated to cement his chances of becoming Donald Trump’s running mate. An ascent Trump announced two days later.
This leads us to…
2) JD Vance and his America.
I have met JD Vance briefly, twice, but “know” him mainly through his work.
What I know from that work makes me view him as perhaps the most deeply cynical figure in current public life. A younger Mitch McConnell. A more nakedly ambitious Lindsey Graham. A less preposterous Tim Scott. A less creepy Peter Thiel. The cynicism has been a constant through an otherwise malleable public presence. Here’s why I say so.
Vance came to public prominence with his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, which I viewed then and now as a form of slumming, or poverty porn. It gave an eager audience of “educated” readers in better-off cities, like the one where Vance himself actually grew up, feel pity for those feckless, addicted hillbillies. If you do a brief online search of “why people in Appalachia don’t like Hillbilly Elegy,” you’ll get many screensful of hits. Here is one sample from back in 2020. There’s a whole book from West Virginia University Press about what people who actually live in Appalachia resent about Elegy. You can read this from The Bitter Southerner. Or listen to this from If Books Could Kill. Deb and I were reporting in West Virginia at this time and heard and reported on a very different “hillbilly” view.
With that book, in my view, Vance had made a calculation similar to the one at the center of the recent film American Fiction and the Percival Everett novel it was based on, Erasure. (Both of which turned on a talented Black author realizing that “liberal” white audiences really wanted to read about dysfunction in the ghetto.) Vance figured out what a book-buying elite wanted to hear, from someone positioned as an “authentic” voice. Even after his experience at Yale Law, in venture capital, and as a protege of Peter Thiel.
That was prelude to the second great cynical pivot from Vance. When he wrote Elegy, he warned that people in Appalachia were easy suckers for charlatans who preyed on them. Among those, he specifically named Donald Trump. His warning that Trump was “America’s Hitler” is now famous. He published a whole essay to this effect, in the wake of his book’s celebrity, in The Atlantic in 2016. This was during the Trump-Hillary Clinton race, when he earnestly warned against Trump’s rise:
During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump….
Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.
Some members of today’s MAGA base seem attracted by pure tribalism. Others know full well what Trump is and stands for. Nikki Haley knows. Mitch McConnell knows. Above all JD Vance knows. His cynicism has paid off for him, so far. Watch him, and watch out. [Update: Vance’s speech this evening at the Republican convention was surprisingly lackluster and dull. Another thing we don’t know: Are we seeing his limits as a speaker on the big stage? Or did he keep this intentionally low-key, to appeal to Vance-curious TV viewers rather than the in-person MAGA crowd?]
3) The prisoner’s dilemma: Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Ten days ago, I argued that Joe Biden had a fleeting opportunity to go out on top and to make himself a lasting hero: of his party, of his country, of the causes he cared most deeply about. He would need only to seize the moment and say, I’ve always done my duty. That duty now is to pass the torch.
Obviously that didn’t happen.
And since then the party’s predicament has become both more urgent and more impossible.