A New Yorker article published on Monday delivers a portrait of President Joe Biden that might surprise many Americans. Despite the pollsdespite endless headlines focused on his age, and despite pundits desperately clutching at whole strings of pearls, the Biden that emerges from the article is calm and confident.
When it comes to Biden’s strategy for the fall election, Bruce Reed, one of his closest aides, put it simply, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”
That may be true. We can all hope that it is true. But a pair of new polls indicate that there could be a basic problem with counting on Americans to reject Donald Trump’s wild statements and authoritarian schemes: First, they have to know about them. Right now, between a steady diet of headlines making it clear that Biden is old and a relative silence when it comes to reporting Trump’s plans for 2025Americans are in the dark about the stakes of this election.
And unless things change in the way the press reports on both Trump and Biden, the nation could sleepwalk into fascism without ever waking up.
On one hand, Biden’s breezy confidence and command during the New Yorker profile is reassuring. “First of all, remember, in 2020, you guys told me how I wasn’t going to win?” Biden told reporter Evan Osnos. “And then you told me in 2022 how it was going to be this red wave? And I told you there wasn’t going to be any red wave. And in 2023 you told me we’re going to get our ass kicked again? And we won every contested race out there. In 2024, I think you’re going to see the same thing.”
There are certainly reasons to think that Biden is correct. As Daily Kos’ own Kerry Eleveld has reported, Trump has been consistently underperforming his polling numbers in Republican primaries. And a big part of what keeps former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s campaign at least semi-alive as we head into Super Tuesday is consistent reports of Republican voters who are unwilling to vote for Trump if he gains the nomination.
However, recent polls are both perplexing and concerning. In a CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday, the threat to democracy is a wash between Biden and Trump, with Biden taking only a 1-percentage-point edge when voters were asked who will better protect democracy and the rule of law. What’s more, 48% of voters don’t give Trump credit or blame for the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Worse, 56% of Americans either believe that Trump tried to stay in office through legal means or did not plan to stay in office at all.
Another poll, conducted by Democratic pollster Save My Country and reported in The New Republicfocused on voters in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania who did not vote for Trump in 2020 and who do not think Biden’s win is illegitimate. The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most troubling statements—including his desire to be a dictator on “day one,” the Hilter-echoing statement that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and his promise to pardon Jan. 6 insurgents—and fewer than a third said they had heard a lot about these statements.
In late January, focus groups of swing voters seemed largely unaware of many of Trump’s extremist statements. As with the voters in the Save My Country survey, when these voters were told about Trump’s statements, they became alarmed and reported they were less willing to vote for Trump.
But they largely didn’t know about these statements. What’s more, looking back at the CBS News/YouGov survey, many voters seem to have wrapped Trump in a kind of misty nostalgia. An astounding 65% reported that the economy was “good” under Trump, compared with just 38% reporting a good economy under Biden. Trump gets a 6-point edge over Biden when voters were asked about whether each man “fights for people like you.”
The New Republic pins this on Democrats and the Biden campaign, saying, “the lack of voter awareness of Trump’s ‘dictator’ threats shows that the Biden campaign and Democrats don’t appear to have succeeded in making voters aware of the menace Trump poses.”
However, there’s a problem with that angle. The Biden campaign owns no television stations or streaming services. Unlike Trump, it doesn’t own a social media platform. It doesn’t even own a newspaper. The bully pulpit is only bully if someone holds up a microphone. The Biden campaign and Democrats are dependent on the press to get the message out about Trump’s threat to the nation, and the press is simply failing.
It’s not Joe Biden’s responsibility to inform the American public that Donald Trump has said he wants to be a dictator. Biden does not have the sole responsibility for reminding people that Trump crashed the economy, needlessly cost thousands of lives in a pandemic, burned every bridge with our allies, and then tried to hang onto power in a violent coup.
Biden will do that. He does that. But if it doesn’t get reported, it doesn’t matter.
That a great deal of Americans don’t know Trump is regularly dipping into Hitler quotes to talk about the purity of the nation’s blood is a direct failure of the media. That Americans don’t understand that the economy is miles better now than it was under Trump is a direct failure of the media. That the public doesn’t know Trump is regularly wandering off script to make nonsense statements and repeat major mistakes about the most basic issues is a direct failure of the media.
Major press outlets may find it simpler to report polls showing American ignorance, but correcting that ignorance is their job. And they are not doing it.
Here are two stories from The New York Times this week. The first is headlined “Joe Biden’s Superfans Think the Rest of America Has Lost Its Mind.” It starts off talking about an elderly lady, her 16-year-old cat, and how Biden supporters like her “occupy a lonely position in American politics” because Biden is just not that inspirational. It finishes off by talking about how Biden needs to trim the hair on his neck. What do Biden’s fans think of the economy? The Times never asks them.
The second story is headlined “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to Be Effective.” The first sentence of that story begins, “Widespread concerns about President Biden’s age pose a deepening threat to his re-election bid, with a majority of voters who supported him in 2020 now saying he is too old to lead the country effectively …”
If the New York Times were pressing its thumb on the scale any harder, it would need a new scale. Possibly a new desk.
It’s fair to say that everyone is aware that Joe Biden is old. Everyone is even aware that many people are concerned about Biden’s age.
Another story focused on that topic appeared on the front page of the Times on Monday. It’s not hard to predict that another story about Biden’s age will be on the front page tomorrow. There’s even an opinion piece from Tuesday titled “What Would Nancy Reagan Do?” that compares the prospect of Biden’s second term with the final years of the Ronald Reagan administration when Reagan was noticeably suffering from dementia. There is no sign that Biden is facing anything like dementia, but that didn’t stop them from running the article.
How many stories are there about Trump wanting to be a dictator, or his threats to judges, or his calls for vengeance, or his plans to purge the government, or even his demand that the Republican Party boot any remaining moderates? You can count them all, and you won’t even need one finger.
Biden is counting on the American people to reject crazy for normal. And they might. But to get there, the media has to truthfully tell the public what Trump is saying.
Expecting that from the press today … might just be crazy.
Simon Rosenberg from the Hopium Chronicles Substack is back to talk about the facts of the 2024 election cycle. The facts are: Things look bad for Donald Trump—and even worse for the Republican Party.
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