Trump and Napoleonic War Rule

July 10, 2024

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Numerous adjectives have been used to describe Donald Trump’s behavior. Reserved was rarely one of them – until recently. Below I look at how the former president’s newfound discipline is actually a mirage. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

A fire that needs oxygen

When Joe Biden’s team proposed a June debate – the earliest in modern presidential history – their theory was clear: Trump’s vitriol would turn off viewers, while Biden would come across as dignified and presidential. Instead, Biden endured arguably the worst night of his five-decade career, leaving 50 million viewers stunned. Not only is his 2024 candidacy now in jeopardy, but some people, including my colleague Adam Serwer, have argued convincingly that Biden should immediately resign from the presidency.

Biden’s team argued for months that this election would be “about Donald Trump.” At the debate, Biden tried to remind voters of Trump’s deplorable character (including his recent criminal conviction). But as always with Trump, many voters seem ready and willing to overlook his litany of misdeeds — which means the Biden campaign’s grand strategy is failing. “Donald Trump, in my opinion, is on track to win this election. And maybe even overwhelmingly, winning the Senate and the House,” Democratic Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado said on CNN last night. “I think we could lose the whole thing, and that’s mind-boggling to me.” My colleague Tim Alberta, who has covered Trump’s reelection campaign for months, reported today that Republican strategists have reached the same conclusion.

Since the debate, Biden’s party has been engaged in an internal war — partly private, partly public — over how to avert disaster. Some elected officials, including Reps. Adam Smith of Washington and Pat Ryan of New York, have called on Biden to withdraw (as has actor and Democratic fundraiser George Clooney). But most people with real power and influence over the president have not yet raised their flag. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina has both pledged his support to Biden and spoken forcefully about who should take his place if he drops out (Vice President Kamala Harris). House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi today dodged the question of whether she personally believes Biden should remain the Democratic nominee, then issued a follow-up statement that was still vague.

Despite all this chaos and dysfunction, Trump’s standing with voters has only improved.

The Electoral College math favors Trump. Biden can’t win the presidency without defending his “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. According to RealClearPolitics polling averages, Trump is currently ahead in all three states — about two points ahead of Biden in Wisconsin and a whopping five in Pennsylvania. (Trump’s lead in Michigan is smaller, at about 0.6 points.) Four years ago, Biden was ahead in all three states — and overall. All Trump has to do, it seems, is not blow everything.

Trump was supposed to be the center of attention this week. After being found guilty in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records, the former president was originally scheduled to be sentenced tomorrow, July 11, but his sentencing has been pushed back to September 18 – assuming the courts do not rule that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity makes such a conviction moot. Instead of marching into the Republican National Convention as a freshly convicted “political prisoner,” Trump is maneuvering his way through a period when Biden is dominating the headlines.

Last night, I asked one of Trump’s longtime allies, veteran Republican Roger Stone, how he thought Trump was approaching this particularly explosive period of the campaign. He responded with a quote often attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy while he is in the process of destroying himself.” This idea – that Trump is deftly sitting back and avoiding attention while Biden falters – has been parroted by many in the media. But look a little closer and you’ll find that Trump is still Trump.

Just listen to what the former president said at his rally in Doral, Florida, last night. Trump admitted that he didn’t really know what NATO was before his presidency, re-praised Hannibal Lecter (“he was a lovely man”), lamented that Americans don’t like bacon anymore, and spread panic that tourists in Washington, DC, were being “shot, robbed and raped” while visiting the Jefferson Memorial. (He also recalled the most embarrassing moment of the debate, when he challenged Biden to an 18-hole golf match.)

But this wasn’t just a night of sloppy reversals. Last weekend, Trump made the ridiculous claim on Truth Social that “every one of the lawsuits” he is involved in, including the civil suits, “were brought by Crooked Joe Biden and his fascist administration for the purpose of election interference.” This is a serious accusation, even for Trump. As always, if these things were said by anyone other than the former president, they would label such a person as unfit for office and mentally ill. But, as Dave Weigel and Benjy Sarlin of Semafor have noted that many of his strangest outbursts go unnoticed because Trump now exclusively uses his own niche social network rather than X. Trump’s boastfulness simply doesn’t dominate news cycles the way it did four or eight years ago.

Trump card want to wrest the spotlight back from Biden, even if that desire could end up hurting him. To win the election, Trump must continue to woo moderate and swing-state voters away from Biden. But he can’t help but be… himself. On Truth Social today, Trump called on House Republicans to subpoena “crazy Jack Smith” and “immediately investigate his ILLEGAL INVESTIGATION of me.” And despite reportedly pushing to remove a national abortion ban from the Republican Party’s 2024 platform, Trump joined Brian Kilmeade’s Fox News radio show today and boasted that “abolishing Roe v. Wade“ was “an incredible thing.”

Some say the media has been piling on Biden over the past two weeks, but the truth is that what is currently troubling Biden and the Democratic Party is an important story worthy of thorough reporting: the allies of the incumbent President of the United States cannot agree on whether he is fit for another term, and the President is currently ignoring their concerns out of hubris.

At the moment, the world seems like a distorted mirror of the Trump era. Many Democratic politicians say one thing about their president in public, but the opposite in private. Trump, on the other hand, should just stand back and watch the fire, but he can’t even do that. Trump himself is still a bigger fire, and every fire needs oxygen.

Related:

Today’s news

US-made F-16 fighter jets are currently being delivered to Ukraine and NATO allies have pledged to send Kyiv dozens of air defense systems.
A federal judge is expected to dismiss Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, citing “transparency” issues; he expects to make a final decision by Friday.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has filed charges against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, accusing them of failing to recuse themselves from certain cases and failing to disclose gifts they received during their time in office. The plan will likely fail in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives.

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Evening reading

Illustration shows Alice Munro and sentences from her work — Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Diane Bondareff / Invision / AP.

Alice Munro was a terrible mother

By Xochitl Gonzalez

We should be used to this story by now: a beloved artist is brought down by his own misconduct, knocked off his pedestal, his works relegated to a distant shelf. Since the beginning of the #MeToo movement, publishing, like film and music, has lost its share of idols. But the mourning for Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro has a different tone.

Read the full article.

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