Nervous about November? Stop listening to pundits and start defending the president

This past week’s State of the Union, and the incredibly powerful performance by the President, in any other era, would result in a rash of articles about the strong position he is in as we move closer to the November election. Of course, we don’t live in any other era, and in the post-truth “feelings over facts” timeline in which we live, we know that his opponents are going to double down on their attacks and that is going to fuel even more hot takes about President Biden’s fitness for office from pundits and armchair strategists all over Washington. Some of those takes will repeat deeply offensive and ageist attacks on his mental capacity that were dropped into a special counsel report by a deeply political operative who sought to harm him– despite the fact that the report completely exonerated him of any wrongdoing. That, of course, is the price of doing the right thing in an America that is defined by its MAGA obsession– even when you play by the rules, you will be attacked mercilessly. 

Despite the fact that we’ve been living in a world in which a small group of authoritarians surrounding Donald Trump continue to gaslight and attack the rest of us, there are still pundits and operatives who haven’t adapted their strategies and tactics to those realities. They view every single thing said by the abusers as something we need to consider and we need to be afraid of. These conversations end up fueling private conversations at the cocktail parties all over Washington, in which otherwise well-meaning staffers, consultants and strategists discuss and dissect these attacks to the point where they result in big portions of the progressive infrastructure seizing up, unsure of how to react and afraid that whatever they do will be the thing that will propel Trump back to the White House.

It turns out though that the answer is far easier than the half-baked solutions that seem to make it into the navel gazing podcasts online or the “think pieces” we see in some papers. The answer is to stop looking for alternatives and start defending the President. Every single time we entertain notions that our opponents' attacks are real, we perpetuate the ability for our opponents to create doubt in the minds of voters. Every single time we play on their level and play the “what if” game, we make an undecided voter feel anxious over the President’s leadership.

Otherwise convincible voters are looking for leadership and reassurance that the president is strong and that the past four years have been an incredible success. They don’t want to hear us wonder out loud about what Trump’s allies are saying and they definitely don’t want us to lend those attacks credence. Doing so undercuts the campaign’s ability to make a case for the next four years and undercuts our ability to defend democracy against those who are intent on destroying it. Further, there has arguably never been a clearer choice and message between two Presidential candidates as there is in 2024. The Biden presidency has been an astonishing success that prevented our nation from spiraling into failure, restored confidence in our world leadership and created the most successful economic recovery in the post-pandemic world. We just need to get out there and defend it. 

Meanwhile, while we sit around pondering Ezra Klein or Nate Silver, Donald Trump and his allies are preparing for militarized detention of immigrants and asylum seekers, invoking the insurrection act in order to restrict the exercise of free speech and enabling Russia to attack NATO allies. We know what they are going to do if they win, they are telling us every day. At the ultra-conservative gathering CPAC this week, Trump ally gleefully proclaimed, “Welcome to the End of Democracy” while Steve Bannon gleefully cheered him on.

The only way that we are going to defeat the anti-democratic forces that are looking to transform our nation in ways that keep us all up at night is to present a unified opposition. The only thing that our opponents understand is the exercise of force and power. When we equivocate or fail to defend a President who has brought our nation back from the brink of ruin, all they sense is our fear, and all it does is embolden them. Instead of dragging the entire nation into a debate over our President’s fitness, it's time for all of us to do the one thing that will prevent him from losing– get out there and start defending his record. If not, then we’ll all be sitting around in October wondering where things went so wrong.