Fiddling While Rome Burns
A new book about Trump’s 2024 election victory is a profoundly unsettling account of the Democratic Party machinery’s refusal to respect their own voters or offer any answers to America’s problems beyond maintaining the status quo.
Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr)
On 5 November 2024, the night of Donald Trump’s historic second election victory, it suddenly — and unexpectedly — looked as though he would win Pennsylvania. Of all the seven swing states Trump needed to win in this intense, closely fought race, Pennsylvania was said to be the most important, not least due to the fact that it was the birthplace of Joe Biden.
Among Kamala Harris’ senior staffers, a sickly feeling spread. It had been only four and a half months since Biden had suffered a professional catastrophe while debating Trump; the entire country witnessed a frail, mentally challenged man appearing as if he had scant knowledge what was going on around him.
High–powered Democratic donors were the first to explode in their cell phones, followed by top party officials, often sitting alone in their living rooms, vaguely expecting something of what actually happened. This is covered for the first time in Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, the new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
In Fight, these two veteran Washington D.C.–based journalists portray a devastating inside–the–Beltway tale in which a small cadre of Democratic leaders — mainly Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama — basically disagree about what to do next. As Allen and Parnes put it, ‘the same scene played out on the screens of politicians, party operatives, and progressive pundits across the country — a widespread freakout unlike any other in American history.’
In all, it took 24 days for the Democratic apparatus to finally turn on an enraged Biden, forcing him to leave the race. His family and small circle of insiders insisted he had only been suffering from a cold that night. A furious First Lady, Jill Biden, attacked his detractors, buoyed by Hunter, the family’s scandal–plagued son, who played a leading role in bashing his father’s ‘enemies’.
‘People close to [Biden] would never cop to the complicity of their own silence,’ the authors write. To them, ‘it wasn’t a linear process’ and Biden was not always exhibiting what could be called dementia–like symptoms. But still, his condition was disturbing, as everyone now understood. Even before his fateful debate, Biden’s ratings had significantly fallen, with the party gearing themselves for a very tough battle.
The first decision was to coax Biden to remove himself from the running — a very difficult chore. The second decision was to choose, in some manner, a new party nominee. Kamala Harris was eventually settled upon as the replacement by his longest friends, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who had worked hard to develop state–wide Democratic coalitions in response to what they saw as Obama’s neglect of the party faithful. Led by longstanding loyalist Donna Brazile, there was a large groundswell for Harris as Biden’s loyal vice president.
Obama — never a big Harris fan, according to the authors — wanted to stage a series of mini primaries so that the public could decide for itself. Beyond that, Obama was a big fan of Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, for her intellectual heft. Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Californian wanted another candidate — as one staffer put it, ‘she doesn’t like Harris.’
Clintonworld — the term widely used for the huge informal network of political staffers who have passed through Bill and Hillary’s operations over the years — effectively controlled the decision to give Harris the job. Some in other factions of the party, usually never named, complained that she had made little, if any, leeway in her own presidential run, dropping out early because of mismanagement and money problems. Others pointed out her reputation for gaffes during interviews and lack of vision. ‘You know who did that,’ said one unhappy insider, ‘Bill and Hillary motherfucking Clinton.’
Pennsylvanians Wandering Away
‘It had just been a couple of hours earlier when I was looking at a six–hour line of college students in fucking Altoona, PA’, said one overwrought Harris staffer. ‘But once it switched, man, it went down quick and hard.’
Turnout in Philadelphia was only a little bit lower than in 2020. But, as the same staffer explained, ‘Trump was winning more of it.’ It would be slightly up in nearby Bucks County, but Trump was doing better there too. Harris had massive crowds in Philadelphia itself, but was lost in nearby mostly white middle and upper middle–class towns after choosing to campaign with Lynne Cheney, the noted Trump-basher and daughter of Iraq policy leader Dick Cheney.
Trump, incredibly cunning and playing to working–class financial problems, campaigned near Bristol, aiming at the working–class whites that Harris usually avoided. During his extensive campaigning through that state, Trump made repeated promises to bring down grocery prices and bring in new jobs, never hinting he’d be signing off on the destruction of Medicaid and social security just months later. In the end, Trump would win in Pennsylvania by 50.4 percent to 48.7 percent, as well as Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina — making up more than 90 electoral votes.
Residents of Dearborn, Michigan — home to the United States’ largest Arab community — voted Trump rather than Harris, believing his promises that he would end the war in Gaza, never mentioning that his actual plan was to collaborate closely with Netanyahu, and no hint that he would soon be advocating the removal of Palestinians to make Gaza into a luxury resort for the rich.
But this isn’t to say that Biden hadn’t manipulated voters. Always used as a gauzy photo shoot near Independence Hall, Philadelphia had become over the years ‘the country’s poorest big city,’ stealing that title from Detroit. A fifth of the city’s residents live in poverty, trying to make ends meet on the federally mandated $7.25 an hour. In contrast, Philadelphia’s suburbs are mostly prosperous, and along with Center City competed with legal, medical, architectural and design peers up and down the east coast.
Nevertheless, rusting factories — often shutdown as a result of Clinton’s neoliberal 1990s trade policies — still remained for miles, despite Biden’s ongoing braggadocio about reindustrialisation. In the ongoing economic malaise, many working–class men and women in Pennsylvania were in no mood for Harris’s ‘happy talk’ campaign, totally bereft of Bernie Sanders’s important ‘laundry list’ of political demands. With Harris, there were few specifics.
The Clintons, however, had conjured up a plan in restructuring state organisations —as the authors point out, ‘in large part it was designed to stop the party’s leftwing from taking control’ — to keep ‘progressive outsiders’ out of the picture. And at the Democratic Convention, Harris saw to it that no pro–Palestinian voices would address her convention.
On the night of the convention, Biden was seething. His speech was pushed back out of prime time to 11:30. ‘They were all so eager to get rid of him,’ the authors surmise.‘This final insult, his gold–watch retirement ceremony playing out to an emptying arena and a smaller TV audience, really burned.’
No Daylight, Kid
During the previous few months, Biden had repeatedly reminded Harris that loyalty to him meant everything. And she had complied, never once wavering in her support. The way he put it was ‘no daylight, kid’ — any attempt to encourage intrigue and disunity was not helpful to her campaign.
‘Most voters did not see Biden’s first term as the most compelling recommendation to give him a second term,’ said one staffer. When Harris was interviewed on the extremely popular show The View, she was asked what she would have done differently than Biden. She replied, ‘There is not a thing that comes to mind,’ creating a response that would hurt the campaign to the end.
In a very dramatic way, the ludicrous mid–August debate highlighted the difference between the two candidates. In an incredibly tense atmosphere, the general sense that Harris ‘ran circles around Trump’, the authors wrote, but that he ‘landed serious blows that previewed his fall campaign.’
Trump countered Harris’s policy comments by calling her a ‘radical–left liberal’ who ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison’ and accusing the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio of ‘eating the dogs, eating the cats… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.’ Harris laughed at these remarks but failed in adequately responding when asked whether people were financially better off than they were before Biden took office.
What her aides soon discovered was that the debate had only given her a statistically insignificant bump in national polling — less than a point in the RealClearPolitics average. She had effectively hit a ceiling which would trail her campaign until Election Day.
Only a couple of weeks before the election, Biden upended Harris’s carefully planned speech by making a bizarre call appearance during her speech that went instantly viral. Saying in a strange, disjointed way that ‘the only garbage I see floating out there is [Trump] supporters’, Biden enraged many Trump voters who were instantly reminded of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 mockery of Trump supporters as being ‘a basket of deplorables’. ‘It was a gift,’ a senior Trump aide reflected.
In a final projection of the race, Harris aides presented her numbers showing she would probably lose Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, while she seemed poised to win Michigan and Wisconsin (which never happened). And while Harris would never renounce Biden’s close relationship with the Israeli government, Trump travelled to Dearborn to convinced them he was empathetic to the Palestinian people’s plight. He increased his share of Latino votes from 32 to 46 percent, Asian American votes from 34 to 40 percent, Black women from 13 to 14 percent, and Black men from 19 to 21 percent.
In the end, Fight is a profoundly unsettling microcosm of the Democratic leadership as it currently stands. Since Trump’s election has veered so hard to the right, there has been a noticeable shift — at least for now — towards progressive solutions and attacking Trump’s actions in a direct manner.
It can only be hoped that this is a growing progressive fightback, and that it is not strangled at its infancy from gaining greater influence by those forces in the Democratic leadership who have been so low on ideas for much of this century so far, and prove completely incapable of providing their own responses beyond the maintenance of neoliberalism.