THE INFAMOUS DEBATE
President Biden’s catastrophic performance during the June 27, 2024, debate with Donald Trump has taken the worldwide limelight in its wake. There is no doubt regarding Biden´s inability to carry on with any leadership task, not to mention the Presidency of the United States. Panic has overtaken the Democratic Party; polling companies are rushing to find who could get more popular support to replace Biden at the last hour. The President’s performance was so bad that Trump seemed to have won the debate. Yet, no one won. The debate was a total disaster. The image it projected was not that of one winner and a loser in a ring but that of a collapsing ring spreading disaster among the public. Thinking of the third possibility, the candidate not in the program, Robert Kennedy Jr., the image was that of Dorothy looking for the Kingdom of Oz accompanied by a tin man without a heart, a lion without courage, and a strawman without a brain. The deficiencies of the candidates may or may not coincide with those of Dorothy’s companions. Still, the situation is the same: the dismal prospect of being guided by people with crippling deficiencies. No wonder the panic has spread worldwide. The one who seemed to be the adult in that election is already too old.
The material to substantiate this impression was exposed during the debate. While Biden showed that what his opponents said about the sad decline of his abilities was true, Trump was at his best in proving that the mendaciousness that has characterized him throughout his life is still there and that he is guided by an inexhaustible will to power and an unquenchable thirst to take revenge for past slights. The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper nobody can accuse of leaning to the left, published a list of mendacious statements by Trump under the headline “Trump’s Debate Performance Marked by Familiar Theme: Falsehoods.” On immigration, he asserted that “we had the safest border in the history of the country,” In truth, his administration coincided with the second-largest surge of immigrants, second only to Biden´s. Referring to January 6, 2021, Trump said: “They talk about a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol and in many cases were ushered in by the police.” The crowd overrun police and injured many of them.
Regarding the economy, he said that Biden had presided over the largest deficit in the country's history. Biden’s deficits are the second largest after Trump’s. Regarding foreign policy, Trump asserted that Putin “would have never invaded Ukraine” if the U.S. had a “real president,” meaning himself.[i] Actually, if there is someone who has helped Putin realize his dreams of rebuilding a Russian empire like the Soviet Union, it is Trump. He has declared several times that he would end the war in Ukraine in one day, suggesting that he would force Ukraine to negotiate and reach an agreement with Putin, which could be obtained only if Ukraine cedes a part of its territory to Russia. This would reassure Putin that the continuation of his declared policy—taking over Eastern Europe—would always be rewarded with at least part of his objective if Trump is the president. Recently, Trump showed that his declarations regarding this point are not empty. He blocked through the Republican Party the provision of U.S. funds to Ukraine, bringing this country to the brink of defeat and allowing Putin to gain more territory in the war.
In this subject, Trump said, “The European nations together have spent $100 billion or maybe more than that—less than us.” The WSJ estimates that American aid to Ukraine totals $107 billion after adjustments. The newspaper estimated the European countries at $110 billion.
With this falsehood, Trump implicitly reaffirmed his fallacious argument that the U.S. should not help NATO members (even if this would violate U.S. formal international commitments) if they spent in their defense less than 2 percent of GDP. The argument is fallacious because the defense of Europe is not a favor that the United States is dispensing on its European friends, as it is frequently described. The defense of Europe is essential for a world power for several reasons. First, it would be stupid for the United States to cede Europe territorially to Russia, a sworn enemy. Second, Europe is the third largest industrial and post-industrial economic power. Leaving it under the control of Putin would multiply several times over Russia’s capacity to defeat the United States, mainly because China is supporting it. Third, Europe is one ally, indispensable in a world where the United States is beginning to confront an alliance between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, which could open multiple fronts worldwide. Using the same Trump fallacy but inverted, someone could say that European countries should not spend their resources to help the United States defend its global status in the South China Sea or the Middle East without realizing that not defending the United States would be equal to not protecting themselves.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States through the 1930s, when World War II was being cooked while isolationism, like today, had taken over the country, never made this mistake. When the war exploded, Roosevelt provided almost unlimited help to the United Kingdom, which fought alone against Hitler for one year and a half from the summer of 1940 to December of 1941, when the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor and the German subsequent war declaration. As continental Europe was already in the hands of Hitler, leaving the UK alone would have given him away all of Europe. Allowing this would have been genuinely idiotic, not just territorially but also economically. It would be equally foolish to cede the gigantic economic power of Europe to Russia. Stop defending Europe would be like you refusing to help your neighbor fight a terrible fire that threatens to spill over into your own home just because he isn't keeping up with his condo fees. Trump and his followers do not understand, or do not want to understand, that Ukraine is putting its territory and the lives of its people in the defense of all of us.
So much for Trump’s assertion that he would stop the threats to the United States with the sheer force of his personality. Putin’s personality overwhelms him.
Hidden under the wings of Biden lurks Kamala Harris, who plays in the same league as Trump, Biden, and RFK Jr, to the point that many people suspect that she has been retained in the ticket because she is the only candidate worse than Biden himself and therefore would not pose any temptation to separate Biden from the Presidency once elected.
THE PROBLEM IS NOT BIDEN OR TRUMP
How could this happen? How could the United States, a world example of efficient governance and democracy, fall into this enormous pothole amid a fantastic period of technological brilliance and economic progress? In moments of danger, the United States has produced great statesmen to manage the country through dark storms, from George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklyn Delano Roosevelt. Now, it presents candidates unable to promise anything better than what her companions could offer Dorothy in her search for the Kingdom of Oz.
Dorothy had no choice but to take her three companions. With three hundred and thirty-three million citizens, the United States should have a plethora of options. However, the reality is starkly different, with a noticeable lack of viable leadership alternatives, not because they are not there but because the people have thrown them on the side in the electoral process. As the old saying says, countries have the governments they deserve.
In the last several decades, the quality of American leaders has declined because the American people are losing their social cohesion, their grit, their mojo. They cannot come together to face the challenges that the new century is posing to them. The Americans have disappeared from the United States. Methodically, the old Americans have transformed into small tribes, warring against each other, exactly reversing the process that leads to the formation of a great society. As explained by José Ortega y Gasset,
<The groups that make up a state live together for a reason; they are a community of purposes, of desires, of great uses. They do not live together to be together but to do something together... The day Rome ceased to be this project of things to be done tomorrow, the Empire was dismantled.>[ii]
The tribes now forming the United States do not have a common purpose except sinking the others, defined in terms of race, sex, gender, origin, or whatever category that may mark the differences between human beings. Tragically, the Trump-admired Putin, the Trump-hated Xi, and many others who want to see the United States and the West destroyed are providing a reason to work together—to survive the attacks they are preparing—but the Americans, busy canceling each other, ignore them. Eventually, they will notice. We may only hope they do it on time.
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Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at Johns Hopkins University Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize and is the author of four books, the last being In Defense of Liberal Democracy: What We Need to Do to Heal a Divided America. His website is manuelhinds.com
[i] Alex Leary, Michelle Hackman, and Vivian Salama, Trump’s Debate Performance Marked by Familiar Theme: Falsehoods,The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2024, https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trumps-debate-performance-marked-by-familiar-theme-falsehoods-531fe5b6?mod=livecoverage_web
[ii] José Ortega y Gasset, España Invertebrada y Otros Ensayos, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2020, pp. 43.