Politics

They warn generals not to fight the last war. The same admonition might apply to presidential races. Donald Trump was out on the White House lawn attacking Joe Biden with his usual battery of epithets — ‘dummy,’ ‘loser,’ and so forth — and it sounded like déjà vu all over again. Even as he derides Biden as ‘slower than he used to be,’ it is Trump who is starting to look as though he’s losing his mojo. In 2016, Trump ran a guerrilla campaign in which he was able to sneak up on the enemy, first the Republicans vying for the nomination, then Hillary Clinton. No one took Trump that seriously.

If Joe Biden snatches the White House from Donald Trump in 2020, he will govern as a modern liberal. This week’s Hyde Amendment snafu is proof positive. But only Mr Biden knows if his beliefs have really changed. It doesn’t matter, because his party has. The famously gaffe-prone Biden would lead a censorious party. Whatever he thinks of the new Trump line on China, it’s clear that the elder statesman — who has considered running in nearly every presidential race since 1980 isn’t going to let his best shot yet — and his last shot —  get mired in the details. Joe Biden, architect of the 1994 crime bill, will not reverse Trump’s reform of it.

David Brooks, the center-right Cassandra of the New York Times, reckons that a GOP apocalypse is coming. The data predicted as much in 2016, when all the smart pollsters predicted a Clinton landslide, and I predicted as much when mourning the fact that Trump was the new Republican standard-bearer. But tinsel didn’t rain forth from Hillary’s near-anointing at the Jacob Javits Center. The end of the world is deferred, yet again. Trump is not conservative in the strict sense of the word; he’s a libertarian and a libertine. So you could plausibly argue that despite Trump’s victory, conservatism did not win in 2016. You could even argue that conservatism didn’t really compete at all in 2016, or, if it did, that it lost.

It looks more and more like a foregone conclusion that impeachment proceedings will be initiated against Donald Trump in the near future. Bernie Sanders became the latest Democratic presidential candidate to call for this on Thursday, joining a cast of characters that includes Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Seth Moulton, and Wayne Messam. Bernie’s quandary is a particularly fraught one. He had equivocated for months on impeachment, lagging behind his chief ‘progressive’ competitor Warren, who was first to call for proceedings after the Mueller report’s release. You may not agree with Warren’s analysis, but at least she read the report and formed an independent conclusion.

Japan has a new emperor, and so do we. Donald Trump isn’t merely president. He wants to be America’s shogun. Already Trump has repeatedly made his contempt for his Cabinet officials and staffers plain as he routinely forces them to line up and sing his praises. Now, in an episode that is more redolent of H.M.S. Pinafore than Top Gun, TVSG, or The Very Stable Genius, is enmeshed in an embarrassing brouhaha over the USS John S. McCain, which was inconveniently parked off the shores of Japan, where Trump might see it. Klaxons apparently started sounding in the White House over Trump’s Memorial Day visit to Japan. It was time to clear the decks. Under no circumstances could Trump be allowed to espy the dreaded name ‘McCain.’ It would harsh his mellow.

Like the poor according to Jesus of Nazareth, Joe Biden we will always have with us, or so it seems. Can anyone remember when he first ran for president? It was more than 30 years ago, in 1988. I looked it up. Many of the people who work for me weren’t even born when Biden plagiarized his first speech. And now, just as he should be stocking up on Geritol and Viagra and preparing for that Acela Express to the beyond, he is at it again. Running for President. Of the United States of America. Joe Biden and 6m785 other Democratic hopefuls. Opinions about Joe’s potency — as a political candidate, I mean — vary widely. I have several well-informed friends on both sides of the chasm who believe that he will be the candidate.

The Wolff is once more at the door. The Guardian reports that Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, has written a new tome. It’s called Siege: Trump Under Fire. It alleges that special counsel Robert Mueller drafted a three-count obstruction of justice indictment that he then decided to discard. The Mueller team says that Wolff’s report is bogus. But Wolff himself writes that his assertion is ‘based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel.’ He’s also got some eyebrow-raising quotes. ‘The Jews always flip,’ was apparently Trump’s verdict on the cooperation agreements of Michael Cohen, David Pecker and Allen Weisselberg.

There have been darker days for the House of Cheney. In 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney left office amidst two imprudent wars and a capsizing economy. A decade on, the times are surprisingly kind to a family once among the most controversial in American politics. Dick’s daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, is looking at a Senate run. ‘She’s got pretty good foreign policy, national security chops,’ Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said unironically earlier this month. ‘She’d be a great addition.

Referring to her imaginary victory in the midterm elections, the LARPing governor of Georgia, Stacey Abrams, delivered to Democrat voters a come-to-Jesus moment. ‘The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the last 10 years, and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the new voices coming into progress,’ she said to an audience last week. ‘I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and it’s exactly how we won.’ She didn’t win, for the record. But this is what they call in therapy a breakthrough. The Democrats seemed to have finally entered the fifth stage of grief: Acceptance, a time of adjustment, readjustment and resolve.

Oscar Wilde once observed that only very superficial people don’t judge things by their appearances. Like many of Wilde’s quips, that observation has the dual advantage of being both witty and true. Its apparent flippancy — in fact, its flippancy is genuine, not just apparent — does not so much conceal as embody the deep truth it expresses. Thomas Aquinas also appreciated the importance of appearance as the ambassador of truth. Aquinas tended to speak of pulchritudo, ‘beauty,’ which he congregated with the good and the true as interwoven ‘transcendentals.’ The beautiful, Aquinas wrote, is id quod visum placet, that which having been seen, pleases.

Inquiring minds want to know: should Nancy Pelosi, who has hitherto prudently fended off calls from her left flank for impeaching Trump, adopt the lesser tack of launching an impeachment inquiry? Progressives want progress, which is to say they’re intent on ousting Trump from office by any means necessary. Their thinking is that starting an inquiry may not be tantamount to impeachment, but will help erode Trump’s defiance of Congress, thereby allowing it to inform the public of his various transgressions. Trump has instructed his former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II not to meet Congress, an edict he obeyed this morning to the vexation of Jerry Nadler, the head of the House Judiciary Committee.