Michael Tracey

'Protest' often feels inadequate as a characterization for the public exhibitions that have erupted nationwide over the past several weeks. The term 'protest' carries a connotation of actions carried out in opposition to existing structures of power; hence, you 'protest' against forces that are arrayed against you (even if some municipal bureaucrat might have reluctantly granted you a permit). However, at least in many jurisdictions, events which were presented as 'protests' should more rightly be labeled as something along the lines of 'state-backed demonstrations.' For instance, in my otherwise sleepy hometown of Caldwell/West Caldwell, New Jersey, high-school students organized what turned out to be an astonishingly large protest march.

Without a doubt, women who level sexual assault allegations against powerful men are often subjected to character assassination and smears.However, evaluating the credibility of a person who alleges that a presidential candidate committed a grievous act of criminal violence is not the same as ‘smearing’ that person.I’m not interested in smearing Tara Reade, who claims to have been raped by Joe Biden. For one thing, I have no particular affinity for Biden. You can go check my archive at The Spectator and elsewhere for numerous examples of articles in which I harshly criticize Biden, especially for his own pattern of deception as it relates to the circumstances of his 2002 Iraq War vote.

One of the mantras for interpreting the nature of Donald Trump has always been to take him ‘seriously, but not literally’. When this maxim was first introduced in September 2016, the advice was clearly useful. Journalists and pundits were in a constant state of outrage over his every utterance. The daily deluge of Trump jokes, wisecracks, obviously figurative exaggerations, and ALL CAPS tweets were incessantly ‘fact-checked’ in the most tedious fashion by members of the media who hated Trump. One illustrative example would be when Trump accused Barack Obama of being the ‘founder’ of Isis. In short order, the fact-checking brigades sprung into action to clarify that Obama had not in fact literally founded Isis.

Though neither her supporters and detractors wanted to hear it, Tulsi Gabbard was always clear that she would support the eventual Democratic nominee. Now, with the Democratic primary functionally over, she has endorsed the nominee — Joe Biden. It’s really as simple as that.Tulsi haters loved to invent wild theories about her supposedly sinister motivations, and were always either unwilling or incapable of just listening to her plain-spoken words. Over and over again, she said she would not run as a third-party candidate and would support the eventual nominee. Anyone surprised by her announcement today had no reason to be: it doesn’t contradict anything she’s said in the past; in fact,  it comports entirely with what she always said she would do.

Elizabeth Warren did not die in a tragic accident yesterday. But judging by the reactions of America’s journalists and academics, you would be forgiven for thinking she had. Instead, she suspended her presidential campaign after a string of self-inflicted, humiliating failures. Yet huge swathes of the overeducated US intelligentsia responded the news as though their entire worldview had been shattered. I don’t see much of a difference in the reactions of Warren’s elite opinion-maker supporters to her campaign suspension and the way Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash was processed by NBA fans: raw trauma and disbelief, with some anger and desperation mixed in.

Perhaps the intense wave of establishment Democratic party consolidation around Joe Biden over the past 48 hours isn’t a concerted conspiracy — no smoke-filled rooms, no corrupt deals, no villainous blackmail schemes. But the Democratic party establishment (which we’re often told does not exist) is clearly making every effort to give the appearance of something conspiratorial going on.Take yesterday, for instance. Pete Buttigieg meets for breakfast with 95-year-old Jimmy Carter (?), ensures the visit is well-publicized, then heads home to South Bend and pulls the rug out from under his campaign. Wait, what? Is this the same Pete Buttigieg whose aides just a few days earlier released an elaborate memo detailing his surefire path to a formidable delegate acquisition?

At the time of writing, Joe Biden is on course for an approximately 30 point victory in South Carolina. Not that he won with 30 percent of the vote; rather, he is beating his nearest competitor (Bernie Sanders) by approximately 30 percentage points. That's a truly romping win — but ironically, given his many many decades on the political scene, the American elite media has never known quite how to cover the Biden candidacy. First, if you are a consumer of online political news and commentary, you might have noticed the conspicuous lack of virtually any vocal Biden supporters on social media.

Mike Bloomberg publicly admitted just a few years ago that he ‘couldn’t win’ the presidency because his political program would never be salable to a mass national constituency. What changed? Certainly not the fundamental desires of the electorate — which is still overwhelmingly uninterested in a Bloomberg-style governing agenda of shallow corporatized cultural liberalism, technocratic fealty to Wall Street, and veneration of unnamed ‘experts’ who will ‘get it done’ under Mike’s lifeless stewardship.No, what’s changed is that Mike Bloomberg has identified a constituency into which he really can tap: older voters petrified at the prospect of another Trump term in office.

Craven audacity in US politics knows no bounds. Billionaire intruder Tom Steyer is currently running television ads in New Hampshire lamenting that Donald Trump has received a political boost from the Democrats’ botched impeachment crusade, which ended this week in failure and humiliation — as is true for most Democratic crusades. Trump is therefore going to be tougher to beat, he suggests in the new ad, and nominating an outsider like Tom is increasingly necessary. What Tom forgot to mention is that no single private individual in the entire country was more responsible than him for fomenting the hysterical drive toward impeachment.

Perhaps the most annoying response to last night's Iowa debacle are the haughty scolds from journalists and pundits chastising anyone who might proffer a sinister explanation for what unfolded. No, there is not yet evidence of some grand conspiracy — and as ever, the likeliest explanation almost certainly involves an astronomical dose of standard-fare incompetence. But for such a catastrophic failure to have happened in the first place — still zero votes counted at the time of writing, at least three campaigns claiming fraud or illegitimacy, seismic technological and human error, et cetera. — there had to have been some malicious intent involved.

By impeaching Donald Trump on December 18, 2019, the House of Representatives declared that the offenses contained in the articles were among the most grave ever committed by a US president. As every squawking TV and Twitter pundit now knows, this was only the third impeachment ever in US history. The House taking such a dramatic step was a clear signal that it believed Trump’s actions were so uniquely grievous that they warranted a measure as extreme as impeachment.

The most meme-friendly and amusing explanation for Kamala Harris’s demise is that she was splattered by Tulsi Gabbard over the summer and never recovered. There’s some truth to that: Kamala had never been challenged on her record in a high-pressure national setting before, and the moment someone finally turned up the heat, she crumbled. The New York Timesarticle last week presaging the end of her campaign noted that donors were so flustered by her performance that they demanded she ‘strike back at Ms Gabbard more aggressively’, which was a tad ironic given on that same night Kamala had infamously declared herself a ‘top-tier candidate’ who need not trouble herself with the insignificant pesterings of a minor contender like Tulsi.

MSNBC dropped all pretenses of neutrality at last week’s debate, not that its pretenses were ever remotely credible to begin with. Most of the time they’d at least attempt to play it straight, however perfunctorily. Of course, no one should have been under the illusion that running a debate well was within the repertoire of Rachel Maddow — one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists — whose very presence as lead moderator undermined the legitimacy of the entire affair from the outset. Even with the albatross of Maddow, though, it is conceivable that they could have striven for something resembling an impartial approach. Not surprisingly, that all went out the window when one particular candidate was targeted for open contempt.

It was never especially plausible that Tulsi Gabbard would follow through on her threat to boycott last night’s presidential debate. Too much campaign energy and resources have flowed into ensuring that she secured a spot on the corporate TV stage, which is a sordid but unavoidable aspect of the modern primary process. But in her first comments, she spelled out the reasons why such a boycott would in theory have been absolutely warranted. The two media co-sponsors, CNN and the New York Times, had just spent the past several days attacking her with a level of brazenness that was shocking even to those well-accustomed to the regularity with which she is smeared by journalistic antagonists.

We’re told over and over by fair-weather constitutional scholars that impeachment is a 'political process.' Which is to say: it’s not strictly to do with statutes being violated or any narrow legalistic calculation, but rather a wholesale consideration of the power dynamics within the American system of government. Let’s therefore examine one of the central political arguments presented by advocates of impeachment, namely Nancy Pelosi, whose about-face on the issue this week has ensured several months of all-consuming national melodrama. Announcing that a formal impeachment inquiry has been initiated, Pelosi declared that Donald Trump had 'betrayed' the country.

The great ‘Bernie vs. Warren’ online wars have yet to fully commence, and the current state of affairs resembles something like an uneasy pre-conflict standoff. No tentative pact between the candidates themselves can last forever and early shots have already been fired from their respective squadrons: small skirmishes or drills that precede the outright warfare. Political prognosticators tend to lump Bernie and Warren into the same generic ‘progressive’ category, but for their most committed backers — the ones who will be in the online trenches — the differences are vast and unbridgeable. For the devout socialists, Bernie represents a once-in-a-generation (or even lifetime) opportunity.

To the extent Joe Biden is capable of actually formulating coherent sentences – a questionable proposition – he delivered an attack last night that Bernie Sanders has never really been forced to contend with during either of his presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton was not in a position in 2016 where she had to aggressively attack Bernie. Had she been, she would have almost certainly brought up the fact that he is a self-described 'socialist'. Of course, that’s common knowledge by now. But it's a salient point for Bernie's rivals to press him on, especially considering the overriding concern for Democratic voters at present is 'electability'.