The Stages Of Grief

Over the past week, I think there's been a major shift in polite opinion, prompted in part -- but not completely -- by the Wall Street Journal piece that simply gave everyone permission to admit what people had been seeing for months, if not indeed years. The other factor is that Trump's conviction in the New York "hush money" trial gave him, if anything, a slight boost in the polls, but it also fed $400 million in donations in the week following the verdict.

This brings to mind the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think we can say that polite opinion in the wake of these developments has moved entirely past denial. A week ago, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict and beginning to recognize that calling Trump a "convicted felon" wasn't going to change a thing, Harold Myerson got mad in The American Prospect, calling Trump The Martyr of Mar-a-Lago:

The political consequences of yesterday’s verdict won’t be clear until after November’s election, if then. While Trump’s bluster, belligerence, and bullshit may have failed him in court, they have also created his political base, made him MAGA’s man, and recentered the Republicans around a new constituency: millions of young men lashing out in all directions against, as Tom Edsall described it in his Wednesday New York Times column, their “precarious manhood.” . . . To the remade Republican Party, the party of precarious manhood, he is the victim of the same outsider-controlled system that victimized their young men; he is the martyr of Mar-a-Lago.

Others have moved into depression and acceptance. For instnace, Bill Maher:

Bill Maher predicted an Election Day defeat for President Biden, despite reiterating his support for the president, telling tech journalist Kara Swisher that former President Trump is likely to rally enough support for a second term.

“I would vote for [Biden’s] head in a jar of blue liquid over Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean that I’m — first of all, I think it’s a moot point at this point. He’s going to f‑‑‑ing lose,” Maher told Swisher on an episode of his podcast.

Ed Kilgore in The Intelligencer writes Trump Conviction Shows There’s No 2024 Game Changer Coming:

Anyone holding their breath to see if a guilty verdict in the Trump hush-money trial would impact the election can now exhale. While it’s possible to look at the data and see a glass that is half-empty or half-full, the overall indication is that Trump’s conviction has not changed the race. And on balance, that’s good for the 45th president.

. . . [F]acts aside, Trump’s conviction and his overall status as a man perpetually on the wrong side of the law are being perceived through partisan lenses, which in turn will tend to encourage unaffiliated voters to discount them. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but it’s reality.

. . . [W]e’re in a presidential contest that appears to be all but impervious to the kinds of things that used to be called “game changers.” It’s time to accept at least as a rebuttable presumption that the game isn’t changing. And that has implications for future events like the presidential debates, the two major-party conventions, and the cut-and-thrust of the campaign competition as the November election grows nigh.

So polite opinion for now is moving from anger toward depression and acceptance that, first, Biden's condition has become an obvious problem, and second, that he's likely to lose in November. But Jim Geraghty at the NeverTrump National Review is making the next necessary point:

Way back in June 2022, I wrote, “I think the single most predictable ‘bombshell’ of the coming years is that sometime in 2025, someone like Bob Woodward or Robert Costa will publish a book with a title like Perpetual Crisis: Inside the Biden White House, and we will ‘learn’ something like, ‘the president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties.’” This morning, the Wall Street Journal takes us another half-step toward that minimally shocking revelation, interviewing more than 45 sources and offering a grim portrait of President Biden behind the scenes: forgetful, mumbling, increasingly reliant on notes to remember basic facts, and seemingly oblivious to his own administration’s policies and decisions.

But Geraghty wonders what this really implies:

I’m not that worried when Biden says, in his Time magazine interview, that Vladimir Putin “wasn’t just going into Moscow” when he meant “wasn’t just going into Ukraine.” We all flub our words here and there, and in that example, Biden quickly corrected himself.

I’m much more worried about when Biden insists that he wasn’t told something and military leaders or members of his cabinet maintain, under oath, that he was. Biden had insisted during his infamously short-tempered interview with George Stephanopoulos that no one had recommended keeping a small group of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to keep order at the airport or anywhere else, specifically stating, “No one said that to me that I can recall.” A few months later, under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Central Command general Frank McKenzie and Joint Chiefs chairman general Mark Milley both said they had recommended President Biden maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.

. . . Biden’s long record of shameless BS makes it tough to tell when he’s misremembering or simply lying. When the president keeps insisting that inflation was 9 percent when he took office, is that just spin trying to get voters to blame Trump for inflation? Or does Biden really not remember that inflation didn’t start increasing until he had been in office a few months and signed some massive spending bills? Does Biden not remember assuring Americans, in July 2021, that “there’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way”?

I can understand why Biden would want to forget certain inconvenient facts and regrettable guarantees. But it matters a lot if the guy making decisions as commander in chief and head of the executive branch actually can’t remember what he was told from day to day.

Whatr he's edging toward is the real question: it's not whether Biden will lose in November -- smart people have laid $400 million on that outcome in the past week alone. The question is whether Biden is fit to serve now, or indeed if he's been fit to serve for some months or years already. And if something needs to be done, the next problem is that his constitutional successor, the vice pressident, is probably less fit to serve than he is. We're facing not just a transition period between November and next January, we're facing a de facto interregnum now with no clear solution.

I call this a constitutional crisis. We haven't reached the stage where polite opinion can handle it.