The Week When So Much Changed
An assassination attempt. An official Republican presidential nominee who is also the most polarizing figure in modern American history. Growing talk that Donald Trump could win in a landslide. His anointing of an heir to realign the parties and sustain Trumpism for years to come. And in the middle of it all, tormented by polls and criticism, able to change the entire dynamic only by sacrificing himself: Biden Agonistes.
What a week! It feels like August 1914, a fulcrum in the sweep of events. These days may have moved the arc of America and the world, with history lurching in competing directions in ways that may shape our course for decades.
“There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen,” Lenin is widely quoted as saying. In fact, he probably didn’t say it; please excuse my effort at fact-checking as a token pushback to our Leninist dialectic of exaggerations, deceptions and conspiracy theories that were all highlighted this week.
To me, the tumult raised fears but also offered hopes and potential turning points — the most significant of which is the prospect of President Biden withdrawing from the race, as it seems he’s considering. Trump had a triumphant and exultant week, but his acceptance speech also underscored his lack of discipline and tendency to hail himself as America’s Caesar. The polls showed his strength against Biden, but his speech also suggested a Biden-like incoherence — a phrase that is somewhat unfair to Biden — and a path to a Democratic victory that might even shake the G.O.P. out of its cultish reverence for Trump.
Biden can borrow the language of President Lyndon Johnson, who on Sunday, March 31, 1968, stunned the nation in a television address, announcing, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” That won Johnson rare praise; in 2024, such a statement might avert disaster in November.
The transcendent problem for America is not Trump himself but the larger poisons, divisions, inequalities and frustrations that he has exploited and that this month came to a head. These are not unique to the United States, for similar forces led to Brexit in Britain, to Marine Le Pen’s rise in France and to a prime minister in Italy whose party has neo-fascist roots. To me, today’s toxins seem to be an echo of the rages that tore apart America and Europe in the 1960s but that ultimately ran their course and allowed us to recover. It’s far from inevitable, but at the end of this week I could squint and see a path ahead that navigates a dangerous autumn but that ultimately repudiates extremism and leads to a new American recovery.
