With Trump wreaking havoc, a question for the US Democrats: when will you ever learn? | Timothy Garton Ash

NOthing is more unbearable than someone who says “I told you”; So forgive me for being unbearable. On September 29, 2023, after a few months in the United States, I published a column that was well summed up in his Guardian title: “Unless Joe Biden is held aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0”. We can never say certainly “What would have happened if …?”, But there is a very good chance that Biden opened the way for a democratic primary in the fall of 2023, the strongest candidate could have defeated Trump. The whole world would have been spared the disaster now.

“No use by crying on overturned milk,” you can say. Yes, but it is always worth learning lessons for the future. I’m back in the United States now, and a recent survey for the Wall Street Journal revealed that 63% of voters have an unfavorable vision of the Democratic Party. To put it slightly, the Democrats have a long way to go.

So, if, given everything that happens and everything we know now are the right lessons? The aim of mentioning my former column is not to boast of a special idea of insiderities of Washington High policy; The fact is precisely that I did not. It was obviously crazy to set up a visibly old and fragile candidate who would be 86 years old at the end of his second term. By way of comparison, the leaders of the Soviet Union that we consider as the quintessence of the decrepit gerontocracy were, at their respective moments of disappearance little, 75 (Leonid Brejnev), 69 (Yuri Andropov) and 73 (Konstantin Chernenko).

This did not require any particular knowledge to see this and most Americans have already done so. As I wrote my column, an opinion poll revealed that 77% of Americans thought Biden was too old to be president for four years. It is only the political initiates, the liberal commentariat, the democratic establishment, who continued to agree with the president, his family and what (you could not invent) is in fact informally known as “Politburo” of his closest advisers that he was the only man for work.

In their recent and very noticed book, original Sin, two main journalists from Washington, Jake Tapper from CNN and Alex Thompson d’Axios, argue that there was, as their subtitle suggests a cover. The Biden family and the Politburo tried to hide its precipitated cognitive decline, confining most of its meetings between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Even the members of the cabinet did not see it closely for several months and the in -depth media interviews were as rare as a parade of pride in the Vatican.

The authors generously distribute the president, his wife, the other members of the family and his closest advisers, but there are a set of people whom they spare curiously: themselves and their colleagues journalists from Washington initiates. Now, I have not returned to all their reports on CNN and Axios, and there are certainly documents that should be cited to defend their journalistic file. But there is no doubt that American political journalists in general, and the liberal commentary in particular, were slow and late to say what most “ordinary” Americans had seen for a long time.

For what? The writer of the New York Times, Ezra Klein, digs in an episode of his excellent podcast. Recognizing frankly that his own call from February 2024 for Biden to withdraw was “late”, Klein explored in a conversation with Tapper why most of the others were even later. The answer seems to be a mixture of ingredients: the journalistic fear of losing access; the vindictive tribalism of the democratic establishment; Deference to an imperial presidency; Fear of Donald Trump; Worried about Kamala Harris as an alleged alternative candidate.

The fear of losing access is a professional journalism disease. “You had the impression that you destroy all your relations with the White House at the same time,” explains Klein, remembering his February 2024 approach. “Yes, not only with the White House but the Democratic Party,” adds Tapper. My own September 2023 notebook summarizes a private conversation with a columnist based in Washington: “Yes, Biden should withdraw. He [the columnist] I can’t say it. (My note continues: “Jill Biden could, but she likes it.”)

I know, also from other sources, how threatening the democratic establishment could be threatening when the Biden’s physical form closed to serve a second term. Even in the critical articles that appeared in the American media, there was a kind of residual deference to the presidency, almost as if he asked a king to abdicate rather than another politician to withdraw. This follows partly from the 237 -year -old American constitutional apparatus from the implementation of your Prime Minister and your monarch. In Great Britain, we limit our residual deference to the monarch while the Prime Minister is roasted every Wednesday to the Prime Minister’s questions in the House of Commons. Someone in the statement state in 2023 of Biden would not have survived two weeks in Westminster.

Then there is the fact that people were already panicking about Trump and we thought in a way, especially after the democratic successes in the mid-term elections of 2022, that Biden was the only guy to beat him. More since the alleged alternative was Harris, who was considered a relatively low candidate. And so, for fear of getting Harris then Trump, they got Harris then Trump.

Some lessons are therefore clear. Tapping and Thompson open their book with a quote from George Orwell: “Seeing what is in front of the nose needs a constant struggle.” But Orwell also always calls us to say what we see, even if – no, especially if – it is uncomfortable for our own side. There is a double test for journalists: see it and say it.

For democratic establishment: do not try to intimidate the media in self -censorship with the argument that they are shaking up with the enemy. You would have been better served by journalists who do their job, in the mind of Orwell. Then: change your old guard. Chuck Schumer, the chief of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate, is older than Chernenko and quickly catches up Brejnev. Oh yes, and simply listen to the people you are supposed to represent.

The tragedy of all this story is that the Democrats have a profusion of talents in the young generations – of Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom to the New New York Star, Zohran Mamdani. They do not yet have the shared platform which could earn a presidential election, but thinkers such as Klein and Derek Thompson, co-authors of abundance,, The other book of the moment is already working on good ideas. Democrats can probably swing the House of Representatives in the mid -term elections next year with a few new faces – and focusing on Trump’s already visible negative consequences for class and middle class Americans. But by 2027, as the next presidential election approaches, they will need everything they spectacularly failed in 2023.