Blue MAGA Falls into Line

It has been two weeks since President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance showed the world what many have long suspected:  He has experienced cognitive decline since 2020 and is incapable of effectively sparring with Donald Trump. 

Biden’s reaction to challenges and concerns from his party over his acuity and ability to run for office this time has been to double down on his candidacy. Calling into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday morning, just as his predecessor did to “Fox and Friends,” the president addressed the strength of his mental health and dismissed rumblings within the party about his ability to win reelection.  

“I have a neurological test every single day sitting behind this desk and making these decisions,” Biden told co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. “You know it, they know it — I’m not bad at what I do.”

But the question is not whether Biden is a bad president — it’s whether he can defeat Trump. And on that point, a majority of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, want Biden to step down and let someone else, likely Vice President Kamala Harris, take over as the Democratic candidate. Democratic leaders in the House are coming out against the president, with even Nancy Pelosi, the former longtime leader of the caucus, indicating she’s open to a change.

Initially, the panicked reaction to the June 27 debate spread even to the most obsequious corners of the party. Aaron Rupar, a video clipper who posts cable news segments to X with shameless Democratic spin, sent out an email to his Substack subscribers the next morning entitled “Not great, Joe.” 

“I’m not going to sugarcoat it: Biden’s performance was a crushing disappointment,” Rupar wrote. “It was close to a worst-case scenario.”

It didn’t take long for Rupar to get roped back in line. Hours after panning the president’s performance, Rupar celebrated a telepromptered event from Biden as “a good message — owning up to last night and tying it in with the resilience he’s shown personally and politically throughout his life.” The gushing overview of Biden’s remarks and subsequent unflinching support for the president — even as he remains incapable of completing a series of coherent sentences — suggests Rupar is mindful of what is needed to maintain regular White House invites from a possible Harris administration. 

Another Biden backer who has grown accustomed to administration access is historian and Substacker Heather Cox Richardson. A superstar to anti-Trump liberals, Richardson’s “Letters From an American” pulls in millions of dollars a year with its consistent message that the republic remains in danger from the former president and only Democrats can save it. Her nonstop advocacy for the party has earned her multiple interviews with Biden, including a coveted sit-down in January. 

Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on July 6, Richardson said that any party that would “change a presidential nominee at this point in the game, the candidate loses.” But that claim is unverifiable. As historian Gary Alexander put it, “there is no historical precedent for this scenario” and comparisons to Johnson and Nixon are an error. “You cannot derive causal inference from the fact they were replaced when they were catastrophically unpopular already,” he said.  

Democratic allies are already deploying their well-worn tactic of vote scolding and attempting to shout people on the left into line. “This is not a ‘West Wing’ episode,” commentator Don Winslow posted on X. “This is real life and the attacks on Biden only help Trump.” Former Republican turned Biden booster Ana Navarro-Cárdenas said that she was “not gonna fall for the hysteria, baseless claims, & pile-on against @JoeBiden,” adding, “Every day Democrats are in an existentialist crisis, they’re not focusing on beating Trump.” Their message is clear — no more discussion.

The further one moves away from mainstream voice, the stranger the arguments grow. Some of the president’s loyal supporters are veering into something more closely associated with their opponent’s campaign: a mainstream media conspiracy to take down the president.  

Some Biden supporters with large social media followings are making the case, for example, that the audio for the 22-minute ABC interview Biden did with George Stephanopoulos was modified to damage the president. The New York Times is out to get Biden, Splinter’s Dave Levitan claimed; the newsroom is “so deeply steeped in its own juices [that] it can’t see the absurdity” in covering calls from within the party for the president to drop out of the race. Others, like IT reporter Anshel Sag, claim the Times is opposed to Biden because he refuses to do an interview with the outlet.

“The alleged reason NYT hates Biden is that he snubs them and never gives them interviews,” writer David Klion tweeted in response to this delusion. “Do his fans imagine that’s because Bidenworld objects to NYT’s coverage of gender-affirming care for minors, or could it be that they’re afraid to let their guy do interviews?”

Whether or not Biden steps down from the nomination or resigns — and given his incoherence, he should resign or face removal — the past two weeks have shown some liberals to be as cult-like and eerily subservient to him as their right-wing counterparts are to Trump. Biden is acting the part of his predecessor by calling into friendly morning cable news shows to ramble on about his political enemies and doing everything but outright telling voters, “I alone can fix this” as Trump once did.

Whether it’s apparent careerist interest in access — as with Rupar and Richardson — or the genuine if paranoid fantasies of the loyal rank and file, acknowledging widespread doubts about the president’s mental acuity shouldn’t provoke accusations about fiendish plots against him. Sadly, all indications point to more of this Blue MAGA mentality going forward, no matter who ends up as the party’s standard bearer in November.