This past week’s State of the Union, and the incredibly powerful performance by the President, in any other era, would result in a rash of articles about the strong position he is in as we move closer to the November election. Of course, we don’t live in any other era, and in the post-truth “feelings over facts” timeline in which we live, we know that his opponents are going to double down on their attacks and that is going to fuel even more hot takes about President Biden’s fitness for office from pundits and armchair strategists all over Washington. Some of those takes will repeat deeply offensive and ageist attacks on his mental capacity that were dropped into a special counsel report by a deeply political operative who sought to harm him– despite the fact that the report completely exonerated him of any wrongdoing. That, of course, is the price of doing the right thing in an America that is defined by its MAGA obsession– even when you play by the rules, you will be attacked mercilessly.
Despite the fact that we’ve been living in a world in which a small group of authoritarians surrounding Donald Trump continue to gaslight and attack the rest of us, there are still pundits and operatives who haven’t adapted their strategies and tactics to those realities. They view every single thing said by the abusers as something we need to consider and we need to be afraid of. These conversations end up fueling private conversations at the cocktail parties all over Washington, in which otherwise well-meaning staffers, consultants and strategists discuss and dissect these attacks to the point where they result in big portions of the progressive infrastructure seizing up, unsure of how to react and afraid that whatever they do will be the thing that will propel Trump back to the White House.
