At the 1940 Republican National Convention, in Philadelphia, an uneasy affair marked by bomb scares, a British espionage scandal, and the imminence of global conflict, ten names were placed in nomination. On the sixth ballot, a corporate executive from Indiana named Wendell Willkie finally emerged as the challenger to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was running for a third term. Desperate to find a way to compete with F.D.R., a political colossus who had lately engineered the New Deal and ended the Great Depression, Willkie challenged him to a series of radio debates.
This was something new in American life. F.D.R. hardly feared the medium—he’d been delivering his homey yet substance-rich fireside chats to the nation since 1933—but he nonetheless dodged Willkie’s invitation, citing scheduling conflicts. In November, he crushed Willkie, and by the end of 1941 he was engaged in the struggle against fascism.
The 2024 election also comes at a moment of national crisis. This time, however, the threat to the country’s future—to its rule of law and its democratic institutions, its security and its character—resides not in a foreign capital but at a twenty-acre Xanadu on the Florida coast. For nine years, Donald Trump has represented an ongoing assault on the stability, the nerves, and the nature of the United States. As President, he amplified some of the ugliest currents in our political culture: nativism, racism, misogyny, indifference to the disadvantaged, amoral isolationism. His narcissism and casual cruelty, his contempt for the truth, have contaminated public life. As Commander-in-Chief, he ridiculed the valor of fallen soldiers, he threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he emboldened autocrats everywhere, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán. When Trump lost to Joe Biden, in 2020, he tried every means possible to deny the will of the electorate and helped incite a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.
In contrast, the Democratic Party’s nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, has displayed the basic values and political skills that would enable her to build on the successes of the Biden Administration and to help end, once and for all, a poisonous era defined by Trump. Few, if any, of our readers will be surprised that we endorse Harris in this election—but many would have been surprised, earlier this year, that the choice would end up being between Trump and the Vice-President. The change in the Democratic candidate is the result, of course, of a debate of the sort that F.D.R. sidestepped.
During the past half century, these quadrennial confrontations have become a centerpiece of election season—a chance to glimpse the choice in real time, side by side. Aficionados may know the highlights of debates past: Ronald Reagan, at the age of seventy-three, joking nimbly that he would not “exploit” the “youth and inexperience” of his fifty-six-year-old opponent, Walter Mondale; George H. W. Bush glancing at his watch after Bill Clinton answered a question from the audience; Mitt Romney assuring the country that, far from being a sexist, he had, in fact, “whole binders full of women” he had consulted for his gubernatorial cabinet.
Yet no debates have been as unusual or as consequential as the two we have just witnessed. The first—on June 27th, in Atlanta, between Trump and President Biden—proved to be an unmasking. On a human level, Biden’s nationally televised disintegration was a poignant spectacle. Viewed more coldly, it was a gift. Had it taken place, say, after the Conventions, it might have been too late to force a reassessment.
Illustration by João Fazenda
It was hardly a secret that Biden has aged, growing markedly less robust, particularly in the past eighteen months or so. If he got through an interview or a (rare) press conference without incident, staff and supporters exhaled and treated it as a victory. But, rather than open the gate to a younger generation of Democratic candidates, Biden, his advisers, and the Party leadership stood in the way. They made it plain that a challenger would inevitably be defeated. Meanwhile, through spin and deft scheduling, the White House staff protected the President and hoped for the best. Tens of millions of voters, fearing another Trump Presidency, had little choice but to close their eyes and think of America.
But staying the course was, as the polls were suggesting, probably a doomed strategy. In an attempt to invigorate the campaign, Biden and his team took the risk of challenging Trump to an early debate. Perhaps a forceful, coherent performance would diminish the doubts about the President’s capacity to govern well into his mid-eighties. It was not to be. The debate, broadcast on CNN, was a humbling. Biden’s resting expression of slack confusion was almost as unnerving as his faltering efforts to make a clear and vivid case for his reëlection. When Jake Tapper asked him about the national debt, he delivered a wobbly reply that concluded, “Look, if—we finally beat Medicare.” After Biden gave a similarly jumbled response to a question about immigration, Trump said only, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.” By Trumpian standards, this was a kindness. It was also the end of the Biden candidacy.
For the next twenty-four days, the President travelled a hard road from denial to acceptance. All of us face the assault of time, but few must reckon with mortality before the eyes of the world. Biden loves the job and thought he was uniquely positioned to defeat Trump once more. But finally, after absorbing discouragement from Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the Obamas, and others, Biden, in an act of grace, issued a letter concluding that it was “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down.” In a separate message, he gave his endorsement to Kamala Harris.
The second Presidential debate, at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, was an unmasking of another kind. For some time, observers have asked whether Trump, who is now seventy-eight, has himself suffered from some form of decline. On a given day, it is hard to determine if a particular insult, lie, or rant represents his usual malevolence or something else. Not long before the debate, Trump took to speculating whether it would be preferable, in the event of finding oneself on a sinking boat, to die by shark attack or by electrocution from the boat’s battery. (“I’ll take electrocution every single time,” he assured a grateful nation.) There is nothing he will not say. When a group of Proud Boys were convicted of conspiracy last year, he warned that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department were just getting started: “get smart america, they are coming after you!!!” Trump has defied multiple legal gag orders, attacking judges and jurors, and has even blamed the latest attempt on his life, a deeply alarming event, not on the would-be assailant or the easy availability of assault weapons but on the Democratic ticket.
For Harris, the debate presented an opportunity to expose Trump at his worst. All she had to do was to prick his vanity. Trump’s rallies were boring, she suggested. Military leaders thought he was a “disgrace.” Foreign leaders ate his lunch, considered him weak, laughed at him. With growing rage, Trump began howling from a familiar hymnal. America is a “failing nation.” Migrants are pouring in from “prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” Indelibly, Trump picked up on a racist, J. D. Vance-endorsed conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants in Ohio and gave it his full voice:
Trump went on in this vein of fact-free bluster, bringing discomfort even to some fellow-Republicans. He had been calling Harris “dumb as a rock” and “unable to speak properly without a teleprompter” or even “put two sentences together,” while mocking her looks, her family, her racial identity, her personal life. He refused to pronounce her name correctly. Harris decided to flick all that lint from her shoulder. She left it to the moderators to correct Trump’s facts and the electorate to behold his lunacy. It was a performance that had the potential to lay bare Trump’s character for those voters who might not have been paying much attention. After the debate, Trump, of course, declared a “BIG WIN,” but he then issued a loser’s proclamation: “there will be no third debate.” Some days later, he had more to say about that night, particularly about an endorsement that came his opponent’s way minutes after the debate’s conclusion. On his social-media platform, he wrote, “i hate taylor swift!”
In the fall of 2016, the editors of The New Yorker published an enthusiastic endorsement of Hillary Clinton:
The lack of sufficient caution remains, well, an astonishment. We all learned a painful lesson. Trump has never won the national popular vote, and the elections of 2018 and 2020 were setbacks for the Republicans; in 2022, the anticipated “red wave” failed to materialize. And yet in rural towns, in struggling deindustrialized cities, in the South and the Midwest, his popularity is broad and deep. His strength among Black and Latino men has grown. He has the ardent backing of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, right-wing legal activists like Leonard Leo, and no small number of Wall Street executives whose highest priorities are to prevent regulation and changes to their tax status. Coming out of the Democratic National Convention, and then the September 10th debate, Harris made extraordinary inroads with the electorate; she’s got the “vibes,” as this year’s cliché has it. But the race remains very close. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump outperformed the polls. No responsible assessment of the contest has the luxury of focussing only on the imperatives for a Harris Administration and gliding past the ramifications of another Trump Administration.
