One of the American political parties has a presidential candidate who is really old and shows it. The other has a presidential candidate who is a convicted felon, convicted sexual abuser, corporate fraudster, and self-described would-be dictator for a day. And really old.
One of the parties is in turmoil over its nominee and is trying to figure out at the last minute how to replace him. The other is not.
The spectacle of the week since the nationally televised debate between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump has focused attention on two political parties that agreed to have their parties led by flawed candidates, whose vulnerabilities have been exposed even more painfully just months before the election.
But the contrasts of the past few weeks are striking. After Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies by a Manhattan jury in May — a verdict that followed civil judgments against him for personal and professional misdemeanors — there was no significant groundswell within the Republican Party to force him out of the race in favor of a less tainted candidate. Despite many Republican officeholders and strategists who privately despise him, they rallied and made clear they would stick by him no matter how many scandals piled up.
Until last week, Democrats had also resigned themselves to a candidate who was widely regarded as less than ideal. Biden and his allies had effectively suppressed any internal dissent, forcing Democrats to remain silent despite fears that his age would ultimately undermine his campaign. But after last week’s debate exposed concerns about his mental acuity, the conspiracy of silence was broken. Suddenly, a large portion of Democrats concluded that he was no longer viable and scrambled to pressure him to step aside for a younger candidate.
“While Biden had the worst debate performance in presidential history, Trump’s was likely the second-worst,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “Yet we’re hearing crickets from Republicans after their presumptive nominee was incoherent, muddled, and completely out of touch with the truth. Oh, and a convicted felon, too.”
The disparity says something important about the two major parties 248 years into the American experiment. Mr. Trump has come to dominate his party in a way that no president in modern times has, crushing internal opposition, punishing dissidents and commanding loyalty even among those who openly declared him a danger.
Rather than defending his many political commitments, Mr. Trump has gone on the offensive, forcing his fellow Republicans to accept his version of reality in which every accusation against him, even those proven in court, is part of a vast conspiracy of persecution. He has turned shortcomings into power, at least among his own party.
“Republicans do not see Trump’s beliefs, his rhetoric or his threats of retaliation as moral or political weaknesses,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who broke with his party over Trump. “Many see them as strengths. So we are not going to see a parallel family conversation among Republicans like we are seeing among Democrats about President Biden’s age and questions about his fitness.”
That all of this is happening around the Fourth of July holiday reminds us that the Founding Fathers were not initially fond of political parties. Alexander Hamilton warned that parties, or “factions,” as they were then called, “the most deadly disease” of popular governments. In his farewell address, George Washington said that the “general and continuing calamities” of such factions made it necessary to ‘discourage and restrain’ them.
Today’s parties live in radically different universes and interpret the same fact through radically different lenses. What used to be disqualifying is no longer. Mr. Trump was seen as such a threat by Democrats that they were willing to live with a nominee they knew could be risky. Mr. Trump has imposed his will on his party to the point that even rival candidates in the primaries did not criticize him for his alleged crimes or for trying to overturn an election.
Neither side should have been surprised by what would follow. It was entirely predictable that by the time voters cast their ballots, Mr. Biden would have aged further and had more senior moments, and Mr. Trump would be found guilty of various misconduct. Both sides knew the minefields they were entering by holding on to Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, and neither side took enough action to prevent it.
“We used to worry that partisanship meant choosing the party over the country,” Mr. Engel said. “Now, increasingly on both sides, it seems to mean choosing the man over the needs of the nation.”
Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and leading anti-Trump voice, said her party had been destroyed by a demagogue. “The GOP is a personality cult that surrendered to Donald Trump long ago,” she said. “The Democrats are still a largely functional political party, with a substantial portion of their membership who believe that the stakes for defeating Trump are existential and therefore worthy of serious discussion about the best path forward.”
But Trump’s supporters argue that his problems are different from Biden’s. “The idea that these are the same, I just don’t see it,” said David Urban, a Republican strategist who has long worked on Trump’s previous campaigns. He compared the situation to a basketball player who tears his ACL and can’t play, rather than being annoying or insulting.
“You may not like Trump,” Mr. Urban said. “You may think he’s mean, you may not like his behavior. You may think he’s rude, you may think he’s rude, you may think he’s impudent. But you still think he can run the United States. Whereas Biden doesn’t run anything.”
That Mr. Trump would seem capable compared to Mr. Biden is a matter of perspective. Mr. Biden, 81, at times slurred his words, stared blankly and seemed lost during the debate. Mr. Trump, 78, whose mental fitness has been questioned by former advisers and who has sometimes seemed incoherent in public appearances in recent months, made debate statements that were hard to follow and, in many cases, simply untrue. But his voice was strong, he did not seem weak, and head-to-head polls showed that most viewers thought he was doing a better job than Mr. Biden.
Not that voters are particularly impressed with either man’s abilities. A post-debate poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that 74 percent of voters said Biden was too old for the job, while 42 percent said Trump was. The big difference is that many Democrats told pollsters they were ready to dump Biden (47 percent want another nominee), while Republicans were content to keep Trump (83 percent want him to remain their nominee).
Partly, said Lynn Vavreck, a professor of American politics at UCLA, that’s because of the debate’s surprise factor. Even though voters knew Biden was getting older, they were stunned to see it so clearly on their living room screens. By comparison, she said, Trump’s rule-breaking is already “baked in.” By the time he was convicted in New York, voters already knew he had been impeached twice and indicted four times, and were deciding what to make of those charges.
“People had already factored in the idea that he was guilty of these charges into their assessments of him,” said Dr. Vavreck, co-author of “Bitter End,” a book about the 2020 election. “No one had factored in the idea that he was struggling as much as he revealed last week. And crucially, this new information caused people to revise their beliefs about his likelihood of success in November.”
