Is the United States in a Chevalier de Panat moment?
It was the obscure French nobleman who said that “the Bourbons have learned nothing and forgotten nothing” — a remark from the 19th century that has lived through the decades and that has eerie resonance for our own time here in the 21st century.
Surely Joe Biden, 81 years old, and Donald Trump, 77, have been around long enough to have learned manifold lessons about human behavior and political life — though both also have learned the wrong lessons about vital elements of humanity and politics. They have been in the public eye long enough to have a storehouse of memories, many of which have been warped over the years.
That’s the problem with a general-election field that consists of two old men, each of whose supporters are convinced the other candidate is a threat to democracy.
Here are some of the lessons that Biden has learned that no longer apply:
— There is a repository of bipartisan goodwill in American life, and it takes its form in an impulse toward cooperation on Capitol Hill.
This may never have been true in the way the folklore remembers it, with political leaders fighting ardently by day and then repairing for cold cocktails and genial conversation by night. Democratic Speaker Thomas P. Neill and Republican leader Bob Michel did spar in the House and have a sociable drink after hours, but no one mistook the power dynamic there. Michel never won an important battle, which is why a backbencher and street fighter like Newt Gingrich could credibly argue that a new combative style of Republicanism was required. His legacy is today’s core of hard-right pugilists in the House.
— The old-time religion and the old-time tales still have enormous power in the American idiom.
Here Biden, with his tales of what his dad told the young and impressionable “Joey” — and his memories of a time long before today’s average American voter was born — displays a political style that is dated, stale, and basically irrelevant. When he ran for the Senate in 1972, Biden portrayed the incumbent, the Republican Caleb Boggs, as too old and out of touch. His campaign slogan: “Joe Biden: He understands what’s happening today.” Boggs was 18 years younger than Biden is today. The president could not plausibly use that slogan in 2024.
One other thing: The top song the year Biden first ran for the Senate at age 29 was “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Roberta Flack now is 87 years old, and the Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield, who saw Biden’s face for the first time when the new Delaware lawmaker joined the Senate, has been dead for 23 years.
— Israeli leaders eventually will bend to the will of American presidents.
Not so. Maybe never so. Dwight Eisenhower sparred with David Ben-Gurion, Ronald Reagan with Menachem Begin, and Barack Obama with Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden repeatedly has implored Israel to curtail civilian deaths in Gaza and then withheld American bombs. Netanyahu’s response Tuesday: “We are not a vassal state of the United States.” The “special relationship” with Israel is no more a reliable notion than those often attributed to American relations with Great Britain and Canada. When countries want to go their own way, they do.
Trump, who at least heads a modern movement, nonetheless fares no better in the battle of the Bourbons. Here are some core elements of his character:
— Women are eligible for abuse, or at least awkward seduction.
Two New York court trials this year, plus cringeworthy stories about satin pajamas and other TMI sexual details, make it plain that this view is part of the Trump personality portfolio. Whether the American people, or his core supporters, forgive him his trespasses against female dignity is one of the campaign’s great unknowns. (He survived the “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016 that boasted of his ability to grab women’s genitals.)
— The values of the New York real-estate business and the New Jersey casino trade are applicable to American politics.
Trump is only the most recent figure to attempt to apply his success in business to politics. Wendell Willkie, the Commonwealth & Southern executive, was the Republican presidential nominee in 1940. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, with experience in insurance and finance, tried it in 1976. So did Steve Forbes, in 1996 and 2000. All failed.
The swagger and loose business practices Trump employs have resulted in multiple court cases, tax audits and questions about whether he has violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bans the acceptance of gifts or other benefits from foreign countries. A Democratic study this year charged that during Trump’s presidency, his businesses received at least $7.8 million in payments from 20 foreign governments and government-backed entities.
— He believes, to adapt the aphorism often attributed to H.L. Mencken, that you can never go wrong underestimating the taste of the American people.
A New York Times/Siena College poll released this month showed that the top thing that Americans remember from the Trump 2017-2021 presidential term was his “behavior,” cited by 39%. (The rampage at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, came in fourth, at 5%).
Even many of Trump’s closest associates and most fervent supporters acknowledge that the former president’s behavior often verges on, or exceeds, the unacceptable. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, told the Jan. 6 committee in 2022 that Trump reacted with fury when he learned that former Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press that there was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. He then threw a plate of food at the White House wall. “There was ketchup dripping down the wall,” she testified under oath, “and a shattered porcelain plate on the floor.”
Now Trump is testing another American aphorism, this one from the author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, in “The Last Tycoon,” wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Trump is attempting to become the modern version of Grover Cleveland, the only American president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.
Given these two finalists, it might be appropriate to quote another aphorism, this one often attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “God looks out for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.” Let’s hope.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
