No remorse

Nikki Haley is dropping out of the “race” for the GOP presidential nomination later this morning:

Nikki Haley will not announce today that she is endorsing former President Donald Trump, sources familiar with her plans tell CNN.

Instead, Haley will call on Trump to earn the support of voters who backed her. That plan appears to leave the room for her to endorse Trump ahead of the general election in November.

Haley will announce that she is withdrawing from the Republican presidential race today according to sources familiar with her plans. She is speaking in Charleston, South Carolina, at 10 a.m. ET.  

Haley actually won the Vermont primary last night, and did pull 25% to 40% of the vote in several other primaries over the course of the last few weeks, so the defection of even a fairly small percentage of those voters, either to Biden or to not voting at all, would be a big problem for Trump. I would estimate the odds that Haley won’t endorse Trump by at the latest the GOP convention are close to zero, but you know how emotional women can be, so you never know.

More seriously, despite Haley’s all but certain future bending of the knee, her campaign did reveal that somewhere around a quarter to a third of Republican primary voters were sufficiently unhappy with Trump to take the trouble to cast what everybody always knew was a purely symbolic vote of opposition against him. That seems potentially significant.

As for the rematch between Biden and Trump, I recommend this new long-form profile of Biden, by Evan Osnos:

Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie. He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose. (It’s one of his favorites, even though Bobby Kennedy thought that it evoked his brother during the Bay of Pigs debacle.) He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he often visited Barack Obama for lunch. One wall is graced by “The Peacemakers,” a famous painting of Lincoln and his military commanders, on the cusp of winning the Civil War. Another is dominated by a large television set, installed by Donald Trump.

It was in front of that TV that Trump spent the afternoon of January 6, 2021, after exhorting his supporters to march on the Capitol and stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election. With the television remote and a Diet Coke close at hand, he watched the events live on Fox News, rewinding at times for a second look. It is a period in Presidential history that the House select committee on January 6th later called “187 Minutes of Dereliction.”

“This is where he sat,” Biden said, and I braced for a bit of speechifying on democracy or character or the defiling of the Presidency. (As early as 1970, a colleague of Biden’s on a Delaware county council observed that he could make a “fifteen-minute speech on the underside of a blade of grass.”) But, in the dining room, he let the moment pass. At the age of eighty-one, in his fourth year as President, he displays less of the reflex to fill every silence. Gesturing around the room, he said, “I don’t do interviews here, because it’s not so commodious.” He gave a rueful laugh and headed back to his office.

Not long ago, most Americans found it inconceivable that they might once again face the choice between Trump and Biden. In the years since Trump lost the 2020 election and refused to concede, he has been found liable for sexual assault and financial fraud, and indicted for attempting to overturn the election and refusing to return classified documents; as his legal challenges mounted, he embarked on a campaign focussed on “retribution” against his enemies. Yet Republicans have become steadily less likely to hold Trump responsible for the violence on January 6th—and less likely to believe that Biden actually won the White House.

Back in the Oval Office, where winter sun shone through glass doors, I asked Biden if it was possible for him to reach voters who had those beliefs. He treated the question as a provocation: “Well, first of all, remember, in 2020, you guys told me how I wasn’t going to win? And then you told me in 2022 how it was going to be this red wave?” He flashed a tense smile. “And I told you there wasn’t going to be any red wave. And in 2023 you told me we’re going to get our ass kicked again? And we won every contested race out there.” He let that sink in for an instant and said, “In 2024, I think you’re going to see the same thing.”

For decades, there was a lightness about Joe Biden—a springy, mischievous energy that was hard not to like, even if it allowed some people to classify him as a lightweight. For better and worse, he is a more solemn figure now. His voice is thin and clotted, and his gestures have slowed, but, in our conversation, his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date. At one point, he pulled out a white notecard inscribed with some of Trump’s most alarming comments: his threat to terminate the Constitution, his casual talk of being a dictator on “Day One,” his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Biden tossed the list on his desk and gave a look of disbelief. “What the hell! ” he said. “If you and I had sat down ten years ago and I said a President is going to say those things, you would have looked at me like, ‘Biden, you’ve lost your senses.’ ”

I came away from this article with an even stronger sense that Biden’s candidacy isn’t merely inevitable: it’s actually optimal. Among many other things, here’s an echo of Irish Republican fervor in Biden that seems right for this historical moment. It reminds me of the Irish athlete at the 1908 Olympics in London, who refused to dip the flag he carried at the head of the American delegation when it passed the British royal box. “This flag,” he supposedly said, “dips for no earthly king.” (The remark itself remains no less quotable for being apocryphal).

Out of Ireland we have come.

Great hatred, little room

Maimed us at the start.

I carry from my mother’s womb

A fanatic heart.

Yeats, “Remorse For Intemperate Speech”