I can, though, tell you two things — what Iate and how I felt after. I ate a tuna salad sandwich with tomato on wholewheat bread, with a bowl of mixed fruit and a chocolate milkshake for dessertthat was so good it should have been against the law.
What I felt afterward was this: For all youknuckleheads on Fox who say that Biden can’t put two sentences together, here’sa news flash: He just put NATO together, Europe together and the whole Westernalliance together — stretching from Canada up to Finland and all the way toJapan — to help Ukraine protect its fledgling democracy from Vladimir Putin’sfascist assault.
In doing so, he has enabled Ukraine toinflict significant losses on Russia’s invading army, thanks to a rapiddeployment of US and NATO trainers and massive transfers of precision weapons.And not a single US soldier was lost.
It has been the best performance ofalliance management and consolidation since another president whom I coveredand admired — who also was said to be incapable of putting two sentencestogether: George HW Bush. Bush helped manage the collapse of the Soviet Unionand the reunification of Germany, without firing a shot or the loss of a singleAmerican life.
Alas, though, I left our lunch with a fullstomach but a heavy heart.
Biden didn’t say it in so many words, buthe didn’t have to. I could hear it between the lines: He’s worried that whilehe has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America.
It’s clearly his priority, above any BuildBack Better provision. And he knows that’s why he was elected — a majority ofAmericans worried that the country was coming apart at the seams and that thisold war horse called Biden, with his bipartisan instincts, was the best personto knit us back together. It’s the reason he decided to run in the first place,because he knows that without some basic unity of purpose and willingness tocompromise, nothing else is possible.
But with every passing day, every massshooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, everynation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, everybogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. Iwonder if it’s too late.
I fear that we’re going to break somethingvery valuable very soon. And once we break it, it will be gone — and we maynever be able to get it back.
I am talking about our ability to transferpower peacefully and legitimately, an ability we have demonstrated since ourfounding. The peaceful, legitimate transfer of power is the keystone ofAmerican democracy. Break it, and none of our institutions will work for long,and we will be thrust into political and financial chaos.
We are staring into that abyss right now.Because it is one thing to elect Donald Trump and pro-Trump candidates who wantto restrict immigration, ban abortions, slash corporate taxes, pump more oil,curb sex education in schools and liberate citizens from mask mandates in apandemic. Those are policies where there can be legitimate disagreement, whichis the stuff of politics.
But the recent primaries and theinvestigations around the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol are revealing amovement by Trump and his supporters that is not propelled by any coherent setof policies, but rather by a gigantic lie — that Biden did not freely andfairly win a majority of Electoral College votes and therefore is anillegitimate president.
Thus, their top priority is installingcandidates whose primary allegiance is to Trump and his Big Lie — not to theConstitution. And they are more than hinting that in any close election in 2024— or even ones that aren’t so close — they would be willing to depart fromestablished constitutional rules and norms and award that election to Trump orother Republican candidates who didn’t actually garner the most votes. They arenot whispering this platform. They are running for office on it.
In short, we are seeing a national movementthat is telling us publicly and loudly: WE WILL GO THERE.
And that terrifies me because: I HAVE BEENTHERE.
My formative experience in journalism waswatching Lebanese politicians go there in the late 1970s and plunge their fraildemocracy into protracted civil war. So don’t tell me that it can’t happenhere.
Not when people like Pennsylvania stateSen. Doug Mastriano — an election denier who marched with the Jan. 6 crowd atthe Capitol — just won the GOP primary to run for governor. Have no doubt:These people will never do what Al Gore did in 2000 — submit to a decision ofthe courts in an extremely close election and recognize his opponent as thelegitimate president. And they will never do what principled Republicansrunning for office or acting as elections officials did after the 2020 election— accept the votes as they were tabulated in their states, accept the courtorders that confirmed that there were no significant irregularities and permitBiden to legitimately take power.
It is stomach-turning to watch the numberof Trump Republicans running for office affirming his Big Lie, when we knowthat they know that we know that they know that they do not believe a singleword of what they are saying. That’s Dr Oz and JD Vance and so many others.Nevertheless, they are ready to hitch a ride on the Trump train to gain power.And they do it without even blushing.
It reached its nadir, in my view, whenHouse Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, so obsessed with becoming speaker of theHouse at any cost, actually lied about telling the truth.
McCarthy publicly denied the fact thatimmediately after Jan. 6 he explicitly (and on tape) told his Republicancolleagues that he expected Trump to be impeached for inspiring theinsurrection and that McCarthy intended to tell him he should resign.
Who in your life have you ever encounteredwho lied about telling the truth?
And this brings me back to my lunch withBiden. It clearly weighs on him that we have built a global alliance to supportUkraine, to reverse the Russian invasion and to defend core American principlesabroad — the right to freedom and self-determination of all peoples — while theGOP is abandoning our most cherished principles at home.
That is why so many allied leaders haveprivately said to Biden, as he and his team have revived the Western alliancefrom the splintered pieces that Trump left it in, “Thank God — America isback.” And then they add, “But for how long?”
Biden cannot answer that question. BecauseWE cannot answer that question.
Biden is not blameless in this dilemma, noris the Democratic Party — particularly its far-left wing. Under pressure torevive the economy, and facing big-ticket demands from the far left, Bidenpursued expansive spending for too long. House Democrats also sullied one ofBiden’s most important bipartisan achievements — a giant infrastructure bill —by making it hostage to other excessive spending demands. The far left alsosaddled Biden and every Democratic candidate with radical notions like “defundthe police” — an insane mantra that would have most harmed the Black andHispanic base of the Democratic Party had it been implemented.
To defeat Trumpism we need only, say, 10%of Republicans to abandon their party and join with a centre-left Biden, whichis what he was elected to be and still is at heart. But we may not be able toget even 1% of Republicans to shift if far-left Democrats are seen as definingthe party’s future.
And that is why I left my lunch with thepresident with a full stomach but a heavy heart.
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