The Two Saviors Who Would Destroy Us
07-05-2024Roger Berkowitz
Fintan O’Toole, who will be speaking at the upcoming Arendt Center Conference Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism, writes this week in the New York Review of Books about how Joe Biden and Donald Trump have become mirror images of each other. Both men have come to believe in their own mythos, that they are the only ones who can save us. Biden’s motivations may be more benign than Trump’s, “but he has ended up in the same place: with the great delusion of “I alone.”” O’Toole writes:
"The great problem, and the one that now threatens to engulf American democracy, is that Biden began to think of himself as indeed a savior figure. There was, of course, a certain immediate and literal truth to this: Biden not only saved the US from a second Trump term but also saw off an attempted coup. Yet Biden’s mindset is also deeply religious, and specifically Christian. In his inaugural address, delivered just two weeks after the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, he offered to stake both his earthly body and his immortal soul on the defense of democracy. He repeated Abraham Lincoln’s words at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863: “My whole soul is in it.” Biden echoed this commitment: “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this.” This is not rhetoric for Biden—it is prayer.
What, though, was the “this” to which he committed his immortal essence, the part of him that is beyond the ravages of time and age? It was “Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.” This may be a gallant ambition. It is also an impossible one. Biden was completely sincere in his belief that reuniting a fractured nation is more than a political program—it is a sacred duty. But it was a duty he could not possibly fulfill. America has no interest in being brought together. It is not Biden’s fault that what had been sundered could not be made whole, but it is a reality that grates on his whole nature as a politician steeped in ideas of comity and consensus.
From the wreckage of this aspiration, Biden’s sense of divine mission was rescued by Trump’s reemergence, not just as the Republican candidate-in-waiting but as the defining figure of American politics. When Biden gave his inaugural address it might have seemed reasonable to assume that Trump was over, that the grotesque efforts to overturn the results of the election had made it impossible for him ever to return to power. But Trump was undead and his malign potency again established him as the major predator in the American political jungle.
This in turn gave Biden a second chance at achieving something worthy of his eternal soul. He had saved America from Trump once—now he could do it again. He could banish Trump, and Trumpism, not for now but forever. If thoughts of eternity gather round the aging Catholic believer, this is Biden’s political equivalent of an undying achievement. In his inaugural address, he evoked the struggle of light against darkness. He sees the delivery of a final, fatal blow to Trump as the ultimate vanquishing of the American darkness.
This is noble. The difficulty is that it also endorses a kind of personal exceptionalism. Biden, because he has suffered so much pain, is deeply inclined toward the Christian message that suffering is redeemed by a self-sacrificing savior. This is where being the counterpart in the world of light to Trump’s presence in the world of darkness takes on that eerie sense of transference. For Trump, too, presents himself as a savior. He conjures the vision of an American apocalypse. In the debate he ranted about immigrants: “people are coming in and they’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen.” He used the word “killing” eleven times. The fascistic vision of eternal ethnic war is now fully integrated into Trump’s rhetoric. And its point is the same as it has always been: only an exceptional man can save the real Americans from the carnage that otherwise awaits them.
This is Trump’s most visceral appeal. As he put in his speech accepting the Republican nomination in 2016: “I alone can fix it.” At the heart of authoritarianism is this notion of indispensability. The leader is unique, unparalleled, irreplaceable. God has chosen him to rescue and revive the nation. That is why he cannot be constrained by laws or even by the ordinary calculations of rationality. Only in his infallible instincts and indomitable will does salvation lie.
Biden’s tragedy is that he has come to take on this same conviction, to feel that he alone can save America. In mirroring his archenemy, he has created an equal and opposite belief in his own indispensability. On a rational level, he knows that this does not make sense. In December he responded off the cuff to a reporter’s question about whether he thought another Democrat could defeat Trump: “Probably fifty of them.” Yet he has also boasted in a social media video that “I’m still the only person that ever beat Donald Trump.” Even after the debacle of the debate, Senator Chris Coons, the Biden campaign’s co-chair, insisted that “the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump” is Biden. This has always been a circular argument: no one but Biden can beat Trump because no one but Biden can be allowed to stand against him because no one but Biden can beat Trump…"
What, though, was the “this” to which he committed his immortal essence, the part of him that is beyond the ravages of time and age? It was “Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.” This may be a gallant ambition. It is also an impossible one. Biden was completely sincere in his belief that reuniting a fractured nation is more than a political program—it is a sacred duty. But it was a duty he could not possibly fulfill. America has no interest in being brought together. It is not Biden’s fault that what had been sundered could not be made whole, but it is a reality that grates on his whole nature as a politician steeped in ideas of comity and consensus.
From the wreckage of this aspiration, Biden’s sense of divine mission was rescued by Trump’s reemergence, not just as the Republican candidate-in-waiting but as the defining figure of American politics. When Biden gave his inaugural address it might have seemed reasonable to assume that Trump was over, that the grotesque efforts to overturn the results of the election had made it impossible for him ever to return to power. But Trump was undead and his malign potency again established him as the major predator in the American political jungle.
This in turn gave Biden a second chance at achieving something worthy of his eternal soul. He had saved America from Trump once—now he could do it again. He could banish Trump, and Trumpism, not for now but forever. If thoughts of eternity gather round the aging Catholic believer, this is Biden’s political equivalent of an undying achievement. In his inaugural address, he evoked the struggle of light against darkness. He sees the delivery of a final, fatal blow to Trump as the ultimate vanquishing of the American darkness.
This is noble. The difficulty is that it also endorses a kind of personal exceptionalism. Biden, because he has suffered so much pain, is deeply inclined toward the Christian message that suffering is redeemed by a self-sacrificing savior. This is where being the counterpart in the world of light to Trump’s presence in the world of darkness takes on that eerie sense of transference. For Trump, too, presents himself as a savior. He conjures the vision of an American apocalypse. In the debate he ranted about immigrants: “people are coming in and they’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen.” He used the word “killing” eleven times. The fascistic vision of eternal ethnic war is now fully integrated into Trump’s rhetoric. And its point is the same as it has always been: only an exceptional man can save the real Americans from the carnage that otherwise awaits them.
This is Trump’s most visceral appeal. As he put in his speech accepting the Republican nomination in 2016: “I alone can fix it.” At the heart of authoritarianism is this notion of indispensability. The leader is unique, unparalleled, irreplaceable. God has chosen him to rescue and revive the nation. That is why he cannot be constrained by laws or even by the ordinary calculations of rationality. Only in his infallible instincts and indomitable will does salvation lie.
Biden’s tragedy is that he has come to take on this same conviction, to feel that he alone can save America. In mirroring his archenemy, he has created an equal and opposite belief in his own indispensability. On a rational level, he knows that this does not make sense. In December he responded off the cuff to a reporter’s question about whether he thought another Democrat could defeat Trump: “Probably fifty of them.” Yet he has also boasted in a social media video that “I’m still the only person that ever beat Donald Trump.” Even after the debacle of the debate, Senator Chris Coons, the Biden campaign’s co-chair, insisted that “the only Democrat who can beat Donald Trump” is Biden. This has always been a circular argument: no one but Biden can beat Trump because no one but Biden can be allowed to stand against him because no one but Biden can beat Trump…"