U.S. Democracy Hangs on Two Men’s Egos

Former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump participate in the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., on Oct. 22, 2020.

It should go without saying that anyone who thinks he can be president of the United States has a massive ego.

With Trump, it’s obvious. Only an ego the size of a Goodyear blimp could be inflated by the loss of a presidential election. Biden’s ego is jumbo too, but it may be dwarfed by his cluelessness. He thinks he’s the one person who can beat Trump. In fact, he told donors in early December that if Trump were not running — and threatening to bring down American democracy — he’s “not sure” he’d be running either. Biden’s implication is that only Biden can save American democracy.

During the summer both voters and politicians were already publicly worrying that Biden’s age and flagging approval ratings would sink him in 2024. When he announced his run in September, Democratic voices urged him to step aside. James Carville advised his party to “wake the fuck up” and get another candidate.

But almost immediately a consensus formed: It was too late to change horses. In early November, when polls showed Biden trailing Trump in five of six swing states, NBC News repeated the conventional wisdom that too many primary filing deadlines had passed. “Restive though they are, Democrats can’t do much at this stage to give American voters another option.” That opinion was repeated through December.

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Few mentioned that this too is a problem created by Biden’s overweening self-confidence. If he stepped aside, the party could anoint someone else or others could throw in their hats, and the primary deadlines would be moot. Some Democrats are still holding out hope. In January, an opinion writer in the Boston Globe begged Biden to “give the speech,” as Lyndon Johnson did when he recognized his looming defeat.

On January 4, a Newsweek analysis concluded: “There is only one presidential candidate that would be able to find a path to the White House if the 2024 election was held today,” and that candidate is Donald J. Trump.

Biden was in a soundproof booth. Or he wasn’t listening.

How strong these egos really are is anyone’s guess. For a psychopath, supposedly unmoved by the thoughts and feelings of others, Trump is remarkably sensitive to slights. And where would he be without his brownshirts? Vox reports that MAGA zealots’ threats of violence against elected officials and their families have silenced any intraparty dissent and likely saved Trump from impeachment. Asked by a researcher what would happen if she spoke out against the ex-president, Pennsylvania Republican state Sen. Kim Ward said, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.” Ward is a Trump supporter.

Biden is working to stoke fear, too, not from himself — he’s a more formidable political player than he gets credit for, but he’s not planning to sentence any of his rivals to death, as Trump has openly fantasized. Rather, Biden is running against (and hoping voters will run from) two perils: one real, the other dubious. The real one is Trump’s trumpeted plan to be a dictator (if only for a day). The other, it seems, is that a younger, more dynamic contender would arise from the party’s left wing, which is too far left for the electorate. If Biden believes he can save democracy, his party must first be rescued. He believes that he, and only he, can do that too. “Biden, for all his flaws, represents a compromise between the activist left of the party and its moderate center,” writes Washington Post columnist Ruy Teixeira.

This race isn’t about policy.

Teixeira also thinks that the Democrats’ “activist contingent” is too radical. Among the wild-eyed proposals that no working stiff, or even college-educated snob, can stomach are Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, he claims. In fact, majorities consistently support government-funded health insurance. The Green New Deal enjoys a 31 percent margin of support, including one-third of Republicans, according to one survey.

This race isn’t about policy. There is no rational political explanation for Joe Biden’s name at the top of the Democratic ticket and Donald Trump at the top of the Republicans’.

Of course, not every man or masculine-identifying person is an egotist. And women can be egotists too. A handful of women have contended for the presidency, starting with the suffragist Victoria Woodhull, who ran in 1862, before women could vote — and, as I’ve said, you can’t run for president if you’re not abnormally confident. Still, those I’ve observed — Shirley Chisholm, Liddy Dole, Hillary Clinton, and the unabashedly left-wing New Ager Marianne Williamson — have not apparently confused qualification with irreplaceability. Clinton won the popular vote and conceded, as the Constitution demands.

But now, thanks in large part to masculine ego, nine months from Election Day, we’ve got two equally despised guys to choose from. With third-party candidates Cornel West, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and, potentially, Joe Manchin in the mix, we need another Environmental Protection Act to rid the election of these billowing emissions of toxic masculinity.

“I alone can fix it,” Trump declared, in a preview to his megalomaniacal presidency, at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Less histrionically, Biden feels the same. Neither man will fix it. We know how Trump will wreck it. But Biden can wreck it too by not getting out of the way of someone who might beat Trump. The future of U.S. democracy teeters on two invincible male egos.

What can be done? Prohibiting men from running for office, even for a limited time, is impractical and probably illegal.

That leaves one solution: Biden must be man enough to withdraw.