Here’s how the last 24 hours have gone for the Democratic Party: Former President Donald Trump, who would be 82 at the end of a second term, has gone from trolling for more debates with President Joe Biden to trying to wiggle out of one with Vice President Kamala Harris, whose historic bid for the White House so energized the rank-and-file that they’ve donated more than $83 million via the progressive fundraising platform ActBlue since Sunday morning.
“Small donors are fired up and ready to take on this election,” ActBlue said in a statement. Major Democratic donors, such as Netflix cofounder Reid Hoffman and financier George Soros, have already announced they have her back, as has every major potential competitor, from California Gov. Gavin Newsom to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, dashing some pundits’ fevered dreams of a hotly contested open convention.
It is the GOP now in disarray, Trump surrogates and media allies who had planned for years on running against Biden — old, old, old — forced to improvise attacks against a 59-year-old former prosecutor capable of speaking passionately and cogently about Project 2025 and the planned assault on reproductive rights and liberal democracy.
“She wants to ban plastic straws,” Fox News personality Sean Hannity told his viewers.
Trump himself posted through his own anxiety attack, dashing off multiple complaints that he was no longer facing the 81-year-old Biden, leaving one major party with a candidate whose age and apparent decline is of deep concern to many voters.
“Shouldn’t the Republican Party be reimbursed for fraud in that everybody around Joe, including his doctors and the Fake News Media, knew he was not capable of running for, or being, President?” Trump posted on his website, Truth Social.
Before Biden’s announcement on Sunday, there had been reports that Republicans strongly favored him staying in the race, preferring that the November election be a referendum on his age rather than their own nominee’s criminal convictions and mental health. Those reports appear to have been absolutely correct, the early responses to Harris’ candidacy suggesting that Republicans are going to have a tough time talking about a woman of color in a way that doesn’t repulse swing voters.
On Sunday night, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wisc. — who earlier this month spoke about the need to “get America back to, say, 1960” — told a reporter that Democrats had indeed scrambled the race.
“I think it is going to be more difficult to beat somebody who is not Joe Biden,” Grothman admitted. Asked to weigh in on whether the Democrats could go with anyone but Harris, Grothman, inevitably, got weird about it, saying “a lot of Democrats feel they have to stick with her because of her ethnic background.”
For Trump allies, that was actually an improvement. Seb Gorka, a former Trump advisor who longs for the 1930s, referred to the sitting vice president, ex-senator and former California attorney general as a “colored” diversity hire just the other week (“DEI” the new “CRT”: a stand-in for a racial slur).
Republicans will of course throw anything they can at the new presumptive Democratic nominee, whose candidacy will likely be formalized at in a virtual roll call in early August. Inflation, migration and catering to reactionary white male America’s every anxiety about a woman of color leading the country: When the GOP does land on a line of attack, it won’t be an entirely new surprise but talking points drawn from the same old well.
What is clear, at least now, is that Biden putting the good of his party over his personal ambition is not something for which president’s political opponents had planned.
“MAGA seems completely flummoxed by Biden’s withdrawal and quick coalescence around Harris,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted on social media. “But this scenario has been plausible for weeks. What I think is that politicians doing what’s right, rather than acting out of fear and ambition, isn’t part of the MAGA mental universe.”
