Biden gave up power to save democracy. Trump tried to overthrow the 2020 election to stay in power

What a contrast. A presumptive Democratic presidential nominee decided it was more important to save democracy than pursue power. A Republican presidential nominee, fresh off a coronation that defied explanation, bragged that he “took a bullet for democracy” after he was  shot in the ear during a recent rally — and three years after he tried to overthrow democracy to stay in power. 

We could not have a starker choice in November. The question is what kind of America do we want going forward? If you have kids or grandkids, what will they inherit? 

These are times that try our souls, to borrow from founding father Thomas Paine. But we are not the first generation of Americans called upon to preserve and protect what makes this country great. Past generations made the ultimate sacrifice for what we take for granted. They gave what Abraham Lincoln called the “last full measure of devotion” to a nation “conceived in liberty.” 

For us to dishonor them now with indifference or resignation would be unforgivable. So buckle up for a turbulent ride and fulfill your obligation to be an informed, engaged citizen lucky enough to still live free, to still have a voice in our shared destiny.

Before President Joe Biden willingly stepped away from power for a cause far greater than himself, I was channeling Rod Serling from TV’s iconic Twilight Zone series while reflecting on the just concluded Republican National Convention. It felt like we had collectively entered another dimension in American presidential politics that was beyond description.

One of the country’s two major political parties, long a respected bastion of conservatism with Reaganite foreign policy hawks, law and order champions, limited government diehards and more, crossed into the Trumpian Zone and normalized insanity. The GOP, as we knew it, was subsumed into the cult of personality party which last week coronated a convicted felon for president who conspired to overturn the lawful results of the last presidential election. 

Republicans elevated the sore loser of the 2020 election whose drumbeat of lies about a “stolen election” drove an armed and violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power for Donald Trump. In any rational world, a twice-impeached disgraced ex-president who incited an unprecedented attack against the government he swore an oath to defend would be a pariah in his party and certainly in the country he betrayed.

But in the Trumpian Zone there is only hero worship for a man unanimously found guilty by a jury of his peers on 34 felony counts, by another jury for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and defaming her, by yet another court for financial fraud and fined a jaw-dropping $354 million for company frauds so widespread the judge said they “shock the conscience,” and a criminally indicted defendant in pending state and federal cases.  

But in the surreal dimension of the RNC there was only effusive devotion to the Dear Leader imbued with messianic glory. He survived a rally shooting by divine providence, after all. The pretense of politics as usual obscured the abject lunacy of the moment. No one pierced the delusion in Milwaukee. No one cried out the obvious. “The emperor has no clothes!”

The same maddening complacency carried over to Trump’s vice-presidential pick and evangelist for the neoreactionary right. Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who shamelessly prostrated himself before the coup-plotting Trump for the coveted second slot on the Republican presidential ticket, is a slick fraud. But he is also a stealth proponent of a truly scary New Right ideology — along with his mentor Peter Thiel and biggest cheerleader, Tucker (I heart Putin) Carlson. 

Do not be fooled by Vance’s politically expedient pivot to benevolent bearded Midwesterner at the right hand of Trump. He aspires to preside over a new world order even more extreme than Project 2025. Vance, as his Ohio constituents well know, will say or do anything to win power. He is a shapeshifter of the first degree. 

The former venture capitalist’s meteoric rise to the U.S. Senate and Republican vice-presidential nominee was no fluke. His wealthy and powerful ideological soulmates financed and promoted the millennial high on his best-selling memoir and seduced by celebrity. Vance’s billionaire benefactor Thiel is all in on the New Right’s agenda to overthrow the Republic and impose a new worldview of nationalistic values and fundamentalist morality.  

He bankrolled Vance and greased his way to Mar-a-Lago grace to get it done. The Ohio Republican is smart enough to present as friendly and non-threatening to a general election audience. But he belongs to the growing New Right movement of young, well-educated, patriarchal autocrats who envision a post-democracy America. The group likes the idea of  a “national CEO [or] what’s called a dictator” as a “solution to our political warfare.” For real.

Just two years ago Vance told a right-wing podcaster “we’re in a late republican period” — a common New Right judgment of America as a crumbling Rome awaiting its Caeser. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable,” he said. 

Naked authoritarianism. A democratic president walking away from power to fight it. What a contrast.