President Joe Biden in his post-midterms news conference/AP

 

Lisa Van Dusen

November 17, 2022

Two events have happened in the past 10 days that mark the unofficial launch of the 2024 presidential election cycle as might have, in previous eras, the early formation of Super PACs or a dewy new facelift on an undeclared contender.

The first was the November 8^th midterm election result of a slim Democratic majority in the Senate and a slim Republican majority in the House. That outcome was a victory for President Joe Biden, both as a Democratic triumph over the curse of off-year elections being a shellacking for the president’s party and a democratic triumph over the threat of anti-democracy interests in the form of tactical election deniers, rampaging Trumpian puppets and all manner of pre-election panic propaganda.

The second was the announcement by Donald Trump on Tuesday, one week later, of his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The most important thing to note about the sequence of these two events is the way in which the rational takeaway from the first event — that Trump’s political career is, per the inspired Aislin cartoon below, toast — was completely decoupled from the response of Trump himself via the second event.

That’s because Trump isn’t a politician, he’s a narrative warfare weapon. And as a narrative warfare weapon, Trump has as much anti-democracy utility left in him as the relative violability of our democratic garde-fous will allow. Reviewing the avoidable assaults to which humanity has been subjected in our post-Obama parade of revolting spectacles, the Trump II: Attack of the Zombie Coup Plotters possibilities boggle before they’re even off the storyboard and polluting a propaganda platform near you.

In the same way that the narrative frame for the 2022 midterms opened in August of 2021 with Joe Biden’s poll slide below 40, this launch of the 2024 presidential cycle portends a narrative battle that will be less about what’s plausible than what’s possible. And what’s possible these days has less to do with conventional political wisdom, longstanding behavioural norms, compos mentis risk-benefit calculations and reasonable expectations than with the motive-meets-opportunity corruption rationale of all hybrid and narrative warfare: All the bullshit money can buy. As we’ve all witnessed in recent years, that covers quite a lot of status-quo discrediting, democracy-degrading nonsense, both editorial and performative.

Biden represents a walking, empathizing, authentic antithesis to that behavioural model of commodified lunacy, which is not good for the anti-democracy imperative of redefining deviancy down.

In purely hypertactical terms — and pending the post-insanity-siege evidence of a few more un-preposterous outcomes in a row, those are the terms that currently bedevil the US political context — Trump’s role in the pre-2024 narrative could well include a reprise of his dystopian diva tour de force as performative nutter in chief, only from outside the circus tent that was his presidency. And if the GOP and its media logrollers ultimately reprise their supporting roles, Trump could fill the Venn diagram overlap between the two events described above by using his laughably cultish, empirically absurd leverage over the Republican Party to rationalize a pre-2024 narrative catalyzed by the GOP’s control of the House, aimed at degrading Joe Biden ahead of 2024 behind the marquee of a partisan witch hunt.

With many thanks to Terry Mosher/Aislin

Such is the politics of personal destruction in a 21^st-century Washington defined not by partisan divisions, but by trans-partisan, pro- and anti-democracy ones functioning in a wildly distorted BS market that extends beyond the Beltway and across the content sphere of today’s borderless propaganda war zone. In this conflict theatre, lying and weaponized stupidity are rewarded, asinine behaviour is a headline-fuelling cottage industry and manufactured chaos is a means to an end. Biden represents a walking, empathizing, authentic antithesis to that behavioural model of commodified lunacy, which is not good for the anti-democracy imperative of redefining deviancy down.

As with every presidential cycle, who jumps in will dictate who stays out, and who doesn’t. Unlike every presidential cycle but more typical of the post-2000 ones, those calls are now also made based on how safe it may seem to wade into the narrative-warfare water, with pre-emptive reputational and disqualification ops being contemporary additions to a choice architecture once quaintly defined by money and piggyback polling.

Still, there is a chance that the November 8^th midterm results represent a turning point in the assault on American democracy; that the shock-based suspension of public disbelief that was indispensable to that assault has been shattered, and the people are demanding their uncorrupted reality — and their collective peace of mind — back.

The most convincing indication of that has been the vindication of Joe Biden’s faith in what his fellow Americans truly value. Another hopeful sign was a Murdochian gonfalon flown on the propaganda battleground — a slim banner across the bottom of page one of the New York Post the morning after Trump’s 2024 declaration: Florida Man Makes Announcement, with a turn to page 26 for a brilliantly localized blurb.

A hilarious signal, perhaps, that sanity is being restored to the kingdom.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.