In “Varying Treatment of Biden and Trump Puts Their Parties in Stark Relief,” NYT chief White House correspondent Peter Baker notes the obvious:
One of America’s political parties has a presidential candidate who is really old and showing it. The other has a presidential candidate who is a convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, business fraudster and self-described aspiring dictator for a day. And also really old.
One of the parties is up in arms about its nominee and trying to figure out how to replace him at the last minute. The other is not.
The spectacle of the week since the nationally televised debate between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump has thrown into sharp relief two political parties that agreed to be led by flawed putative nominees whose vulnerabilities have become even more painfully apparent just months before the election.
None of this is new, of course. Because Trump has been so off-the-charts terrible for so long, his awfulness is just baked in. Because we expect Biden to be a competent politician, we hold him to a much higher standard.
Fair? No. But it’s reality. (See also: Israeli and Hamas.)
But there’s also something else going on.
But the distinction of recent weeks has been striking. After Mr. Trump was found guilty of 34 felonies by a Manhattan jury in May — a verdict that came after civil judgments against him for personal and professional misdeeds — there was no significant groundswell within the Republican Party to force him out of the race in favor of a less-tainted candidate. Even though many Republican officeholders and strategists privately loathe him, they fell in line and made clear they would stick with him no matter how many scandals piled up.
Until last week, Democrats had also resigned themselves to a candidate many considered far from ideal. Mr. Biden and his allies had effectively squelched any internal dissent, forcing Democrats to stay quiet despite fears that his age would ultimately undercut his campaign. After last week’s debate showcased concerns about his mental sharpness, however, the conspiracy of silence was broken. Suddenly, a wide swath of Democrats concluded that he was no longer viable and mounted an effort to pressure him to step aside for a younger candidate.
The Democrats have a functioning political party, with viable factions fighting to control the agenda. The Republicans have a cult of personality around a single candidate. While a significant number of GOP officials want Trump gone, they’re quite rightly afraid to challenge him, as almost everyone who has been ousted for others will fall in line.
Relatedly, Trump remains considerably more popular with his base than Biden does with his. There’s simply less cost to challenging him.
Beyond that, Trump has been narrowly leading in the polls for the entire campaign. Democrats are scared that he’ll win and the debate pushed many of them over the edge, panicking that Biden’s infirmity will guarantee a Trump win and all that comes with it.
Neither party should have been surprised by what would follow. It was eminently predictable that by the time voters began to cast ballots, Mr. Biden would have aged further and had more senior moments, and Mr. Trump would be found guilty of various acts of misconduct. Both parties knew the minefields they were heading into by sticking with Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, and neither took enough action to head it off.
“We used to worry that partisanship would mean choosing the party over one’s country,” Mr. Engel said. “Now it appears to mean, again increasingly for both sides, choosing the man rather than the nation’s needs.”
Baker knows better than this. Biden and Trump are their party. Both won their primaries without much of a fight, and there is no magical entity that can kick them off the ticket.
