New York Review of Books

The mainstream consensus seems to be that Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the nominees for the 2024 presidential election, but there are still five months until the Republican National Convention, and six until the Democratic convention. In the NYR Online this week, Fintan O’Toole and Sean Wilentz write about two major developments in the 2024 presidential race: the recent report by special counsel Robert Hur accusing Biden of “near-senility,” and the ongoing Supreme Court case over whether to disqualify Trump from the ballot for engaging in insurrection.

O’Toole finds Hur’s report “grossly unfair” but argues that the subject of Biden’s age and mental fitness is nonetheless “a gaping vulnerability that the Democrats have pretended not to see…. It’s no good highlighting the undoubted truth that, while Biden’s language may sometimes be uncomfortably sloppy, Trump’s loose lips utter toxic lies and dangerous slurs.” Wilentz, in a follow-up to his recent assessment of the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump is ineligible under the Fourteenth Amendment to become president, maintains that the national Supreme Court, in its apparent intention to rule in favor of the ex-president, seems unfamiliar with “the basic questions raised by the case,” and may end up “hastening the constitutional crisis they think they are heading off.”

Below, alongside O’Toole’s and Wilentz’s new essays, we present a compilation of their writing about the vulgar cast of American politics in the last decade.

Fintan O’Toole
The Memory Hole

By drawing broad conclusions about Joe Biden’s mental capacities, Robert Hur’s special counsel report went far beyond its remit—but it still leaves Democrats with a political dilemma.

Sean Wilentz
A Historic Abdication

If the Supreme Court decides not to rule on whether Trump should be disqualified, it could set off precisely the crisis it hopes to avoid.

Sean Wilentz
The Case for Disqualification

“No degree of cherry-picking or obfuscation can deny the historical record of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is unequivocal: if Donald Trump engaged, in any way, in the insurrection of January 6, he is automatically barred from holding any public office, federal or state.”

Fintan O’Toole
Eldest Statesmen

“The baby boomers who sang along with Bob Dylan when he warned, ‘Senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway/Don’t block up the hall,’ now linger in the lobbies.”

Fintan O’Toole
The Designated Mourner

“Joe Biden is the most gothic figure in American politics. He is haunted by death, not just by the private tragedies his family has endured, but by a larger and more public sense of loss.”

Sean Wilentz
The Culmination of Republican Decay

“When Trump seized control of the GOP in 2016, he reaped the populist whirlwind that Richard Nixon began sowing nearly half a century earlier and that the Bush administration…had whipped to hurricane force.”

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