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Quick Take
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take on the back of a staggering announcement that President Biden is no longer standing for reelection. No one thought that President Biden should have stood for reelection after he won the first time. Certainly, nobody believed that he was going to be able to serve a full four years of a second term.
That was becoming increasingly obvious to Biden himself, because he saw what rank and file members of the Democratic Party were saying, how they were pulling. The internal polls that the White House has been getting over the last 48 hours were devastating for Biden, not just a loss, but a landslide that would have led to the Democrats getting wiped out in the House and Senate as well, would probably lead to the Republicans ending the filibuster. Biden ultimately a lot later than a lot of people wanted, but nonetheless ultimately standing down, standing aside, strongly endorsing Kamala Harris, his vice president, for the presidential nomination, and to defeat Trump come November. It is certainly a very long way to go. People were saying it's late. We have 107 days to go left in this election.
That's an eternity in US politics. It is longer than most elections in democracy actually occur for the entire campaign. And so, I mean, if you look at that, look at just how much might happen in a race where Trump and Biden have been historically both very unpopular, both seem to be far too old and unfit to serve as president for another term. Biden, the last numbers we saw in that were 74% of American voters saying that he was unfit to serve for another four years because of his age and increasing frailty. 49% of Americans said that about Trump. Now it's worse for Biden. But if Biden wasn't in the race, for Trump, that would be the worst that we'd ever seen.
And of course, now Biden isn't in the race and Trump is, which means that his age, his frailty, his incoherence when he makes statements, that is suddenly a big issue. It is immediately his largest vulnerability, even after the extraordinary ability of Trump to stand up and put his fist in the air and say, “fight, fight, fight” after an assassination attempt, a huge thing, but suddenly yet another piece of unprecedented history in the US.
This one in favor of the Democrats. I'd like to say this is a good day in US politics in the sense that it shows a level of selflessness from President Biden that he was unwilling ultimately, to put himself personally and his ego ahead of that of the country, and he recognized that this was going to be a disaster. No one had the ability to force him. They pressured him. They embarrassed him. They showed him facts. But ultimately, if Biden decided that he wasn't going to go, no one could have forced him. And of course, that's exactly the case for Trump as well. And, you know, you'll remember that after the 2020 election, when everyone in the Republican Party was saying, “you got to stop this, you got to stand down.” That's absolutely not what Trump was prepared to do. He puts himself above the party, above the country, and has done so consistently. I mean, you know, if you think about, the vice presidents in these cases, the 45th President Trump, threatened the life of his vice president in a last ditch effort to hold on to power, back on January 6th in 2021. The 46th president ended his campaign and strongly endorsed his vice president for the good of the country.
It would be hard to see a more dramatic contrast between two old white men in political power in the United States, one, America’s Nero, holding on for himself no matter what the consequences. The other, America’s Cincinnatus. They are not the same. And as a consequence, the US now has a much more competitive political race. I do believe that over the next month, the Democrats will not just dominate headlines, and they've done that a lot with Biden's unfitness, but also have energy and enthusiasm, and that they have not have and they haven't had for a very long time.
That is certainly an advantage for them. I think that Kamala Harris will do much better if the election nomination process is at least somewhat competitive. Now, I personally don't think that Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, who are, you know, seen to be the most well-known and competitive candidates, potential candidates outside of Kamala Harris. I don't think they'll run, with Biden now having endorsed, fully endorsed his vice president, with Kamala wanting that endorsement, I think that they will wait, they’ll bide their time. They will support Harris, and they'll wait themselves until 2028. But I do think that others will decide to declare, I don't know who they'll be, but I think there will be some. And I think it's interesting that former President Obama did not endorse Harris. He said very strongly positive things about Biden. But he said that the process needs to be open and play out.
And I think that that is not just a knife to Harris. Not at all. I think it is a Obama recognition, that for all of her advantages, she has vulnerability and she will benefit from a process that doesn't look like the political machine has just decided that they're going to anoint her, that there's not going to be a primary process. So there needs to at least be some level of competition, a race that she has to show that she can win. And, you know, conceivably she could implode during that process. And then maybe she isn't the nominee, though I would bet a lot at this point that she is going to be. Where do we go from here?
We're in unprecedented times. As much as this is a better day for US democracy and there haven't been many, it is also true that this is a democracy that remains in crisis. We were less than a second, a fraction of a second away from former President Trump getting killed, getting assassinated, and if that had happened, I have no doubt that we would have had George Floyd-style riots across the country, but with a lot more guns. And I think that there is a lack of appreciation of just how close this country was to a level of political chaos, social instability and violence. And we have three more months plus before this election, where both the Democrats and the Republicans still believe that if the opponent wins, that it is going to be the destruction of democracy.
Biden's standing down did not change Trump's view of that or his supporters view of that. And the Democrats still feel the same way about Trump, and they feel the same way about Trump, even after his near assassination. There's been no unifying of the country on the back of that, and there'll be no unifying of the country on the back of Biden stepping down. But there may well be a lot more unifying of the Democrats, with perhaps a significant number of independents that show up. So very divided, deeply vulnerable over the coming months, we're going to be very busy. But it's nice on a Sunday to have something nice to say.
And I will certainly say that to President Biden, someone that I have criticized a fair amount over the past months, as he has deteriorated for not, doing the right thing in standing down, that you sir have my appreciation. as an American and more importantly, as a citizen of this little planet here, for doing something that the world can take a little bit of inspiration from, and thinking of someone beyond yourself for your legacy, which looks better today than it did yesterday. That's it for me.
And I'll talk to you all real soon.
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a quick take to kick off your week. Still talking very much about the United States, the elections, the assassination attempt on former President Trump. We now have the Republican National Convention kicking off in Milwaukee. And is it possible that anything good can come from this most tragic event and very close to a world changing event?
I wish I could say yes. I certainly was heartened to see in the initial hours after the attack that the president of the United States strongly condemned it, called for unity, a very nonpartisan statement, pulled down campaign ads and stopped with planned events for the president and vice president. This is no time to be campaigning. I saw the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, did the same in a statement that he made publicly a few hours later. And it's good to hear from former President Trump, that he is changing his speech and wants it to be a less divisive and a more unifying speech.
All of that sounds promising, and there is an opportunity here. But I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical. I think that the divisions in the country are too deep, and the weaponization and of the politics has come from inside the House. It's not from the Russians or the Iranians or the Chinese. It's from American citizens. And that's very likely to continue. When you say that former President Trump is a dictator and that if you elect him, the US will become a dictatorship, and you compare him to Hitler, then it is understandable that many people would view it as patriotic to do everything possible to stop him. If he is an existential threat to the country, then he must be stopped by all means. And if it is true that Biden and the Democrats will destroy the country, and we'll have World War III and the country will be gone if they're elected as Trump has said, then you have to stop them. You have to do everything possible to stop them.
And in that regard, I think this is not going to look like 9/11, where after an external threat, the country rallied together and said never again and meant it, made a lot of mistakes, of course, trillions of dollars and a failed war in Iraq, a failed war in Afghanistan. But it was unifying for America. The response to 9/11 was not red or blue. It was not left or right. It was all Americans, and waving a flag was something that all Americans were proud of and did not see in any way as polarized. I think this is different. I think this is a lot more like what we saw on January 6th. January 6th, you have a lot of people that were outraged, Democrats and Republicans outraged with the violence that they saw in the Capitol building with the illegal insurrection and attempt to overturn a legitimate vote.
And you saw the speeches that were made by Senator McConnell and many others that said that this would not stand. But in a short period of time, it became politicized. It became weaponized, it became Democrats saying one thing and Republicans saying another. And we're now at the point that the January 6th insurrection is singing the national anthem are seen as patriots by the MAGA right. And not only does Trump play that at rallies, but he salutes it. That is, I fear, what's going to happen in the United States in the next four months of this election. I want to see the country come together. I want everyone to recognize that the rhetoric is dangerous and leads to violence and that the US is not on the verge of becoming a dictatorship, and that Trump is not the second coming of Hitler, and that political violence in all of its forms in the United States is something that we as a democracy can't tolerate that. But I don't believe that's where we're heading. I think it is, unfortunately, much more likely that we are going to revert to an “us” versus “them” diatribe.
It is going to be an incredibly polarized election, and people really do feel like democracy at stake. 75% of Americans, when asked, believe that democracy of the United States is at stake with this election in November. The problem is, of course, they don't agree on who's behind that and who's responsible. 25% of Americans agree that it's patriotic to turn to violence in this environment to protect the country. And that doesn't mean that 25% of the people are prepared to actually take action on it. But the level of sympathy, private sympathy and public sympathy is an awful lot higher than the number of people that publicly said, “Oh my God, this is horrible, and nothing like this should ever happen.” And everybody that's watching this knows that.
And so, I fear, that we are not going to learn the right lesson from this near assassination. I'd love to see Trump himself prove me wrong, and we'll see, what the speech is like. But there have been many times, of course, over Trump's presidency, it's like now he's a leader, now he's presidential. And of course, the reality is that Trump is much less of a leader than he is a winner. And Trump won the presidency by dividing America, by taking advantage of the existing divisions and playing on them and preying on them, that he refers to others, his political opponents, as losers. Much more focused on that than fellow citizens. And the need for that to change is immediate and immense. The United States cannot be a country of winners and losers. The United States has to be a team with leaders that we respect. And there are many countries around the world, many democracies around the world, that have that manifestation that feels much more like that.
But the United States today does not. And that's fundamentally why the US is a democracy in crisis and is uniquely in crisis compared to all the other democracies in the world that have had their elections over the past months with no problem at all. It's not where we are right now in the US. We can't normalize this. We can't accept it. We have to be willing to fight together for our democracy, as opposed to fight each other and destroy our democracy. I will say I'm a little offended that President Putin thinks we need his help to destroy democracy. We're more than capable of doing that ourselves. Russians. Stay the hell out. But, seriously, this is a time that we need a lot more from Americans being together.
And that is not the way that we define our political system right now. So that's my honest take on this. I hope I'm wrong. My analysis is not where I want the country to go. And it's not where I'll work on the country to go.
So, I'll be back and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and responding to what is certainly a very dramatic turn of events in my country, the United States, with former President Trump at a rally appearing to have been shot, an apparent assassination attempt, and he's okay, but certainly didn't have to go that way. It looks like he was at least hurt, a minor injury, grazed, blood on his ear, got back up when the shots stopped, and again, appears to be fine. But that cannot be said for the state of American democracy.
This is a very grave turn of events in a country that is very deeply polarized, in a country where a great many Americans do not believe that their democracy is healthy or particularly functional, and where a large majority of Americans believe that the domestic political opposition is out to destroy that democracy. This is the worst sort of event that can happen in that environment, and I deeply worry that it presages much more political violence and social instability to come. This is the kind of thing that we have seen historically in lots of countries facing instability. It frequently does not end well. And the US, of course, is far more powerful; its institutions are resilient, but they have been under stress and eroding an attack for decades now.
Lots of things to say about this. Maybe the first, about the campaign itself, is that image of Trump standing up with blood on his face and injured and with his fist raised up and the Secret Service all around him, and it was he's saying fight, fight, and there's a flag above him is an iconic image. I suspect it is an image that will become very, very important for the remainder of this campaign. It makes it more likely that Trump wins. The fact that President Biden and his serious vulnerability is his age and that he's seen to not be physically robust, that he's frail, that he will, and we saw that with the debate, and everyone's talked about it for two weeks. This is the opposite of frail, and I don't know if it was adrenaline or instinct or what it was that got into Trump after someone tried to shoot him, but that response and being caught on tape is, I think, going to be a rally for his people for a long time. And I expect it to lead all the headlines on this issue as people across the world see it over the coming hours and days. So, that's the first topic.
The second is what has to happen now as a consequence. And I think it's utterly essential that everyone across the American political spectrum denounces this political violence. Everyone denounces this assassination attempt and calls for calm from their supporters going forward and that this has no place in a democracy, however damaged. Ideally, that is done in a bipartisan manner, that is done in Congress, in the House, and in the Senate. Not with individual posts, and comments, and tweets, but from the entirety of a joint session condemning it and working for peace and a peaceful transition, whatever the results of the election going forward, no matter what. That's what the country needs. I am deeply suspect that it's not going to happen. I'm deeply suspect that former President Trump, President Biden, will not be willing or able together to do that and that many of their supporters will have no such interest. But that's what the country needs. It's utterly essential in this environment.
Secondly, we should be prepared for more violence. And I would say this across the political spectrum: the United States has more gun availability and violence than any G7-advanced industrial democracy by a long margin. Political extremism and disinformation have been weaponized through the media landscape, and particularly through social media. There are large numbers of people, of course, that are spreading conspiracy theories. And there are also external actors like Russia, like Iran, like China, like North Korea, and others that are very interested in taking advantage of US division and dysfunction, and further using their resources as a megaphone to support and stoke more political violence and instability in the United States. And at a time when Americans believe that the other political side is out to destroy US democracy, then the stakes are very high. And the willingness of some to use political violence is far greater, certainly, than we've seen at any point since 1968, but perhaps at any point since the Civil War. So, that is a real concern.
I think that finally, and I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say about this as we learn more, but one point I really do want to make is that democracy around the world is not in crisis right now. This is a year of many, many elections, and we've seen them in India, the world's most populous country, 1.5 billion people. We've seen it across the European Union, the largest common market. We've seen it in France, in the United Kingdom, in Mexico, rich countries, poor countries, democracies all they have had free, fair options with peaceful transitions. That is not what we are seeing right now in the United States. The US is the only major democracy in the world today that is experiencing a serious crisis. And we do ourselves no favors by normalizing the events of the past months of this election, and the events that we've just witnessed in the past moments in the United States.
This is going to require people to recognize that US political institutions are in danger, and that they require our protection together as citizens to uphold the values that we believe in. If further devolution into blamesmanship, into polarization, into the weaponization of politics, is the way you lose your democracy. And those stakes are very real, certainly much more real than at any point in my lifetime.
So that's where we are right now. I hope everyone is going to continue to follow this and engage. It's a really important issue, and I'll do my best to share my thoughts as honestly as I know how. That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. Lots going on especially big elections. We have the France results. We have the UK results. We have the Iran results. We have a lot of uncertainty of course, here in the United States. My big takeaway is this is a horrible time to be an incumbent.
It's really challenging and what a huge reason for it that people aren't talking about, because it's already way in the rearview mirror is the pandemic. If I'm talking to you right now, your life was really changed by the pandemic in ways that you never would have expected before, right? I mean, we all had to deal with social distancing and masking and vaccine and not only that, but of course, the global economy seized up and people also stopped moving around for like a couple of years. An enormous amount, trillions and trillions of dollars were spent and that got us through an incredibly difficult time. But on the back of that, you suddenly have no more money that's being thrown at everyone, and you've got inflation that comes from, all of a sudden, the supply chains moving and demand moving. You know that these are costs that people are paying, that people no longer have those checks that were coming in during the pandemic, and those savings have been deployed already if you're working or even middle class. And people are moving again, people are moving not just from city to city, but also around the world. So migration is really picking up. And you really don't want to be the leader who's holding the bag when that happens. That's absolutely a big piece of what happened in France. It's a big piece of what happened in the United Kingdom, South Africa, India.
Lots of these elections are people that are unhappy with their existing leadership because it is such an unprecedented environment, and they're having a hard time dealing with that. There are other issues, too, don't get me wrong. And certainly in the UK, the fact that this also comes on the back of Brexit and a level of perceived incompetence on the part of successive conservative prime ministers who were not elected by the population but were selected by the party. The Labor Party did just as well in 2024 as they did in 2019. I think they picked from 33% to 34% total population. It was hardly a landslide, but the Conservative Party imploded because people were unhappy with them. And that is very much the story. It's that the existing incumbents are not doing well.
Macron is not doing well. He's lost so many seats in France and the far right has doubled their number in the parliament and the far left and the left coalition that is not Macron's centrist have also done far better, far better than anyone expected.In fact, they came in number one. Percentage wise, it's Macron in the center that is falling apart in France. That's the big lesson. It's not that the far right is doing well or badly. Some of the far left is doing well or badly. It’s that the incumbent, whoever they are, are really getting hit. Now that leads to a big question here in the United States.
November is coming up. Our elections are way too long. They're way too expensive. But, you know, four months, it's now starting to really be silly season in the United States. And, even if Biden was an incredibly robust and reasonably popular candidate, he would have a hard time in this environment. And of course, that's not the case. He's by far the oldest person that's run for the position in the United States. And he's showing that age, he is showing it more and more every day. I worry about that, of course, for him and for all of those that support him, certainly doesn't seem as if he's about to step down. But of course, that's what he has to say if he's intending to continue to fight until the moment that he changes.
On the other hand, Trump is also historically unpopular in the United States. If this was another candidate on the Republican side, this would be an easy call. This would be a Republican landslide. And Biden or anyone that the Democrats would put up would have a really hard time. And that's because, you know, immigration issues, inflation issues, anti-incumbency very strong in this environment. But because Trump himself is so extraordinarily unpopular and polarizing, it's actually still pretty close. And most of the polls show that that we're talking about a small number of swing states and a very small number of voters. And if you're Biden, you can convince yourself in that environment, “hey, I'm the guy that's going to be, you know, as useful as anybody else. It's too dangerous this late in the race to bring in another candidate.” I would agree with that. I would, if I really believe that what we saw at the debate was a one-off event and not a condition as former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said. I don't believe that, certainly don't believe that on the bases of conversations that I've had with the CEOs, the heads of state, the heads of the multilaterals, the senators, the members of the House that have been engaged with Biden regularly and routinely.
Now, that's different from what the people inside the Biden staff are saying. They are on message. They are very loyal, and they are all saying Biden can do it. If you've seen the schedule, he's so robust, he's so active, he's with it. But anyone outside that who is not like being paid to be completely on message is saying Biden has a serious problem. And in that regard, the likelihood that this doesn't go away, that his principal vulnerability gets worse, I think is very high. So if I were in a room advising him personally and he was willing to listen to me, I would tell him to step down. Having said that, I would have said it a year ago. But, you know, it is what it is.
We'll see what happens this week at the NATO summit with all of these world leaders coming in that are very concerned about what's happening in the United States and going forward, we've got the Republican convention real soon. We’ve got the Democratic convention, and everyone is going to be laser-focused on what's happening in the United States.
So much for that. I'll talk to you all real soon.
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. The topic everyone is discussing, of course, is what is the state of play in the US election for President Biden's reelection campaign in particular? What's going to happen? What are the outcomes?
Well, what's going to happen at least for the near term, is that Biden isn't going anywhere. He would have to decide, to stand down. He certainly is not prepared to do that. His team would have to tell him strongly that they feel like he's making a mistake. They're not prepared to do that, either. And this is something we've seen on a few occasions. Remember, Biden has been serving at high levels in Foreign Office for decades as vice president for eight years, in addition to president for almost four and senator including running the Foreign Relations Committee for decades and decades. And so the people around him, they are very loyal. They have a lot of experience. And they've been on and committed to Team Biden for a very long time. They absolutely are willing to give him advice. And they execute as well as they can, on his directives. But they are very unwilling to challenge him, particularly when he feels strongly about an outcome.
And we've seen this play out on Russia-Ukraine, Biden was unwilling to talk about moving towards a negotiated settlement as the Ukrainians were doing better and better. They were kicking it down the road. They weren't having the difficult decision because no one was willing to really challenge it. And then the situation for the Ukrainians started getting worse, and it was “they'll manage reasonably well,” the tactical on the day to day. And you have a strong coalition that the Americans are leading. But at no point are you making the big sudden change. It's very cautious. It's very conservative. and it tends to kick the can on big, controversial potential decisions.
I've seen the same thing in the war in the Middle East. A lot of people feeling like Biden should have been tougher and stronger against Prime Minister Netanyahu much earlier, especially as he was taking his own whacks against Biden. Biden unwilling to do that. They kept kicking the can. And so you got incremental decision making, very cautious, very risk averse, very conservative. Every one of the tactical decisions were pretty well executed.
But willingness to take big bets and risks, much much less so. And now we see the same thing playing out on the election. For the last year, it's been very clear to anyone that has met with Biden. And I've said this, certainly publicly, and I've heard it from all sorts of leaders, whether it's CEOs or leaders of the G7 or the G20 or the big multilateral organizations, that Biden is not someone that is capable of strongly leading the country for another four years through 86. The age of 86, too frail, too slow, losing a number of steps, since he was running back in 2020. But at no point was someone around Biden willing to have the tough conversation. And Biden himself, wasn't willing to hear it. And so you kick the can, you kick the can, you continue to manage it until it becomes a bigger problem. And that's where we are, right now. And it is certainly true that the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the top leaders of the House and Senate and the top governors, none of them are straying from the party line.
They are rallying around the president and saying, “yeah, he had a bad debate, but he can still do this.” But there are a lot of people, that certainly matter, for the president, in terms of the mainstream media, as well as in terms of senior leaders in the former Obama camp that are saying that this guy needs to step down. And I do think it matters when the paper of record for the center left, The New York Times, has not just their individual columnist, but the editorial board writing that he needs to stand down. And I think it matters when respected advisers to Obama, like Axelrod, Favreau and a number of others are saying you need to step down. Now, Biden doesn't trust those people. In terms of the Obama folks, he thinks that they're the ones that gave it to Clinton as an opportunity, when it should have been his, passed him over. If Obama said that to him personally and strongly directly, it would be taken differently. But certainly, Biden and his senior team won't accept a recommendation for them, and they won't accept a recommendation from the mainstream media.
I mean, if you look at the seven stages of grief, they are through shock. They're through denial. They're roughly in the anger phase. But they're not yet in depression. And they certainly aren't engaging in bargaining. So, I think we're very far from Biden actually stepping down. Now, having said that, there's still five months before the election, and that's a long time for an 81-year-old that has bad days. And, you know, the fact that you now do have, for the first time, some damaging information from inside the administration, for example, the Axios piece that said that he's pretty strong, and being able to engage from 10 am to 4 pm. That's an indictment for someone at 81 that would need to govern until he's 86. And that's the kind of thing that would not have been shared with the media six months ago. And now it is. And when you see members of the family and senior friends and formal advisers to Biden blaming the senior team of staffers for not prepping him well during the debate, that again, we haven't seen that kind of internal animosity.
And if you start to see senior members of the team turning out against either anonymously or not, Biden sticking around because they think he can't win, that becomes much more dangerous. So I think this gets harder to manage. It's easy to manage right after the debate when everyone recognizes that he's not prepared to step down. But as this story continues to play, and yes, they can try to manage him and limit the time that he spends with the public. But this is going to be the focus for all of the media going forward over the coming months, and of course, is a very easy thing for the Trump team to run on running against Biden, as opposed to running on Trump's deficiencies, is a much better place for them to be. We are in a horrible place in terms of the state of this US election.
I'm sure many of you have seen the CBS YouGov poll over the weekend that shows that over 70% of registered voters believe that Biden is not cognitively capable to stand, and run the country for four years. They think he should stand down. 50% of registered voters believe the same about Trump. That number is way too high. It's too high for Biden. It's too high for Trump. We have never been in an environment where the American people feel so badly about both candidates. And yes, of course, there is an enthusiasm gap and Trump supporters are much more willing to forgive Trump's unfitness or even to paint Trump's unfitness as a positive, than team, than the people around Biden.
And that is a problem. You're more likely to see a bumper sticker, or a cap for Trump among his supporters than for Biden among his supporters. And in an election where turnout matters, the fact that large numbers of Democrats are now questioning the fitness for office of their own candidate, I think does make it more likely that Trump is going to win. I had very, very low confidence going into the debate about what the outcome of the election would be. I still have low confidence, but it is higher than it was before the debate. This is a major inflection point in my view. And it makes it more likely that Trump is going to win. And it would put more pressure on the Biden team to consider alternatives.
I do believe that if they wanted to go the alternative route, alternatives exist. First of all, at this stage, given Biden's age and given the way he is likely to appear over the coming five months, I don't think that Kamala Harris is a worse choice, is less likely to win than Biden. So simply stepping back, continuing to campaign. But Kamala becomes the candidate, I would say at this point, and I wouldn't have said that six months ago, she is likely to take the election as Biden would be, both in my view, on balance, likely to lose. But I also think that the potential of bringing in somebody else in the convention, and there are a lot of strong candidates out there.
Gina Raimondo would be certainly towards the top, especially because she is actively a very trusted part of the Biden cabinet. So it's less of a transition. Pete Buttigieg, outside, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, Jared Polis, there are a number, that are strong that is also, of course, a big risk because here, not only are you pushing aside Kamala Harris, which will antagonize a lot of her supporters, and there are many, but also would be putting up someone who does not have a significant track record in national politics. And that reminds me of Ron DeSantis. So many anti-Trump Republicans were all in for DeSantis. This guy was going to be the golden child for the Republican Party, take out Trump. And he was an absolute nothing lightweight on the national stage and got pasted by Trump. And that, of course, is a danger. So I understand that tactically, when you have a team that is oriented towards consensus around Biden, that on any given day, putting your head up and saying, “I think it's time for you to go, sir,” is not a great strategy.
And of course, that leads to many, many, many, many days of kicking the can until the point when it is a lot harder and the dangers are a lot greater than they were if you had had that conversation, say, a year ago. Also keep in mind that when Biden first won the election in 2020, became president 2021, literally no one around him thought he was going to run again. So, I mean, they did think this is a one term president. He trounced Trump. there'll be somebody else on the Republican side, probably because he's too old too, Trump is unfit. And Biden will have one term and then it'll go on to somebody else. But of course, if you're unwilling to make those plans on any given day, you end up in a non-optimal place.
And that is where the Democrats are right now. The Republicans are in a non-optimal place for very different reasons. They're also facing someone who they certainly would much rather be running with someone else because they'd have a much higher chance of winning if this were Biden at this age versus Nikki Haley, the likelihood Haley would win would be, I think, a layup or a slam dunk. It's not where we are, even now with Trump, because so many people think that Trump is problematic and for very good reason, to run. But the likelihood that Trump, of course, will be removed, zero. Despite all of that, and he does control the Republican Party to a much greater degree than Biden controls the Democratic Party. And you can say, well, that's unfair. And they aren't the same standards, but, you know, what you would like to happen is not where we are. Where we are, is that Biden is the one that has to make this decision. And it's going to get harder for him over the course of the coming months.
That's it for me. And I'll talk to you all real soon.
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. It is late, and we have just seen the first, maybe the last presidential debate of 2024. I was skeptical about the strategy from day one of Biden getting on stage with Trump. Biden has never been a great campaigner, doesn't have a lot of discipline, and isn't enormously entertaining. But they decided they needed to do it. And the rules benefited a normal politician. The microphones shut off, except for the person who was allowed to speak, and there was no live audience, and it was CNN. So the questions are going to be, at the very least, balance between the two. And, if there's going to be a slant, it'll be towards Biden and not towards Trump. And despite all of that, Biden got absolutely pasted.
And it's not about his speaking points per se; there were some points that he made, if you just look at the transcript, that clearly was in his favor, I would say, on balance, on the economy, his command of the facts was stronger than that of Trump. I saw that, in terms of talk of inflation and jobs. I saw that in terms of China and the trade deficit with China, that's actually narrowed as opposed to increased. Certainly, on abortion, I think that Biden would have landed more punches if you were only looking at the transcript. But no one is looking at the transcript. They're looking at the performance. And the performance, Biden was abysmal.
It wasn't just like a little bit on Trump's side. Trump looked vibrant. He actually, largely played by the rules. He sounded strong. He stuck to his time limit. And Biden looked and occasionally sounded incoherent. And the reality is that, I mean, Trump, in my view, shouldn't be running because he's unfit for being president. Biden shouldn't be running because he is too old to stand. And of the two challenges, the latter looks a lot worse on the debate stage that 50 plus percent of Americans just watched. The inbound that I've been receiving over the last two hours from people all over the world is overwhelmingly: "Is Biden now going to stand down? What is going to happen?" Because this is the worst evening, certainly of his campaign, and the level of pressure to find someone, anyone else other than Biden, to run is going to be strong.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week. I want to talk about US elections and democracy.
This has been the year 2024 of elections all over the world. And most of them are going just fine. I mean, pretty much almost all of them. Okay, Russia is not a democracy. So you shouldn't really talk about elections because it's not like the people actually have a choice. It's Putin or it's Putin. But everywhere else, we've had elections that are free and fair and peaceful, and they've led to stable transitions, whether they're voting people out, or whether they're clipping their power or whether they're doubling down on them. And that's been true in Indonesia and Mexico and South Africa, India, the European Parliament. And soon it will be true in the coming weeks, first in France and in the United Kingdom. So it's not like democracy all over the world is in crisis or is about to fall apart. It's not like most countries can't have normal elections.
But the United States is an outlier. it's of course, the most powerful country in the world, but it's also the most dysfunctional major democracy. It's a democracy in crisis, and it's getting worse. In 2020, of course, there was an election that was very seriously contested. Former President Trump claimed the vote was rigged. It wasn't. But he continues to push forward that narrative. And it has been supported by pretty much the entire Republican Party leadership because he's in charge of the party and as a consequences believed by a strong majority of Republican voters. That is unique among advanced industrial democracies.
And indeed, you see Trump continuing to say the only way the election could be legitimate this time around is if he wins. If he loses, it's obviously rigged. That's clearly problematic for a former president and a presidential candidate in a democracy. But it's worse than that because this time around, you have questions of legitimacy that are beyond the vote, but about the nature of the election itself. Trump's view, whether he believes it or not, is sort of immaterial, but certainly it's what he is promoting, is that the indictments against him, the criminal cases against him, now the 34 convictions against him are politicized by the Democratic Party, by President Biden to make it impossible for him to win a legitimate election. In other words, using the political power of the incumbent party and leadership to delegitimize the election.
That's what he's saying. Again, it's not true, but to the extent that that is the case that implies that, if Trump loses, it's not just because of a rigged vote, it's because of a rigged system. It's because, you know, he was undermined by these illegitimate cases, by the criminalization of the entire judiciary, the capture of the one branch of government by another branch of government, and it's politicization. So that that's the way that Trump is running, Biden is running, saying that Trump is a clear and present danger to democracy, that the country could become authoritarian, that you could lose your democracy if he becomes president. So everything is at stake.
And also the fact that he has been impeached twice, the fact that he has faced these indictments, including convictions, means that he is illegitimate, shouldn't be allowed to run for president, never mind be elected president. That is the Democratic view that Trump is not legitimate as a candidate. So it goes beyond who wins the vote.
It's the reality that Trump and Biden are now portraying the other as illegitimate in terms of the way that the election is being conducted itself. The very reality of a democratic election in that regard no longer holds for the messaging coming from the Democratic and Republican leadership. So is this about Trump? And the answer is only partially, he is a major symptom of the dysfunction and the crisis that US democracy is presently facing.
But it is also very important to recognize a deeper problem, which is that, many Americans believe that their country, my country, is no longer a representative democracy. That powerful, moneyed, special interests, across the board, whether we talk about the defense complex or, pharmaceutical companies or big finance or, you name it, the NRA or the teachers lobby or the police lobby or you name it, that powerful interests are able to capture the political system policies, the regulatory system, and ensure that government does not reflect the interests of the average American.
And it is true that the US is far more captured by special interests. And you see this with the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court. You see this with the ungodly amount of money that goes into campaigning for American elections from the presidency all the way down to the House of Representatives. You see this across the board in the way policy can and cannot be made in the United States.
And this is why you have people talking about a uniparty or the blob in foreign policy or even the deep state. And a lot of this is conspiracy theory, and it's certainly not true that there was a shadowy group of people that are actually forming, you know, sort of policy and controlling the president. But the reality, in a sense, is more disturbing than that. It is that the system is so structurally weak and so controlled by money and power of people that are not voted for office that it feels like an non-representative, non-democracy to large numbers of Americans who no longer share the values that America was founded on. They don't see that the country reflects that.
And to the extent the US is unique among G7 countries in being unrepresentative in governance of its people, you see a lot of that in Trump support, that people out there want someone who is angering the establishment, angering the mainstream media, someone that says he's going to break the system, he's going to bring a corrupt system to heel. And certainly you see a little bit of that in Trump's stated policies, like on wanting to end wars, for example, and why Trump doesn't support free trade and instead wants more subsidy, more industrial policy in the US, Trump's China policy, which precedes Biden's China policy but is largely similar, focused much more on that. But of course, it's also true that Trump's “drain the swamp” mantra only makes sense if you don't look at a lot of Trump's domestic policies.
I mean, Trump was the leader in my life who was most aligned to ensuring that rich people get richer, was most aligned with big finance and hedge funds and major corporations and big oil and fast food and manufacturing and, you know, pro-dumping all of these things. I mean, you look at his cabinet with Sonny Perdue as the secretary of agriculture, and Elizabeth DeVos as the secretary of education, and on and on and energy and treasury and you name it.
What you see the reality of Trump's cabinet was the swampiest, of pro special interests, pro very powerful people. And that's why Trump was so welcomed when the Business Council last week invited him to go and speak, as soon as he said yes, (and Biden was invited too, didn't make it, sent an representative), immediately far more CEOs, went to watch. Why? I mean, one, because they want to make sure that they're connected with someone who can be president. But two, because a lot of Trump's policies, will benefit the wealthiest and the most powerful people in the country. And so in that regard, you know, Trump can throw things like, you know, build the wall, identity politics, anti-DEI. But the reality is that the most powerful will do the best, at least in the short term. Under a Trump administration, that's the revealed preference we've seen, with the alignment that he has with those that give the big money.
So, anyway, that is a little bit for me, a little bit of the state of democracy is challenged as it is. I'm not looking forward to this election, in part because it's horrible to see your country go through this identity crisis and not align itself with the values that I think a lot of people around the world, and a lot of people in the US would like to see America do a better job with. That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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