The Friday Brief

June 28, 2024

The Big Picture

It’s an emergency. Fly the plane.

In flying, we practice emergency scenarios all the time. You learn and memorize a lot of what you must do when an engine quits, your avionics die, a fire breaks out, or a goose comes through the windshield. You can wake me up from a sound sleep, and I can run the boldface emergency checklists for a half-dozen aircraft models from memory, but there’s more to it.

There’s a rule in every aviation emergency that starts with the simplest act: fly the plane. Every problem gets worse if you don’t do that first.

The order of handling the emergency is always the same: aviate, navigate, communicate.

We’re in the “aviate” phase right now. We’ll get to “navigate” and “communicate” in a few days, but for now, fly the plane.

It’s late June, and Joe Biden went on stage with a felon who tore down America, told 500 sundry lies, bragged about ending Roe v. Wade, defended January 6th, denied having sex with a porn star, and promised to betray Ukraine.

And Joe Biden had a bad, bad night.

It was the worst debate performance I’ve seen. Beyond age, there was a sense he was wildly overprepared and not in the kind of way I suggested earlier in the week.

History is replete with bad debate performances: Clinton’s first outing in 1992, George W. Bush’s Boston groaner (I was there, and it was awful), and Obama’s first showing against John McCain. Debates matter until they don’t, but they matter most to the chattering and online classes.

But there’s no spinning it. I won’t bother. The herd is moving as herds so.

With that said, Donald Trump remains an existential threat to democracy, the Republic, the Constitution, and our most fundamental liberties, in addition to being a fraud, a liar, a felon, a degenerate, a sexual assaulter, a global embarrassment, and an ally of evil.

The race is still a choice between America and Trump.

What the Biden White House and campaign do next is not something I can control. I’ve viewed my job since 2015 to defeat Donald Trump. Full stop, no conditions. It’s the most important work anyone who believes in America can do.

Nor can I control what the Democratic Party and the mainstream media will do in the coming hours and days. The media is feasting on this moment to a degree that should — but won’t — permanently dismiss the lie they’re some liberal hit squad.

As a practicing Stoic, I can control my own emotions, my determination to keep fighting Trump, how much my actions will shape the election, and dismiss the actions I can’t take. (Although my plan to release 400 rabid, hungry wolverines into Mar-A-Lago continues to have a certain gory appeal.)

What I can control is the timing, tempo, and character of a magnificent message machine at the Lincoln Project to kick Donald Trump in the balls every day. What I can do is work with allied pro-democracy groups to pull the oars in the same direction toward victory over Trump.

It’s still America or Trump.

What I can control is that the messages that split off GOP voters from Trump didn’t stop working because Biden had a hard night. What I can do is to ensure that the story of Trump told in the media conforms to objective reality, not the Munchausen fantasy spun by his army of enablers.

Trump didn’t suddenly become an exonerated man last night. He’s not better, stronger, or more honorable than he was yesterday.

He’s still a felon. Still a criminal. Still a repugnant, low creature. His catalog of lies and horrors last night wasn’t new. Nothing about Donald Trump changed. Nothing has changed about the fact that 130 days is an eternity in politics.

It was a few days after June 18th, 1940, France had fallen to the seemingly invincible Nazi war machine when Winston Churchill gave one of the most famous speeches in history. It was the third speech in a series you most certainly know of, if only in distant academic memory.

The world looked dark and impossible, and his death and that of his nation seemed inevitable.

In his “Finest Hour” speech, Churchill said the following: I recommend two sections of it to you as you ponder today’s dark mood in this campaign.

“In casting up this dread balance-sheet, contemplating our dangers with a disillusioned eye, I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic or despair. During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced nothing but disaster and disappointment, and yet at the end their morale was higher than that of the Germans, who had moved from one aggressive triumph to another.

”During that war we repeatedly asked ourselves the question, "How are we going to win?" and no one was able ever to answer it with much precision, until at the end, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our terrible foe collapsed before us.”

“The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Here’s the thing about finest hours: you have to earn them. The fight continues, and in the end, I remain confident that one day, after we wage a relentless war against him, “our terrible foe will collapse before us.”