The Weekly Sift

After one presumptive nominee for president gets convicted of felonies, you might expect to hear talk about one of the summer’s political conventions choosing someone else. What you wouldn’t expect, though, is that it’s the other party having that discussion.

So far it doesn’t seem to be a serious discussion: The Democratic Convention is going to renominate President Biden without significant opposition. Nonetheless, this week we went through yet another round of Democrats and left-leaning pundits fretting about Biden’s age and poll numbers, and speculating about alternatives.

Republicans never seem to suffer from this kind of self-doubt. During the primaries, nobody cared that polls consistently showed Nikki Haley running much better against Biden than Trump did. Now, Trump is a convicted felon in New York, and only his political clout has delayed his three other trials long enough to avoid pre-election convictions for even-more-serious federal and Georgia felonies. But prominent Republicans have wasted no time lining up behind their criminal leader, and even Larry Hogan’s tepid plea to “respect the verdict and the legal process” has all but gotten him run out of the party.

In this week’s featured post, I’ll explain why it’s time for all these anxiety-driven can’t-we-dump-Biden conversations to stop. Hoping for another candidate was a totally appropriate fantasy a year ago, but at this point there’s only one scenario that avoids a second Trump term and the threat of fascism it poses: re-elect Biden. We need to get focused on that project, which means boosting Biden rather than tearing him down.

Democracies fall to fascism when the non-fascist opposition fails to unite until it’s too late. Let’s not do that.

That post, “To stop fascism, unite around the old guy”, is just about done and should be out soon.

The weekly summary has a bunch of other stuff to cover: Israel’s costly raid to recover hostages, the ceasefire proposal, Alito’s flag story falls apart, Biden’s new border policy, Hunter’s trial, and a few other things, plus a book about the anti-CRT campaign in one Texas suburb. That should be out around noon EDT.