While Donald Trump is being canonised by his party, Joe Biden is being flagellated by his

Donald Trump’s followers have treated him as the leader of a personality cult for years, immune to the normal standards of political conduct.

At the Republican convention, they elevated him to the status of leader of a religious cult, immune to the normal constraints of humanness.

By surviving the assassination attempt last weekend, he’s inspired his followers to become acolytes and invest him with supernatural powers.

“On Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” Senator Tim Scott thundered from the convention stage. “But an American lion got back up on his feet and he roared!” Trump as American Aslan.

“If you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing
now.”

When the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr, Kimberly Guilfoyle, had the podium, she attributed the former president’s survival to divine intervention – “I know that God has put an armour of protection over Donald Trump” – and actually
crossed herself on stage.

And to authenticate the blessing, the Reverend Franklin Graham, son of the most famous American evangelist of the 20th century, the late Billy Graham, took the stage, saying: “Our heavenly father, we come before you this evening with grateful hearts – thank you for saving the life of president Donald J. Trump. In his own words, it was you alone and you alone who saved him.” The reverend asked God’s will to “make America great again”.

In his speech accepting the Republican nomination, Trump played right into his own sanctification. Describing his feelings as he lay on the rally platform in Pennsylvania after the shooting, surrounded by the protective bodies of his Secret Service agents, he described his realisation of divine protection:

“There was blood pouring everywhere, yet, in a certain way I felt very safe
because I had God on my side.”

And President Joe Biden might be coming to think there’s some truth to the claim. Because, while Trump is being canonised by his party, Biden is being flagellated by his. While the Republicans are rapturously unified around their saviour, the Democrats are at furious war with themselves.

For three weeks now, the Democrats have been attacking their candidate. After a brief pause when the Trump shooting shock hit, the Democrats have resumed their insurrection against the decrepit Biden.

Which would be perfectly sensible if they had a compelling candidate to replace him. And a way to install that better candidate. But they have neither. So by scourging their president, the Democrats are, in fact, flagellating themselves.

Determined to continue its slow-motion no-confidence vote in its leader, the Democratic Party’s prediction of Biden’s failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – the longer they hammer away at him publicly, the more damaged he becomes.

It gets worse for Biden. Republican senator J.D. Vance, now Trump’s vice presidential candidate, immediately blamed Biden for the assassination attempt on Trump.

“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance said. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that president Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to president Trump’s attempted assassination.”

This was an inflammatory and unfair attack. It was also effective.

It was inflammatory because, in an extremely tense moment in a deeply divided America, the risk of “retaliatory” violent attacks on Democrats is real.

It was unfair because Trump has used inflammatory rhetoric six times for every one time by Biden during their presidential tenures, according to an analysis published this week by the political news outlet Roll Call.

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And it was effective because Biden had, in fact, used an unfortunate targeting metaphor just a few days before the shooting. Biden had complained that his
party was directing all its ire against him when it should be attacking Trump. It was, said Biden, “time to put Trump in a bullseye”.

Oops. Biden conceded that it was “a mistake to use the word”. It was, said Biden, “time to cool it down”. The Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen explained why this was “a devastating development for Biden’s re-election strategy”.

Biden, he says, “can’t run on his record because he faces double-digit disapproval on virtually every issue and 7 in 10 Americans say he doesn’t have the ‘mental and cognitive health’ to serve.

“His only case for a second term is to convince Americans that Trump poses an existential threat to our way of life. How does he do that now without violating his own pledge to ‘lower the temperature’?”

So the would-be assassin’s bullet didn’t silence Trump, but it has silenced Biden.

If this were not bad enough, Biden now has been struck by COVID and is isolating. This led Van Jones, a former Obama official and now CNN commentator, to draw this contrast: “A bullet couldn’t stop Trump, a virus just stopped Biden.”

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The Trump campaign is framing the contest as strength versus weakness. Indeed, while Trump revelled in his holy consecration at the Republican convention, attestations to his “strength” were even more numerous.

How could you miss it? Apart from multistorey high screens bearing the photo of a bloody Trump defiantly punching his fist in the air after his narrow escape from the would be-assassin’s bullet, the Republican convention went mucho macho for Trump.

The organisers brought the famous faux wrestler Hulk Hogan out of retirement to mount the stage, rip off his shirt and deliver this endorsement: “I know tough guys. Let me tell you something brother – Donald Trump is the toughest of them all.” Trump, bandaged ear in evidence, smiled along.

By contrast, Biden is in a piteous state. Every time he’s shown descending stairs, the audience watches with bated breath to make sure he gets to the bottom intact. His voice often whisperingly faint, his movements painfully stiff, his sentences frequently trailing off with a signpost to pointlessness – “anyway … ”

Now isolating with COVID, self-censoring with restraint, and assailed ceaselessly by his own party, he seems to be in a terminally hopeless contrast with an indomitable Trump.

Yet the president has said, almost daily since his debate against Trump, that he has absolutely no intention of not contesting. One commentator this week explained why no president will surrender his office lightly by recalling an old simile from the late New York governor Mario Cuomo: leaving office is like dying; your hair keeps growing, your fingernails keep growing, but the phone stops ringing.

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The Democrats’ own convention starts in a month. They’ve pledged nearly all their convention delegates to Biden already, and have no way of forcing him out. And, even if they could, they still have no candidate in a compellingly election-winning position to replace him. Are the Democrats simply in a hopeless position? It’s largely up to them.

It’s true that Trump is ahead in the polls, but his position is nowhere near as strong as the hyperbole suggests. Trump leads in the average of national polls by 3 percentage points, according to the realclearpolitics.com averages. And by 4 percentage points in the aggregate polling of the seven critical swing states. So he’s in a good position, but not a crushing one, and there is nothing immutable or inevitable about this contest.

There remain nearly four months to election day. Biden has time to emerge from isolation, rediscover his voice and focus his campaign.

Campaigns are designed to change voters’ minds. Biden’s problem at the moment is that both campaigns, Republican and Democrat, are working in the same cause – to destroy Biden. If this continues, the Democrats are indeed fated to lose.

The anti-Biden hysteria in the Democratic Party also overlooks three key points. One is that Biden isn’t popular, but Trump is just as unpopular. They have plenty of material to work with.

Second is that there is a wild card, a third candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, who’s polling 9 per cent at the moment, which is substantial for an independent. But his voters are only very tentatively attached to him. The Democrats should be working on this group.

Third is that there is a permanent wild card in US politics that the polls fail properly to account for – turnout. With voluntary voting, whichever side can most powerfully motivate voters to actually vote, wins.

Trump leads a religious cult, but the Democrats have an angry army of women at their disposal, furious at the Republicans’ assault on their reproductive rights.

But the Democrats’ priority is to relocate from the Joe Biden old folks’ home to the Kamala Harris identity politics show. With competition this brilliant, perhaps Trump really does enjoy divine favour.

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