When Paper Tigers Debate
Since at least 2016, the common refrain of US politics has been division. Democrats accuse the Trump-led Republicans of attacking an ephemeral democracy, while Republicans accuse the Democrats of facilitating the decline of the United States via “cultural Marxism” domestically and weakness abroad. The theme of division has reached such a fever pitch since Trump’s abortive January 6th coup that the movie Civil War reached the top of the North American box office with its vague caricature of US internal conflict1. Yet both sides of the US imperial apparatus were united this week in their scathing assessments of Joe Biden’s performance during his debate with Trump, with a surge of liberal commentators calling for Biden to yield his candidacy2.
Biden’s growing incoherence was far from a secret prior to the debate, and the debate’s real significance has little to do with proving this fact. Rather, the debate served to allow Trump to assimilate Biden’s self-designed image as the only “reasonable” candidate. With Biden incoherent and defending his current administration’s failings through deflection and lame excuses, Trump’s tired toolkit of connecting the US’s loss of global prestige with his opponent acquired a sharper effect. Instead of the rightwing, faux-populist outsider which Trump billed himself as in 2016, Trump took on the role of the US’s savior, echoing Biden’s employment of the same popular dissatisfaction in 2020.
Fascism has always been a matter of the existing political order coming to reconcile its distaste for the fascist movement’s disruptive methods with its real utility for protecting capital. The Democrats, in acknowledging Biden’s inability to beat Trump, thereby acknowledge too the cogency of Trump’s claim to the imperial mantle. They reveal that the real substance of the Democrat/Republican feud is not a contest between liberalism and fascism or democracy and authoritarianism, but a bitter changing of the guard between the old and the new fascist methodology. Even this difference proved itself shallow during the debate, however, and it’s for this reason that it brought Trump even closer to positioning himself as the tool of unity which capital craves from fascism for its counterrevolutionary aims.
Just as Biden cloaked his 2020 run in the guise of a reluctant savior of democracy, Trump now positions himself in a nearly identical light: “I wasn’t really going to run until I saw the horrible job [Biden] did. He’s destroying our country”3. For the US citizen aligned with the interests of their empire, Trump’s words tap into an insecurity which grows with the Western military defeats in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Palestine and the ongoing economic triumph of China. What Biden offered was the formulaic platitudes of blind Yankee patriotism: “The idea that somehow we are this failing country, I never heard a president talk like this before … We’re the envy of the world … We’re a country in the world who keeps our word and everybody trusts us”4. Biden made Trump seem like the less delusional candidate, falling into the same casual gaslighting which he’s applied to his presidential record for the past four years. The average US petit bourgeois understands that things are not getting better, and that their loss of economic privilege can be connected with the US empire’s eroding position in the global hierarchy.
When Trump claims that Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin don’t “fear” Biden, he’s making an assessment which is hard for the audience to question given Biden’s dismal performance, while Trump can simultaneously exploit both Republican impressions of his toughness and Democrat notions of his dangerousness. Meanwhile, in the domestic arena, Trump positions himself like a moderate regarding the fruits of his own reactionary agenda. He owned the repeal of Roe v. Wade but distanced himself from the most egregious attacks on reproductive rights, saying “it’s bringing it back to the vote of the people”5. On international issues, Trump doggedly adopts the same imperial war against Russia and Palestine, posturing as the only one personally strong enough to achieve victory, whereas his domestic fascist policies become a distant consequence of his acquiescence to a fraudulent popular will. He becomes the strongman US empire desires abroad and the aloof referee of Yankee fascism at home.
When called on to defend his own presidency’s failures, Trump unleashed hollow assertions just as brazenly as Biden—merely repeating ad nauseam that things were great. He again exposed himself as a one-trick-pony, capable of attacking the hypocrisy and weakness of his more established political rivals while being utterly incapable of coherently defending his own failure to implement his populist campaign promises. Biden, as usual, provided Trump with a more advantageous position than he could ever craft of his own accord. The message Trump delivered from this position is best summed up by his appeal to “let [Israel] finish the job”6. Both Biden and Trump tripped over themselves to claim superior support for Zionist genocide, but it was Trump who won that grotesque scramble by more honestly aligning with the exterminationist logic of a teetering empire.
When Trump wins the presidency, the rhetorical advantages he enjoys outside the oval office will instantly evaporate. Trump and Biden have demonstrated through this debate that their only methods of defending their records are displaced blame and gaslighting. The stronger of two paper tigers remains a paper tiger, and the victory of Trump this November will contain the germ of his office’s eventual collapse. The contradictions between Trump’s populism and the interests of imperial capital will bloom into hundreds of open sores, strengthening the internal front of the protracted struggle against a teetering empire envisaged by Mao Zedong:
“When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.”7
Bibliography
Barnes, Brooks. “The Dystopian ‘Civil War’ Reaches No. 1 at the Box Office.” The New York Times, April 14, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/movies/civil-war-box-office.html.
Editorial Board. “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.” The New York Times, June 28, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/opinion/biden-election-debate-trump.html.
CNN Staff. “Biden-Trump Debate Transcript.” CNN, June 28, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/politics/read-biden-trump-debate-rush-transcript/index.html.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Mao Zedong. “U.S. Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger.” Marxists Internet Archive, 2004. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_52.htm.