The jobs report is a major victory for President Biden, especially heading into the election, as several recent benchmarks, including strong GDP and falling inflation, suggest a booming economy that even consumers are starting to notice.
Liberals and Democrats have had good reason to panic about Biden’s low approval numbers, particularly on the economy. Those numbers were, and are, very bad. But I believe this has had a second-order insidious effect. This, plus Trump’s enduring polling strength amid his conspicuous emotional decline, his deranged threats to unleash retribution and violence against opponents, and his extraordinary array of criminal charges, has produced despair.
The “vibe,” as the kids say, is that Biden has become in some mysterious sense a hopelessly compromised figure—the victim of a kind of Jimmy Carter Curse that’s unfathomable and irreversible. Never mind that the GOP has suffered losses under Trump it hasn’t experienced in decades. The current polling has spoken: Trump is untouchable, invincible, not subject to conventional rules that govern how we believed politics works. Trump has permanently hacked our politics. LOL, nothing matters.
But this fatalism has a cost. As Brian Beutler chronicles regularly at his Substack, a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop has set in. Precisely because Democrats have decided Trump is politically immune to his own glaring negatives—the appalling personal depravity, the contempt for laws and the civic contract, the serial corruption and likely criminality—they often decide that prosecuting the case against those negatives is hopeless, and therefore don’t do it.