What, really, does Donald Trump have to do with Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain"?

I'm prepared for this. I read "The Magic Mountain"... 50 years ago. And right now I'm reading "It’s Time to Talk About Donald Trump’s Logorrhea/How many polite ways are there to ask whether the President of the United States is losing it?" by Susan B. Glasser, in The New Yorker). '

So let's see:

[I]n rambling on so much, Trump reveals just about everything one could ever want to know about him—his lack of discipline, his ignorance, his vanity, insecurity, and crudeness, and a mean streak that knows no limits. “It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely,” Thomas Mann wrote a century ago, in his novel “The Magic Mountain,” set in a sanitarium perched above the Swiss mountain town of Davos, where Trump spent the better part of this week proving to the stunned attendees of the annual World Economic Forum the continuing relevance of Mann’s observation....

[W]hen Trump reached the fulsome self-praise section of his speech, he explained that he was such an incredible peacemaker that he had even managed to end wars in places where he had not known they were happening. Imagine admitting this about yourself. Another quote from “The Magic Mountain” sprang to mind: “I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on. . . .”

1. It's not rambling. It's the weave. There's no acknowledgement that Trump himself has explained what he is doing. He calls it the weave. He's in control of it. You just don't like the elaborate tangles of verbiage. 

2. And yet you push "The Magic Mountain" at me! Why isn't Trump terse and to the point? Why isn't Thomas Mann!!!?

3. You don't want to follow the complex feats of language that require you to keep track of numerous threads to visualize the luminous tapestry.

4. Many a reader has gotten fed up with "The Magic Mountain," and she knows it, but I doubt that Susan B. Glasser would regard Thomas Mann as some kind of nut. I picture her denouncing the reader for not digging in, paying attention, trusting the author, and taking the time to understand. 

5. It's not as though Glasser drew upon deep literary experience to come up with material from "The Magic Mountain." It's the famous book set in the location where Trump spoke. To quote it is like quoting your last fortune cookie or scrap of litter right at your feet.

6. What does Glasser really know of "The Magic Mountain"? She's got 2 quotes, and if you go to Goodreads, you'll find both quotes within the top 6 quotes from the book. They are #5 and #6.

7. ##1-4: "Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil"/"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death"/"Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul"/"There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst." I'm tempted to ask Grok to write a pro-Trump essay using those 4 quotes.

Inciting a peaceful and patriotic riot.

Mmm. First time I'm noticing that the word "riot" is present in "patriotic."

On January 6th, 2021, Trump famously said "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."

Today, I'm reading: "Why Aren’t We in the Streets? On Trump the Almighty and his so-far quiescent capital," by Susan Glasser, in The New Yorker.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: Rewrite "Takin’ It to the Streets" with words that express the feelings of someone who would write an article titled "Why Aren’t We in the Streets? On Trump the Almighty and his so-far quiescent capital."

Inspiration for parodists:

"Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times."

"The condemnation of his critics, up to and including the current President, can sound shrill or simply partisan. The fact checks, while appalling, never stop the demagogue for whom the 'bottomless Pinocchio' was invented... In the next few months, the Biden campaign and its allies plan to spend close to a billion dollars attempting to persuade Americans not to make the historic mistake of electing Trump twice. My thought is a simpler and definitely cheaper one: watch his speeches. Share them widely. Don’t look away."

Writes Susan B. Glasser, in "I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You/The ex-President is building a whole new edifice of lies for 2024" (The New Yorker).

Below is the speech Glasser watched in full. I've watched it. It's a standard Trump rally speech. Is Trump "vituperative"? Why not "fiery" or "feisty" (the words used to describe Biden's loud, angry SOTU)? Is he "rambling" and "unhinged" or a marvel of stamina and spontaneity? But Glasser is convinced — or poses as convinced — that watching the whole 2 hours will persuade voters who might vote for Trump that he's as awful at Trump haters insist he is:

"Trump’s victory is by no means assured...."

"But the past few years of Trump, Trump, Trump have taught me, if nothing else, that hoping for the best is not necessarily a winning strategy. With American democracy on the line, I’m taking the only defensible position toward the New Year: full-scale dread. I plan to pull up the covers and hide under my pillow as long as possible come January. It’s going to be a long twelve months."

Writes Susan B. Glasser, in "The Year We Stopped Being Able to Pretend About Trump/The story of 2023 wasn’t the search for another Republican leader—but the Party’s embrace of the one it already has" (The New Yorker).

Dread as the alternative to hope.

How could dread be a "winning strategy"?

Are Democrats arriving at the belief that Trump is inevitable? What strange power that man has!

"A reëlected Trump would be a President subject to no constraints at all..."

"... having twice dodged congressional impeachment, and either beaten back the Justice Department and the courts or delayed so long that he could seek to use his regained executive powers to nullify the cases against him. Trump, in his ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding his effort to retake the White House, has taken to calling his 2024 race 'the final battle.' I have increasingly come to believe that he is correct."

Writes Susan B. Glasser in "Finally, the Trump Case We’ve Been Waiting For/But, with 2024 looming, is it already too late?" (I don't need to tell you this is in The New Yorker. You can tell from the diaeresis in "reëlected.")

ADDED: I'd avoid the phrase "ever-more-apocalyptic." It's like "very unique." Is it the end of the world or isn't it? And isn't Glasser's rhetoric as "apocalyptic" as Trump's? "Trump would be a President subject to no constraints at all" — she can't literally believe that. Trump's use of "the final battle" isn't more extreme. 

"Does the mere fact of his large following in an increasingly radicalized and extremist Republican Party require that news organizations broadcast his views to millions?"

Asks Susan B. Glasser in "Don’t Say You Haven’t Been Warned About Trump and 2024/CNN’s awful town hall with the former President heralds a disastrous election year to come" (The New Yorker).

Here's my radical idea: Give up on attacking Trump, the person, and engage with the substance of his policy arguments. Act as if he's a completely ordinary politician — pose as if you felt neutrality toward him personally — and engage with the ideas. 

You really do need to take him seriously. He's presumptively the Republican nominee, and he's got an even chance of getting re-elected to the presidency. You can freak out about that, but you've been freaking about about him for 8 years, and it hasn't fazed him. His supporters tune you out.

Reset. Be normal, and treat him as if he were normal. Give up on trying not to "normalize" him. Forefront the substantive issues, treat all the candidates equally, and let us see how each of them holds up to a thorough grilling. If you're neutral, you can be cruel. We'll watch.

I infer that Glasser would tell me that Trump doesn't do substance. She wrote:

Everything must be Trump's fault — even the Manhattan D.A.'s botching of a hare-brained indictment.

I'm trying to read "Trolled by Trump, Again/Thoughts after a week of waiting and waiting for the indictment that the former President promised" by Susan B. Glasser (in The New Yorker).

You’d think that we would know better by now, but here we are, being trolled again by Donald Trump. Whatever else the disgraced, defeated, and possibly soon-to-be-indicted former President is, he is a master when it comes to setting the terms of a media frenzy. Trump knows not only how to get our collective attention but also how to keep it. He flourishes in the absence of hard information to contradict his claims, and he has years of experience using the silence of the legal authorities to focus the debate on their actions rather than his own.

*** 

I tested my headline on Meade before publishing and he raised the question whether you can botch something that's already hare-brained. I mean if it's hare-brained and you've botched it, you've kind of fixed it. In which case, huzzah for the Alvin Bragg!

ADDED: I wrote that before seeing Trump's latest social media posting, reported at "Trump, Turning Up Heat, Raises Specter of Violence if He Is Charged/In an overnight post, the former president escalated his attacks on the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and warned of 'potential death and destruction' if he is indicted" (NYT).

“What kind of person,” Mr. Trump wrote of Mr. Bragg, “can charge another person, in this case a former president of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting president in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a crime, when it is known by all that NO crime has been committed, & also that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our country?”

“Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truely hates the USA!” 

"Is this the end-end of Trump... Or merely another moment when the false hope of Trump’s imminent demise is indulged for a few days or weeks...?"

"I thought back to one of the signs I saw displayed in front of the White House by a jubilant anti-Trumper after the 2020 election was called for Biden. 'The End of an Error,' the sign read, though it turned out not to be. Instead, Trump lived on as a zombie political force, defeated but not really gone. Here we are, two years later, and the unhappily exiled ex-President is running unopposed for reëlection while calling for the termination of the Constitution. And it was not just Trump but the Republican Party leadership that endorsed such a manifestly unfit candidate as Walker.... The Washington Post has found that a hundred and seventy-eight adherents to Trump’s 2020 election lie won their races for House, Senate, or key statewide offices last month. In the House, a small faction of the most rabid maga members looks poised to pick the new Republican Speaker—and exert powerful leverage over him. Ascendant Republicans include Marjorie Taylor Greene... and DeSantis, who, while being the non-Trump flavor of the month among the Fox News set, is probably better viewed as one of Trump’s heirs than as his antithesis...."

 Writes Susan B. Glasser in "Trump’s 2024 Campaign So Far Is an Epic Act of Self-Sabotage/But is this really the end of an error?" (The New Yorker).

"Republicans are so close to power that they can smell it. In Washington, the spoils are being preëmptively divvied up."

"There are lists of who gets what committee, and lots of reporting on whether, if, and when Republicans will seek vengeance by seeking to impeach President Biden; the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas; or others. One can only imagine what a Jim Jordan-chaired House Judiciary Committee would do.... The entire Republican ticket this fall, up and down the ballot, is filled with hundreds of election deniers.... There is no non-Trump faction of any significance in today’s G.O.P.... I have a bad case of election dread right now...."

Writes Susan B. Glasser in "I’ve Got a Bad Case of Election Dread/Whether or not there’s a red wave, it’s clear where this thing is going" (The New Yorker).

There wouldn't be so much dread if the Democrats hadn't spent the last 2 years using their narrow majority so aggressively. They set an example, and you're afraid to see that example followed. If the situation were reversed, wouldn't you be saying it's payback time? 

"MAGA Republicans seemed to think that the scary setting for Biden’s alarming message was somehow beneficial to them..."

"... and they soon began sharing images of the dramatic black-and-neon-red scene. 'I can’t believe this is a real photograph,' J. D. Vance, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, tweeted. 'It depicts the president of our nation, as he took to the airwaves and spoke about his fellow citizens as if they were sewer rats.' Rick Scott, the Republican Senate campaign chief, tweeted the photo and dismissed Biden as a 'raving lunatic' who 'attacked half the country tonight.' Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, called it a 'hate speech.' Over on Fox News, Tucker Carlson was very, very angry about the 'blood-red Nazi background' and the Marine honor guard in front of Independence Hall, a setting that he termed a 'complete outrage.' Even before Biden spoke, Kevin McCarthy—the House Minority Leader, whose slavish devotion earned him the sobriquet 'my Kevin' from Trump—gave a prebuttal, in which he said that the President should 'apologize for slandering tens of millions of Americans as fascists.'"

Writes Susan B. Glasser in "Joe Biden’s This-Is-Not-Normal Speech on the Rising Danger of MAGA Trumpists/The President calls out Trump and his Republicans, and they see red" (The New Yorker).

Glasser's penultimate sentence: "How telling it is that, when the President of the United States today speaks of threats to the nation, he is warning not about adversaries abroad but the danger within."

She means that to read pro-Biden, strangely enough. 

"President Biden said the right things. The expected things.... But what words, really, could be equal to this moment, to this day..."

"... when Europe faces what may be the most dangerous and consequential war on the continent since the Second World War? As Biden spoke, Ukraine was fighting—alone—against overwhelming military odds. There was a pitched battle in the nuclear hellscape that the Soviet Union left behind in Chernobyl. In Kyiv, air-raid sirens sounded for what must have been the first time since the Second World War, and a military official warned that the Russians’ goal was to quickly encircle the capital and decapitate the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky.... In his appearance Thursday afternoon, Biden said he believed that Putin would 'test the resolve of the West to see if we stay together,' and vowed, 'we will.' But ... [i]n the weeks leading up to the invasion, officials had pledged retaliatory measures, including possibly cutting Russia off from the swift international banking system, but Reuters reported that Europeans were still refusing to take this step, even with Kyiv now under attack. When he appeared to announce sanctions, Biden confirmed that the Europeans had in fact balked. 'That’s not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take,' he said. Plenty of other measures have been left untaken, as well, including sanctioning Putin himself, which Biden said he was considering. What, exactly, is the President waiting for? He did not say. The historical record will show that Biden had strong words after the invasion, and also that this confrontation with Russia was the last thing he wanted his Presidency to be about...."

From "In Washington, a Ukraine Tragedy Foretold/But what can Biden really do to stop Putin?" by Susan B. Glasser (The New Yorker).

"We could not imagine that Trump would become President, that he would sow disinformation and denial about a deadly virus, that he would attack the legitimacy of American democracy itself..."

"... rather than concede defeat. Over the past year, Biden has struggled with his own set of unimaginable challenges that became intractable realities. I lived in Russia for four years, where decades of life under the Soviet Union had taught a cynical population a truth that Americans only now seem to be learning for themselves: it can always get worse."

From "Joe Biden’s Year of Hoping Dangerously/It was a brutal start for the new President" by Susan B. Glasser (in The New Yorker).

"Biden himself, normally the most empathetic of politicians, did not address the predictable and predicted human tragedy that his April decision to withdraw..."

"... the roughly thirty-five hundred U.S. troops remaining in Afghanistan has now unleashed. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, followed his comments by blaming the Afghan military, which the U.S. funded, trained, equipped, and built over twenty years, for its fate. 'They have what they need,' she said. 'What they need to determine is if they have the political will to fight back.'... There is, quite obviously, a calculation behind all this, which is that, after all this time and with more than enough blame to go around in both parties, Biden will not suffer politically from leaving behind an unwinnable war. Put bluntly, there is a strongly held belief in Washington that Americans simply do not care what happens in Afghanistan...."

From "'Not Our Tragedy': the Taliban Are Coming Back, and America Is Still Leaving/President Biden made it very clear this week that we’re out of Afghanistan, no matter what" by Susan B. Glasser (The New Yorker).

The phrase "the most empathetic of politicians" draws a scoff from me. Why not write "the most political of empathizers"? Clearly, the empathy is not empathy for its own stake, but a political commodity to be spent where you get good political value. Americans simply do not care what happens in Afghanistan, so Biden did not address the predictable and predicted human tragedy.

I'd like to edit out the "normally" in "normally the most empathetic of politicians." The omission of any empathy — or theatrical performance of empathy — when the subject is something Americans don't care about is exactly normal in political empathy. We're just seeing a clear example of what it means to be an empathetic politician.

"Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.... typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences...."

"Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life.... Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world."

From "Truth," a Wikipedia article I stumbled upon, via "The McNamara Fallacy," as I was writing the last post, which ended with my saying I needed to start this new post, because "Truth" converged with something I've been planning to write about.

But first, here is "Time Saving Truth from Falsehood and Envy":

Now, here's the thing I'd been meaning to write about: "Joe Biden’s Love Letter to the Truth" by Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker. That's about the inauguration address. It so absurd to say "the Truth" while gushing. 

And "Love Letter"? I believe that politicians position themselves somewhere in relationship to the truth, but not that they do it out of love. But then, not all love letters are sincere. Nor are all New Yorker columns, is it even true that Biden's speech professed love for the truth?

Biden spoke of unity, of national reconciliation, and also—and perhaps most important of all—of the need for leaders “to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”... 

[I]t was his love letter to the role of truth in a free society that rang loudest to me during his twenty-minute speech, which took place under a sunny Washington sky....

Ha ha. That reminds me of the lesson in spotting propaganda that I received in my high school class — a class where we were required to subscribe to and read The New York Times. The object of study was a news report on Nixon's inauguration. There was a description of the "gloomy drizzle" of the day....

... and here's how the NYT covered the weather on John F. Kennedy's inaugural day, which the teacher must have reported on from memory:

Isn't that hilarious?! I never forgot that lesson, the seed, perhaps, of 80% of my blogging. 

Must I go back to Susan Glasser, or can I simply end with that light-hearted lesson, which I will now place in the #1 position on my ranking of Things I Learned in School?

I'll just quote Glasser's last line:

Never have the old patriotic clichés about America sounded so good. May their words matter and their aspirations turn into reality. Is this what optimism feels like?

But old patriotic clichés, aspirations, and optimism are not truth — "the property of being in accord with fact or reality." Glasser loathes Trump, but Trump was full of old patriotic clichés, aspirations, and optimism are not truth. They just sounded bad to her when they came from Trump. It sounds good coming from Biden because she's rid of Trump and is in the mood to feel optimistic. 

The snow glistens for the President of your heart.

"This might have been a holy-shit speech, but it came in the 'yeah, whatever' phase of Trump’s lame-duck Presidency...."

"The temptation is to look away, to move on, to cringe and avert your gaze. That is exactly what the Republicans in the Senate, who have stood by Trump through impeachment and other ignominies, have done this week, pivoting so seamlessly into bashing the new Biden Administration that they never even stopped to acknowledge its existence.... Do Republicans think they have a free pass to pretend that the past four years never happened? Do they think they can simply return to the partisan status quo ante, complaining about nasty tweets and potential conflicts of interest, without anyone bringing up the current President? I don’t think this was what Biden meant when he said, during the campaign, that his Presidency would mark a return to normal."

From "The President Is Acting Crazy, so Why Are We Shrugging It Off?/The dangerous 'yeah, whatever' phase of Trump’s lame-duck Presidency" by Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker.

"Whatever happens in the courts, Trump is all but certain to be his own vortex of uncertainty over the next couple of months, until the Inauguration..."

"... and that will be true even after there is a decisive resolution. A vengeance-seeker in the best of times, Trump had already signalled before the election that he might fire a long list of officials in his government whom he views as insufficiently loyal or willing to go along with his orders. These include the director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray; the Attorney General, William Barr; the director of the C.I.A., Gina Haspel; and, even in the midst of the pandemic, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci. He could seek to fire them even if he loses, or perhaps especially if he does.... Even defeated, Trump could use his executive powers to wreak significant additional damages before January 20th. He could break norms and traditions even more than he has already, and pardon his family, friends, cronies—even, potentially, himself. He could undermine public confidence in a coronavirus vaccine, or stop the government’s fight against it altogether. There are many scenarios for the havoc we might see....”

Writes Susan B. Glasser (in The New Yorker). 

I wonder if we'll miss this Trump-specific alarmism if/when Trump goes away. Of course, he won't go away. He'll regroup within media and carry on the havoc from the outside. He won't withdraw in humiliation at this seeming rejection. He'll feel immensely loved by the true Americans, unjustly ousted by his enemies, and stronger than you can possibly imagine. 

I enjoyed Glasser's reference to the idea that the outrageous President Trump might pardon himself. I used that idea on a Constitutional Law exam 20-some years ago. It was a current topic back then. Here's Slate from December 1998: "Can President Clinton Pardon Himself?" 

In 2018, Bill Clinton — no longer in possession of the pardon power — asserted that the President does not have the power to pardon himself. He just said "no" when asked, which, of course, would get zero credit as an answer on a conlaw exam, where it's all about the reasons you can elaborate. You've got to demonstrate your knowledge of the methodologies of constitutional interpretation. That's what matters.

Also quoted at that last link, President Trump:

As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?

That's a strong assertion that the President has the power, then an enigmatic question that contains another assertion — that he did nothing wrong. But it's obvious why someone who'd done nothing wrong might want a pardon. A President may have powerful enemies who are threatening to prosecute him even though — in his opinion — he did nothing wrong.  

"It turns out... that staying away from the daily distractions of Trump has not been restorative. You can turn off the Trump show, but..."

"... the nagging, unfortunate reality is that the show goes on, with or without you," wrote Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker, in "Our Year of Trumpschmerz." She says she "unplug[ged] over the holiday week."

To me, she and her fellow anti-Trumpers are part of the nagging, unfortunate reality show that is the Trump era. The anti-Trumpers like to depict Trump as a big baby, but they've been having a 3-year tantrum. They never accepted his victory in an election, and now they've got a new election creeping up on them, and they can't freak out into a higher level of dismay at the prospect of his reelection.

Glasser offers the word "Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz" to denote "the ceaseless anxiety and absurdity" she (and presumably everyone she knows) feels while Trump is President.

On the brink of a new year, Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz has come to dominate our collective psyche.

The "collective psyche" does not include the millions of people who actually love Trump and the millions more who enjoy or tolerate his style and like some or a lot of what he's doing. Personally, I don't like the idea of a "collective psyche." It sounds fascist to me... especially with that German word stamped on it... even in its shortened form Trumpschmerz.

Glasser tells us that "-schmerz" means a "continuous pain or ache of the soul that results from excessive contemplation of it all." The solution to excessive anything is to scale back to the right amount.

"How much does anyone—on either side of this yawning national divide—care about the evidence if they know in advance how they plan to interpret it?"

Susan B. Glasser asks in The New Yorker in "Is Trump Already Winning on Impeachment?"

And, of course, the sense of constant crisis is overwhelming. How can Americans bother to keep track of who said what to whom about Ukraine when there will soon be another scandal, another cast of characters, another alarming development to monitor?...

Nonetheless, there is an actual investigation, with actual testimony. There are facts and even, in this post-truth age, truths....

The ellipsis I just put there represents my answer to the the 2 questions posed above. I'm not following the details of the impeachment inquiry.

ADDED: I'm not following the details, but it's not because I "know in advance how [I] plan to interpret" the evidence. I'm not following this because I believe the people who are shaping it and presenting and hyperventilating about it decided in advance the interpretation they wanted to manipulate people into having. I'm not going to sit around getting spoon fed this stuff on a daily basis, week after week.

"The president is literally an existential threat to America," said Joe Biden.

Quoted in "Biden and Trump exchange fire in Iowa, ignoring others in the field" (WaPo), teased on the front page as "In Iowa, the feud between Trump and Biden gains strength/President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden ridiculed one another in the harshest terms they’ve used so far."

Trump's response isn't specific to Biden's "literally... existential" barb, just the idea that "Joe is weak mentally":


Years ago, Trump insults, Biden was nothing, polling at 1%, until Obama picked him "off the trash heap." Now, Biden is doing well in the polls, but "he's a different guy. He looks different than he used to. He acts different than he used to. He’s even slower than he used to be.... Joe Biden is a dummy."

By the way, Trump was speaking before going to Iowa, so the teaser headline — with "in Iowa" — is factually wrong. It's got to be like with roaches. If you see one, there are a thousand more that you're not seeing.

What, if anything, do you think Biden is trying to say when he calls Trump an "existential threat"? Underscored with "literally," it should mean that, with Trump, there's a danger that America will cease to exist. I think he's trying to say the America we know and love is threatened by Trump. But to find that meaning, we can't take "literally" literally.

I don't know if I want to make a tag for "Biden rhetoric." Biden's use of language is not very snappy. I don't know if I want to get into a pedantic critique of the use of multisyllabic confusing words like "literally" and "existential."

Do you think some people see Biden gesturing at the philosophy of existentialism? The OED says "existential" can mean, "Of, relating to, or concerned with individual human existence, esp. as seen from the point of view of existentialism; of, relating to, or characteristic of existentialism; having, or prompted by, a keen awareness of individual freedom and responsibility."

ADDED: Maybe what I need is a tag, "Existential Biden." Using those words, I found, "Why Is Joe Biden the Only Democrat Who Wants to Talk About Donald Trump?," by Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker, April 26, 2019:

Given the almost numbing predictability of the President and the ever-increasing difficulty his critics have mustering outrage toward him at this point, it came as a jolt to see Joe Biden go directly at Trump in a video announcing his Presidential campaign, on Thursday. The seventy-six-year-old former Vice-President unabashedly took the Trump-bashing course that most of the eighteen other declared Democratic candidates for 2020 have eschewed. In his launch video, which is three minutes and thirty seconds of Biden mostly talking into the camera, he calls Trump a “threat to this nation . . . unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime” and an existential challenge to the very idea of American democracy. The election of 2020 is “the battle for the soul of the nation,” Biden says, and, if Trump is reëlected, “he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of” the country. In short, Biden adds, “Everything that has made America America is at stake.”

So this "existentialism" is Biden's theme. It shouldn't be confusing!

"Given the almost numbing predictability of the President and the ever-increasing difficulty his critics have mustering outrage toward him at this point..."

"... it came as a jolt to see Joe Biden go directly at Trump in a video announcing his Presidential campaign, on Thursday."

Joltin' Joe.

That's from "Why Is Joe Biden the Only Democrat Who Wants to Talk About Donald Trump?" by Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker.

That caught my eye because of the open admission that the public is tired of the continual demonization of Trump. There's outrage fatigue. Other candidates seem to have moved on to actual issues, but maybe the man Trump calls Sleepy Joe Biden can jolt us awake and ready for a new go-'round of attacks on Trump. He's a big racist, etc. etc. Yes, yes, Joltin' Joe is a real cup of coffee for the bleary.