Different treatment of Biden and Trump highlights their parties

One of the American political parties has a presidential candidate who is very old and shows it. The other has a presidential candidate who is a convicted felon, a sex offender, a business con man, and a self-proclaimed wannabe dictator. And he is also very old.

One party is angry with its candidate and is trying to find a way to replace him at the last minute. The other party is not.

The spectacle of the week since the nationally televised debate between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump has highlighted two political parties that have accepted being led by flawed putative candidates whose vulnerabilities have become even more painfully apparent just months before the election.

But the difference in recent weeks has been striking. After Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies by a Manhattan jury in May, a verdict that followed civil judgments against him for personal and professional offenses, there was no significant groundswell within the Republican Party to force him to drop out of the race in favor of a less corrupt candidate. Even though many Republican elected officials and strategists privately loathe him, they fell into line and made clear that they would stand by him no matter how many scandals piled up.

Until last week, Democrats had resigned themselves to a candidate many considered less than ideal. Mr. Biden and his allies had effectively stifled any internal dissent, forcing Democrats to remain silent despite concerns that his age would ultimately hurt his campaign. But after last week’s debate highlighted concerns about his quick thinking, the conspiracy of silence was shattered. Suddenly, a large swath of Democrats concluded that he was no longer viable and pressured him to give way to a younger candidate.

If Biden had the worst debate performance in presidential history, Trump’s was probably the second-worst, said Jeffrey A. Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Still, Republicans complain about how their presumptive nominee was incoherent, rambling and completely out of touch with the truth. Oh, and also a convicted felon.

This disparity says much about both major parties, 248 years into the American experiment. Mr. Trump has managed to dominate his party in a way that no president in modern times has, crushing internal opposition, punishing dissenters and commanding loyalty even from those who publicly declared him dangerous.

Rather than going on the defensive about his many political weaknesses, Mr. Trump has gone on the offensive, forcing his fellow Republicans to accept his version of reality in which all the accusations against him, even those proven in court, are part of a vast conspiracy of persecution. He has turned his flaws into power, at least among his own supporters.

Republicans don’t see Trump’s beliefs, his rhetoric or his threats of retaliation as moral or political weaknesses, said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who broke with his party over Mr. Trump. Many see them as strengths. So we won’t see a family debate among Republicans comparable to the one we’re seeing among Democrats now over President Biden’s age and questions about his fitness.

The fact that all this is happening as the Fourth of July approaches reminds us that the framers of the Constitution were not particularly enthusiastic about political parties. Alexander Hamilton had warned that parties, or factions, as they were then called, were the deadliest disease of popular government. In his Farewell Address, George Washington declared that the common and continuing mischief of such factions made it imperative to discourage and control them.

Today, the political parties operate in radically different universes, interpreting the same fact through radically different prisms. What was once disqualifying is no longer so. Mr. Trump was seen as such a threat by Democrats that they were willing to live with a candidate they knew could be risky. Mr. Trump has imposed his will on his party to the point that even rival candidates in the primaries have not criticized him for his alleged crimes or for trying to overturn an election.

Neither party should have been surprised by what followed. It was entirely predictable that by the time voters began casting their ballots, Mr. Biden would have aged further and had increasingly important moments, and Mr. Trump would be found guilty of various acts of misconduct. Both parties knew the minefield they were getting into by sticking with Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, and neither took the necessary steps to avoid it.

“We used to fear that partisanship would lead us to prefer the party to our country,” Engel said. “Today, it seems to mean, increasingly for both sides, choosing the man over the needs of the country.”

Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and anti-Trump spokesperson, believes her party has succumbed to a demagogue. The Republican Party is a cult of personality that turned to Donald Trump long ago, she said. The Democrats are still a largely functional political party, with a significant portion of its members who believe the stakes of defeating Trump are existential and therefore merit a serious discussion about the best path forward.

But Mr. Trump’s supporters argue that his problems are different from Mr. Biden’s. “I don’t see the idea that these two problems are equal,” said David Urban, a longtime Republican strategist who worked on previous Trump campaigns. He compared the situation to that of a basketball star who tears his ACL and is unable to play, rather than that of a disagreeable or insulting person.

You may not like Trump, Urban said. You may think he’s mean-spirited, you may not like his behavior. You may think he’s rude, you may think he’s impolite, you may think he’s brash. But you still think he can run the United States. Whereas with Biden, he’s not running anything.

Whether Mr. Trump seems capable of comparing himself to Mr. Biden is a matter of perspective. Mr. Biden, 81, sometimes slurred his words, stared blankly and seemed lost during the debate. Mr. Trump, 78, whose mental health has been questioned by former advisers and who has appeared at times incoherent in his public appearances in recent months, made statements during the debate that were hard to follow and in many cases downright false. But his voice was strong, he did not appear frail, and snap polls showed that most viewers thought he fared better than Mr. Biden.

Voters aren’t particularly impressed with either man’s abilities. A post-debate poll by The New York Times and Siena College found that 74 percent of voters thought Mr. Biden was too old for the job, and 42 percent thought Mr. Trump was. The main difference is that many Democrats told pollsters they were willing to dump Mr. Biden (47 percent want someone else), while Republicans were content to keep Mr. Trump (83 percent want him to remain their nominee).

Lynn Vavreck, a professor of American politics at UCLA, said part of the reason was the surprise factor of the debate. While voters knew that Mr. Biden was aging, they were stunned to see him so pronounced on their living room screens. By comparison, she added, Mr. Trump’s rule violations were already well-entrenched. By the time he was convicted in New York, voters already knew that he had been impeached twice and indicted four times and were making up their minds about those allegations.

People had already factored the idea that he was guilty of these charges into their assessments of him, said Dr. Vavreck, co-author of Bitter End, a book about the 2020 election. No one had factored into their assessments of Biden the idea that he was in trouble to the extent he revealed last week. And more importantly, this new information prompted people to update their beliefs about his likelihood of success in November.

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