2024 was a highly consequential election year, and the Tribune Editorial Board turned many times to the presidential campaign. There was the disastrous-for-Democrats debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the sudden switch by the Democratic Party to nominate Kamala Harris, the contrasting conventions, campaign ups and downs and, of course, the ultimate triumph of Trump himself.
Here’s some of what we had to say as political chaos, followed by drastic change, unfolded.
Feb. 13: Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher announces retirement from the House of Representatives.
How much room is left in the Grand Old Party for those who don’t toe the MAGA line, 100% of the time? On the day after the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s first Republican president, Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher’s surprise Feb. 10 announcement that he would retire from the House of Representatives when his term ends has set us wondering.
March 4: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that individual states can’t unilaterally bar Donald Trump from appearing on ballots on the grounds of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The editorial board approves.
We were stirred and pleased that the Supremes acted unanimously in striking down the Colorado Supreme Court ruling, which was the issue on the table here but will extend to other states that have followed suit. The three liberal justices stepped away from their potential partisan corners and also rejected the suggestions of several law professors no doubt of their acquaintance. That puts this issue to bed in the best possible way, and Trump should return the favor by noting that not everything in Washington is some Deep State plot against him. To his credit, he actually did take some baby steps Monday in that direction. When things go his way, he is capable of marginal magnanimity. It’s when things do not that this big baby’s ruinous side always reveals itself. In this case, he could learn a thing or two from those liberal justices. They swallowed hard and did their jobs. Trump for president is a matter for the voters. Such is the price of democracy.
June 26: In a debate with Donald Trump, disaster strikes for Joe Biden. By the following morning, the editorial board is calling for the president not to run again.
Trump was mostly just himself, energetically narcissistic, cavalier with truths, cruel of tone, bereft of empathy. Biden was an encapsulation of what many Americans have come to know very well as they care for aged parents, partners, friends, grandparents and colleagues: a man now struggling to maintain a line of thought and keep track of complex facts, a man who gets flustered under deadline pressure, a man who has become vulnerable and yet, at the same time, far less self-aware. None of these descriptions of Biden prevent his enjoying a great life fully deserved by a man of distinguished public service; they don’t preclude his passing on wisdom in a classroom, giving speeches, accepting awards, shaping a memoir with a co-writer, having dinner with old friends and colleagues, playing with grandkids. A charitable person would say, maybe, they don’t even preclude his living out the last few months of a first term as president of the United States. With the help of trusted staffers. But standing again for that office? It’s a ridiculous idea.
July 8: Democrats still are mulling what to do about the Joe Biden issue. The editorial board has an analogy involving federal judges.
When Article III federal judges start to struggle to fulfill their vital role, the standard practice is that a trusted colleague, other than the chief judge of a district, schedules a lunch and quietly but firmly suggests to the reluctant jurist that the time has come to stand down. Often this is accompanied by the unveiling of a portrait in a ceremonial courtroom. Assuming the message is received, no public mention is ever made of this intervention; rather, a willing retirement is announced, accompanied by many grand words about all the retiree’s accomplishments.
After the disastrous debate with Trump, we anticipated that would be how things went with Biden. Indeed, there clearly are those still working in that direction, which would involve an acknowledgement of changed personal circumstances on the part of the nominee (no shame there), perhaps (or perhaps not) a crowning of Vice President Kamala Harris as successor, and a surely graceful exit accompanied by an entire library’s worth of pronouncements of admiration by pretty much every Democratic head ever to talk. Then, of a sudden and as if by magic, the editorials and opinion columns would tend to legacy burnishing, to admiration and praise, with any sense of relief banished to the subtext. It would have been a sight to behold in left-leaning media, large and small.
July 19: The editorial board attends the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and finds Appalachia in ascendency.
Our predecessors on the Tribune Editorial Board would not recognize the Republican Party we found Thursday as we took to the floor of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. There were a few cursory nods to the old party of Ronald Reagan in the form of grainy video. But bankers and besuited businesspeople, the old-school Republicans whose values this newspaper long reflected, were as hard to find as a speaker extolling the values of the free market, the perils of protectionism or even the importance of free speech. What mattered most to those with whom we spoke Thursday night was to ensure that Donald Trump was keeping guard on behalf of America — even, we were told over and over, at the “gates of hell.” The Republicans have pivoted hard to being a blue-collar protectorate.
July 25: The editorial board argues Democrats should be allowed to vote from the convention floor at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Democratic Party leaders no doubt are relieved to have the matter essentially settled before their printers say it’s too late to print those Harris-and-whomever T-shirts. But we would prefer a live reminder to the nation that convention delegates have the final say when chaos has erupted and previous plans have gone awry.
Aug. 21: At the DNC, Joe Biden’s speech gets pushed out of prime time.
The messy realities of human existence, whether for presidents of the United States or anyone else, aren’t what political conventions are designed to convey. There is pathos when an old lion admits that the ride is over. And Biden had to do so on the biggest of public stages. So it was egregious that the program ran so long and Biden didn’t take the stage until well after 10 p.m., past prime time and with the United Center full of the fatigued. No doubt that wasn’t the intent. But the error nonetheless amounted to a final indignity for Biden. He remains the president after all, and it wasn’t respectful. On a night in which Democrats otherwise delivered the message they intended and effectively prosecuted the case against another term for Donald Trump, it left a sour taste.
Oct. 1: Unlike rival ABC News, CBS News says that it expects debate candidates to fact-check each other. The editorial board approves of that but not vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s use of fiction.
Good moderators certainly should question a candidate’s untruthful, or unresponsive, answers in sharp, follow-up questions, assuming they are capable of pivoting in real time. That’s the way to handle Trump. But once moderators start making their own voices-of-God declarative statements, which will always be subject to interpretation, the whole structure of the debate starts to fall apart. And that achieves nothing. The moderators are supposed to be unbiased. Republicans had a reasonable beef with ABC News. All that said, we strongly recommend a line of questioning for vice presidential candidate JD Vance on Tuesday night. Vance has at least strongly implied that it is acceptable, if one wants to bring attention to an issue, to do so in the form of fictive storytelling, and to use anecdotes that may not be literally true. This is dangerous claptrap, and Vance knows it very well.
Nov. 6: Donald Trump wins the presidential election.
There are lots of ways of defining the liberal elite — assistant deans, network anchors, public health officials and, yes, legacy newspaper journalists — but there can be no question that Tuesday night saw a wholesale rejection of their dominant value system. America didn’t just elect a craven candidate whom the highly educated had deemed unacceptably dictatorial, fascistic even, but the nation did so in such a way that President-elect Donald J. Trump’s agenda now will largely be unfettered, thanks to Republican majorities in the Senate and, quite possibly as we write, the House. And, adding insult to injury for Democrats, it’s likely that the result of the election also will deliver Trump from his myriad legal challenges.
The party that had been saying democracy was on the ballot found that democracy had risen like an orange tiger to bite it in the neck.
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