Democracy dies on the treadmill

Miami mayor and presidential contender Francis Suarez ran a 5k last week. Vivek Ramaswamy, another 2024 hopeful, likes to play tennis. RFK Jr. recently posted a video of himself doing shirtless chest presses. The eagle-eyed folks at Politico have noticed these facts, connected a few dots and decided that the presidential race has descended into a “testosterone primary.” Politico is following in the footsteps of MSNBC, who last year suggested working out was “far right.”

“Brawn and bravado are in demand, particularly among a GOP base conditioned by a steady dose of both in the Trump era. Thirst…

Miami mayor and presidential contender Francis Suarez ran a 5k last week. Vivek Ramaswamy, another 2024 hopeful, likes to play tennis. RFK Jr. recently posted a video of himself doing shirtless chest presses. The eagle-eyed folks at Politico have noticed these facts, connected a few dots and decided that the presidential race has descended into a “testosterone primary.” Politico is following in the footsteps of MSNBC, who last year suggested working out was “far right.”

“Brawn and bravado are in demand, particularly among a GOP base conditioned by a steady dose of both in the Trump era. Thirst traps are a new wedge issue,” reports Adam Wren. The race, according to Wren, has become “a frenetic fit boy summer sidequest in which candidates are drawing fewer contrasts on policy and proving more keen on comparing feats of strength.”

Hard-hitting stuff, and a sign that what Brits call “silly season” — that summer slowdown in which trivial stories get column inches they don’t deserve — starts earlier every year.

What, you may be asking, does Politico think all this running and lifting means? In search of answers, they turn to Kristen Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, who says it has something to do with the subject of her book, of course, and a sign of a party obsessed with “masculinity.” Some guy from the Lincoln Project says this is all yet another sign that the GOP is the “party of the strong man.”

You got that? Vivek Ramaswamy enjoying a tennis match on the campaign trail is tantamount to endorsing Viktor Orbán’s war on the Hungarian judiciary. Wanting to shed a few pounds is a known sign of far-right extremism. One minute you sign up to Planet Fitness, the next you’re trashing Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office. Democracy dies on the treadmill.

Let’s concede that Politico has identified a real trend: an uptick in presidential hopefuls wanting to appear healthy and vigorous. The simplest, most plausible explanation has very little to do with authoritarianism or toxic masculinity and a lot to do with two unfortunate facts about America: that it is a dangerously obese nation governed by an unpopular gerontocracy.

At the head of that gerontocracy is Joe Biden, the eighty-year-old whom one of these 2024 contenders will eventually do battle with and whose biggest electoral liabilities are issues related to his age.

You don’t need to be some weird, longevity-obsessed tech bro to see that the health of the American people, and the health of their political leaders, are major issues. Or should be. And so if Francis Suarez wants to brag about his (not especially impressive) 5k time on Twitter, that’s fine by me.

On our radar

NATO BREAKTHROUGH Joe Biden may have disappointed those who want NATO membership for Ukraine (more on that below), but the alliance’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg today announced that Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dropped his opposition to Swedish membership and will submit the ratification to the Turkish parliament “as soon as possible.”

CONGRESSMAN’S ALIEN WARNING Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett thinks the truth is out there, and the American people deserve to know it. The lawmaker claims alien spacecraft can travel at the speed of light and turn people into “charcoal briquettes.”

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Commander-in-chief fond of the f-bomb

Cockburn can’t imagine that an 80-year-old who has trouble walking in a straight line could be a threat to anyone. And yet, presidential aides say they tremble in the grandfatherly presence of Joe Biden. Apparently, his old age hasn’t stopped him from remembering his favorite curses.

“No one is safe,” an administrator told Axios about Biden’s fits of anger. In order to abate some of the president’s wrath, aides have found it best to bring a colleague along to meetings as a shield — or at worst a human-sacrifice.

According to aides, some of the president’s choice phrases include: “God dammit, how the fuck don’t you know this?!” … “Don’t fuckking bullshit me!” … and “Get the fuck out of here!”

Of course, the cusser-in-chief is known to let his guard down in public as well. He famously called Fox News’s Peter Doocy a “stupid son-of-a-bitch” at a press conference last year. While many outlets reported it as a hot-mic moment, the president uttered the curse directly into his own microphone during the televised event. Senior moment, yes; hot-mic moment, no.

–Cockburn

‘I don’t think Ukraine is ready for NATO’

Shortly before his trip to Europe and the NATO summit in Lithuania, President Biden told CNN that he does not think Ukraine has an easy path to NATO membership. “I don’t think it [Ukraine] is ready for NATO,” he said to Fareed Zakaria. “I don’t think there is unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now, at this moment, in the middle of the war.”

“I mean what I say,” Biden continued, “we are determined to commit [defend] every inch of territory that is NATO territory… If the war is going on, then we are all in a war.” That Ukraine would not join NATO in the middle of a war has generally been accepted due to the risks. Membership would come, albeit on a longer timeline, and after the war is over. The real question has always been how fast Ukraine could get into NATO post-war. “I think we have to lay out a path, a rational path,” Biden said, “for Ukraine to be able to qualify to get into NATO.”

What does qualify mean? Well, Biden is nitpicking: “I think it is premature to say, to call for a vote in now, because… there are other qualifications that need to be met, including democratization and some of those issues.” Ukraine still has problems, particularly on the corruption front, but it is making significant strides to fix them, and has shown, in blood, that it is committed to a democratic future. NATO also has a track record when it comes to admitting countries with corruption problems — when North Macedonia joined in 2020, it had a corruption score of 35/100 according to Transparency International; Ukraine in 2022 had a score of 33/100. Dalibor Roháč of the American Enterprise Institute notes, “as for the question of Ukraine’s political readiness, one only has to wonder how Salazar’s Portugal in 1949… or Turkey and Greece in 1952, the latter just three years removed from a brutal civil war,” made it into the alliance.

“The United States would be ready to provide,” Biden said, “while the process is going on, security à la the security we provide for Israel, providing the weaponry… the capacity to defend themselves if there is an agreement, if there is a ceasefire.” The US has tight security ties with Israel but no written security guarantee; an equally close arrangement with Ukraine should not wait until the war ends. Israel has the ability to acquire some of the highest quality US weapons available — at present Ukraine gets older or compromised equipment, and not much of it.

Cut through all of the fluff and Biden’s comments leave Ukraine in just as much of a bind as it has been for years. NATO membership still seems cloudy — at least as far as the president is concerned — and while some consolation could have come by giving Kyiv access to weapons like Israel before the war ends, that is also seemingly off the table.

As former Ukrainian defense minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk observed, Ukraine is basically already part of the alliance insofar as military cooperation (and, increasingly, equipment standardization) goes. The NATO summit in Vilnius could get Ukraine on the road — as Roháč puts it, “a clear, believable commitment” — to officially joining NATO upon war’s end (be it by treaty or ceasefire). That, in turn, would demonstrate to Putin that the West’s resolve is long-term and concrete. That message would hasten the end of the war on Ukraine’s terms.

–John Pietro