THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 27
COMMENT
THEJOEANDBERNIESHOW
D
onald Trump has been profligate
in his attacks on the Democratic
candidates for President, but Super
Tuesday, with its unexpected string of
victories for Joe Biden, pushed him to
new heights of incoherence. At a rally
in North Carolina, last Monday, he
mocked “Sleepy Joe” for referring to
“Super Thursday” in a speech. (Biden
had, in fact, caught himself mid-word
and, with a smile to the crowd, said,
“I’m rushing ahead, aren’t I?”) “You
know, maybe he gets in because he’s a
little more moderate,” Trump said. But
then he added, “They’re going to put
him in a home! And other people are
going to be running the country—and
they’ll be super-left radical crazies.”
Apart from the usual crudeness of
Trump’s rhetoric, this picture of Biden
as the kindly face of the Red Terror
doesn’t make much sense. It may turn
out to be just an interim line of insult,
as Trump, who had been working up
crowds with tales of a takeover by the
“radical socialist Democrat Party” and
“Crazy Bernie,” recalibrates to account
for the solid presence of Biden. Trump’s
interpretation will also be news to Sen-
ator Sanders and his supporters, who
have been portraying Biden as a figure-
head of corporate interests. That read-
ing, in turn, critically ignores the role
that African-American voters, first in
South Carolina and then, on Super
Tuesday, throughout the country,
played in Biden’s resurgence. He won
in Alabama and Texas, as well as in
Virginia and Massachusetts, where he
also had particularly strong support
from women.
And yet Sanders’s electorate was
diverse, too; exit polls indicate that
he prevailed among Latinx and Asian-
American voters, and, in some states,
among black voters under thirty. He
also won young voters almost every-
where, though their turnout was lower
than the Sanders campaign had hoped.
In California, Sanders’s share of Lat-
inx voters under thirty was seventy-one
per cent. He accomplished all that with-
out the institutional party support that
Biden unquestionably has. (Pete But-
tigieg reportedly spoke with Barack
Obama and Jimmy Carter before en-
dorsing Biden.) On Super Tuesday,
both Biden and Sanders showed real
strength. Both still have a path to the
nomination, in terms of the delegate
count, though Sanders’s is far steeper.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Trump should be scared of them both,
which is, no doubt, why he’s goading
them to attack each other.
Trump spent the morning after
Super Tuesday testing different for-
mulations of derision, division, and dis-
trust. He said that Warren, “our mod-
ern day Pocahantas,” had cost Sanders
her home state of Massachusetts by
having the gall to compete there—“so
selfish!” (Warren dropped out on
Thursday.) Trump tweeted that the
“Democrat establishment” had come
together “and crushed Bernie Sanders,
AGAIN!” And, after crowing over the
losses suffered by “Mini Mike Bloom-
berg,” who left the race after having
won only American Samoa, he added,
“Now he will pour money into Sleepy
Joe’s campaign, hoping to save face. It
won’t work!”
Trump has a bully’s instinct for iden-
tifying points of tension. His “AGAIN”
tweet was a reference to the 2016 cam-
paign, during which he tried to capi-
talize on the disquiet of Sanders’s sup-
porters in the face of what they saw as
the Party leadership’s preference for
Hillary Clinton. Sanders echoed those
complaints on Tuesday night, when he
said, “We’re not only taking on the cor-
porate establishment, we’re taking on
the political establishment.” He ques-
tioned whether anyone with such back-
ing can bring about real change for
working families, as if no good could
come of moderation.
Still, Biden’s supporters, particularly
those who are, for want of a better word,
established, don’t always recognize that
significant elements of Sanders’s program
