The Case for Making a Corpse President of the United States
Sometimes, dead is better
Since moving to South Korea, I have not paid much attention to US politics. To better my understanding of East Asia, I have instead been immersing myself in its political culture, which though assuredly gerontocratic, tends to take the form of contests between fully continent adults. Until recently, I had succeeded so well on this front that I did not realize there was a US presidential debate the other day until after the fact.
In a moment of relapse, I checked out the highlights from Biden’s debate performance. Watching Biden drone off into the void made me realize two things. First, Biden is starting to look like the half-dead grandfather from A Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (The analogy is even funnier when you imagine a depleted Biden trying to sign legislation in the Oval Office the way the grandfather attempts to bludgeon his family’s captor with a hammer.) Second, and perhaps as importantly, a corpse in the Oval Office would serve America well over the next four years.
That is to say, whereas some might advocate for Biden based on the alternative, I believe Biden is a man distinctly suited for this moment, whether his opponent was Reagan, Lincoln, or even Gavin Newsom.
The case for electing a living corpse is simple: most of America’s biggest risks right now are international. Domestically, the country is quite stable. The economy is strong, and while debt is ballooning at an unsustainable rate, the issue will not come to a head for some time. Even if a fiscal crisis were imminent, Trump and Biden are both essentially Peronists, so neither changes the fiscal equation enough to matter anyway. (Whatever your pet culture war issue is—immigration, abortion, racism, transgenderism, furryism—it can, I assure you, wait.)
But internationally, geopolitical tensions have peaked, and who is in the White House will affect how other countries navigate the next four years. Trump presents distinct risks because he has the quality of being difficult to read and is seemingly out for blood after a feckless first term. No one—not China, North Korea, Iran, or Russia—knows what a second Trump term would look like in terms of foreign policy, only that he would go beyond his first term in his efforts to reinvent America’s position in the world. No more John Bolton.
This is not a defense of America’s foreign policy status quo—only to say that now is probably not the time for a rash reconfiguration of world order. Imagine a scenario in which Trump undercuts NATO and a certain adversary takes this, along with Europe’s growing fractures, as a green light. Maybe tactical nuclear weapons aren’t such a big deal after all. Maybe Trump doesn’t respond to any such escalation, but other parts of the world do. Maybe a subsequent administration, seeking to restore the status quo antebellum, would pursue a nuclearized European conflict.
Concerning China, Trump has flaunted eye-watering tariffs that would escalate already heightened tensions. But because China lacks leverage to retaliate with its own tariffs—its imports from the US are smaller and more critical—it might seek to retaliate through adventurism in the South China Sea—not least because Trump’s commitment to American allies is increasingly wanting. Yet the US retains a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, and the risk of a trade war becoming a hot war would loom.
Epoch-defining wars often occur when two parties fail to correctly read each other. The clearest recent example is the Iraq War, which started in part because Saddam Hussein and the US each arrived at misreadings of their opponent. Saddam thought that the US, in its apparent omniscience, knew that he did not really have WMDs despite his many refusals to submit to an inspection. The US overrated Saddam’s capacities and convinced itself that he did. Both sides had overactive minds that resisted a straightforward interpretation of events—both mistook vitality for competence.1
This is to say that theory of mind matters in geopolitics. Trump and his cast of pillow salesmen are a very difficult read for even domestic onlookers—back in the US, there is a DSM diagnosis for them. One can only imagine the strain on an Ayatollah trying to understand whether to take the latest Trump threat seriously or literally. That confusion will only escalate when there are fewer establishment oracles to elucidate Trump’s true meaning.
And this brings us to why Biden is perhaps so suited for this moment: with a corpse, there is no mind to be read. Rather than trying to parse one erratic mind, adversaries will be left to track a predictable, consensus-driven bureaucracy. And while some might fear that this would invite opportunism, the reality is that US policy has been set to adversarial autopilot. Nothing about Biden’s first term has been friendly to Russia or China—the reason China prefers him is because they know what brand of antagonism they’re getting. This is not, as the Trump crowd suggests an indictment of Biden—China is pathologically risk-averse and does not want war unless it sees no other option. You should, I reckon, not want war either.
The remnants of Biden’s brain do take the harder line on Russia, but Russia is actually the country that needs to be restrained. Putin is an inveterate gambler already at war, and he may feel tempted to challenge NATO in the Baltics, where the organization recently expanded, should Trump become president. Xi Jinping, the man Trump takes a more adversarial tone toward, is by all accounts a subdued tactician who prefers a cold war. Insofar as Trump has a coherent foreign policy, he has misdirected his tough talk toward the East, which should be reassured rather than cowed.
It’s true that a fading Biden could have moments of excitability—in the first term, the rigor mortis hadn’t fully set in. But in contrast to a second-term Trump, Biden has first-rate handlers, and perhaps none so pedigreed as Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken on the international front. These are Ivy League-educated lawyers who deal in process and precedent. They probably did Model UN in school, have surely seen Hamilton countless times, and bleed Wilsonian liberal internationalism. As loathsome as such a profile may be, it is not an indictment in a moment of geopolitical fragility where the US retains escalation dominance. Opponents will be able to perfectly telegraph their by-the-books antagonism—not speculate about what’s going on in a single living guy’s head.
Even if Biden should experience some second wind over the next four years, adversaries will know the score. Talk to Blinken first. If Biden became truly unhinged (the tween backrubs get a little too aggressive), rest assured the 25th amendment would provide an escape hatch. President Kamala Harris—technically living but equally void—would oversee the nation’s cruise control.
True, a Trump administration holds the promise of upending much of a sclerotic bureaucracy (“draining the swamp” they call it). And it is always very gratifying to see Trump make a certain type of person squirm. Out of sheer morbid curiosity, I am inclined to root for Trump, and I know that I will be labeled a normie, NPC, soyboy, and beta male for ridin’ in Biden’s hearse. But that’s just malarky: the tail risks from a Trump presidency in this existential moment outweigh the potential benefits.
Many moments in US history have called on men of action. But a moment of domestic stability and geopolitical delicacy requires a man who has that rare capacity to do absolutely nothing. Call him impotent, moribund, a corpse—call him Joe Biden. For all those who wish to extend Pax Americana, I invite you to join me in ridin’ with Biden–all the way to the funeral home.
This post was sponsored by the Biden Victory Fund.
Trump is obviously Saddam in this analogy.