Opinion | Honorable vs. Dishonorable Is on the Ballot

Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. It goes without saying that we wish Catherine, Princess of Wales, health and strength in her battle with cancer. Other than that, I think the best we can do to respect her privacy is to say as little about it as possible.

Gail Collins: Absolutely no reason to torment public figures in such dire circumstances — unless, of course, they’re running a country. Princesses are obviously a different matter. But let’s move on: Who would you like to carp at first?

Bret: Thomas Edsall had a great essay in The Times last week noting that the Democratic Party is losing support among nonwhite voters. Although Joe Biden still leads Donald Trump by wide margins among Black and Hispanic Americans, the percentages seem to be shrinking. Biden’s lead among Hispanics has dropped from 24 points in 2020 to just six points now. What gives?

Gail: A great essay indeed. Bret, I do think you have to consider the exhaustion factor — everybody’s looking at seven to eight more months of this campaign and it’s not surprising that voters — especially younger voters — are looking for a little variety.

Bret: If Trump qualifies as “a little variety,” I wonder what counts as a lot.

Gail: Donald Trump is a terrible, terrible guy but he’s a professional entertainer. It’s a lot easier to be bored by Biden. And in part because Biden has a good record and personal character, there’s not much to debate.

Listening to late-night comics, you realize that they’re constantly joking about Biden’s age — I think for lack of anything else to make fun of. I’m betting that when we approach the fall with official nominees and elections around the corner, the real issues are going to surface. TV ads will remind people every night that Trump is basically a septuagenarian juvenile delinquent.

Am I too optimistic?

Bret: To quote the immortal line from Airplane II: “Just a tad.”

To me, Edsall’s findings are further evidence that the deepest fault line in American society may not be about color but about class. Over the last few years, Democrats have become a party dominated by college-educated people, which is why you see Biden spending a lot of his political capital on issues like student-debt relief. In the meantime, Trump has successfully recast the G.O.P. as a working-class party, which helps account for his gains among Black and Hispanic voters, many of whom are on his side when it comes to issues like law and order and the rising cost of living.

Gail: Real-world-wise, the working class party is the one that fights for a higher minimum wage, affordable child care for working mothers and protecting the right of unions to organize.

But go on ….

Bret: Well, if that were so then the real-world working class wouldn’t be tilting in Trump’s direction. But they also care a lot about safer streets, affordable groceries, lower financing costs and better educational options for their children than failing public schools — none of which feel like they have improved under Biden. Democrats should be reaching out to those voters, not treating them as moral reprobates.

Gail: I totally agree that Trump voters should be regarded as targets for conversion, not contempt. Obviously that doesn’t mean every person who supports him is a worthy candidate for rehabilitation. For example, when you’re talking about the folks who are prepared to invest several billion dollars in Trump’s disastrous Twitter alternative, I’m leaning toward the reprobate interpretation.

Bret: I take it you’re referring to Truth Social, which in an honest world would be renamed Lies Sociopathic.

Gail: Your name wins.

Bret: This is another example of how Trump’s enemies are always doing him unwitting favors. Here was a company that until a few weeks ago was basically worthless but may now reap the former president a $3 billion windfall — apparently, it seems, because his supporters bought up the stock in a frenzy to help him pay off the $454 million judgment against him in a New York civil-suit judgment. If the judgment against him had come down, say, to 200 hours of community service cleaning out garbage cans in Central Park, it would have done a lot more to humble and hinder him.

And speaking of self-defeating efforts, can we talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threat to oust Mike Johnson as House speaker?

Gail: Wouldn’t have imagined working up much sympathy for Mike Johnson but Greene’s attempt to punish him for getting a budget passed really does force you to … temporarily rethink. Johnson is facing the immediate prospect of seeing his majority drop down to one, including dozens of members who won’t vote for anything that would make the government work. So Democrats in the House have actually been talking about saving him if push comes to shove.

What do you think is going to happen?

Bret: There’s a theory in political science that parliamentary majorities become more cohesive as they get smaller, since nobody wants to be the traitor who brings the majority down. But Greene or some other member of the G.O.P.’s space laser caucus just might prove the theory wrong. For them, politics isn’t about governing. It’s about getting attention. At some psychological level, today’s Republican members probably want to be in a permanent minority, because that gives them a platform with maximum TV time and minimum political responsibility.

But, hey, we’re agreeing too much. How do you feel about Texas managing its own border policy?

Gail: In the long list of bad ideas to emanate from Gov. Greg Abbott, this would be close to the top of the worst. Do we want North Dakota and Montana setting up their own immigration laws? Or New York or Michigan, for that matter?

And hey, didn’t we have a bipartisan plan to deal with the border and immigration issue? Which Trump demanded the Republicans kill so he could keep yammering about the “animals” trying to cross the border.

Do you agree with me about Texas? If so, if we want to fight we’re gonna have to go back to early childhood education or Biden’s college loan forgiveness.

Bret: Well … sorta. On the Constitutional question, there’s no doubt that this is a federal responsibility and Texas is traveling down a states’ rights road that can’t have a good outcome.

But the politics of this is a different story. Abbott’s hard-line policies are one of the reasons migrants have been deterred from coming through Texas over the past months. Democrats can blame Republicans all they want for not passing the bipartisan deal — and they have a point. But most Americans also understand that Biden and Kamala Harris pretty much ignored the crisis for years until Abbott and other Southern governors started sending migrants to places like Chicago and New York and Democratic officials began to see the problem at their doorstep. If Biden loses in November, this will be a major reason.

Gail: The border states had to wrestle with the migrant issue for ages before the federal government did much to help them out. Terrible burden on some Texas cities but providing labor that was a great benefit to large chunks of the economy.

Bret: Then again, if Trump loses, it might be because he insists on calling the people who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6 “hostages” and “unbelievable patriots.” That strikes me not just as awful but also politically crazy. Is there any method to the madness?

Gail: As I’ve pointed out a time or two, he’s a professional reality show entertainer who instinctively says something he thinks will draw attention — whether it’s true or false, good for the country or terrible. The method is in his poll numbers, but I truly, truly believe that when the public has to go deep and focus this fall, they’ll reject him.

Bret: He definitely has a genius for baiting his critics. I also think he means it when it comes to Jan. 6, which is why it’s so important that he lose the election.

I just wish the Biden team hadn’t done so much to facilitate his comeback. When the history of this administration is written, I think it will note that Biden’s biggest mistake was to tack to the left instead of the center on immigration and the economy, to use the Justice Department to go after Trump, and to denounce “MAGA Republicans” as if they were enemies of the state. Much better would have been to never even mention “the former guy” and to have nominated Kamala Harris to the Supreme Court after Stephen Breyer announced his retirement.

But, hey: We can always pray Americans will come to their senses.

Gail: Well, pleased to say I currently have more faith in our fellow Americans than you do. But let’s talk about elections — people are starting to focus on Congress. Both of us are rooting for a Democrat, Sherrod Brown, to keep his Senate seat in Ohio, right?

Still, I wasn’t too crazy about the fact that some Brown backers were rooting for — and even financially supporting — the current Republican nominee because he seems too far to the right, even for Ohio. Never did like the idea of pursuing political goals by helping make the other side worse.

Bret: Exactly. And Brown — who is decent, smart, honest and funny, even if his politics are well to my left — is the kind of Democrat I want in the Senate; his opponent, Bernie Moreno, is the kind of Republican I don’t. I’d rather disagree with an honorable opponent than agree with a dishonorable one.