“[The Importance of Being Earnest] is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy…That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” Oscar Wilde on his popular play The Importance Of Being Earnest

In our last blog (Sanity) we expressed our decision to sit back, watch and laugh at the political spectacle unfolding before us today. Oscar Wilde, noted for his brilliant sarcastic lampoons, would approve. So much of what happens around us depends on random chance, on luck and not “for a reason” as Mencken’s boobus Americanus would have you believe. When confronted with unexplained random outcomes, a good laugh is a better coping mechanism than some hidden mystical reason. Donald Trump once said “everything in life is luck.” After he survived an assassination attempt he told the press he had been “saved by luck or by God.” President Biden likes to use the phrase “lot’s of luck in your senior year.” He’s having a go at it right now. The thing about luck, it can change, and it’s never clear whether it’s good or bad.

The political season is a time when lies are in abundance. The truth checkers are crazy busy. But the lies during political campaigns are seldom more than “insignificant distortions” according to Wilde in his wonderful The Decay of Lying. The “true liar, with his frank fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind” is a rarity according to Wilde. [Can you think of one “true liar” that meets this standard?] You seldom convince anyone, especially true believers, with the truth. You convince them with emotion. And that is why the politicians always resort to personal stories of how they overcame insurmountable obstacles to reach whatever pinnacle of success they have achieved. To give the voter hope that he could do the same if he supports the politician in question. Oscar Wilde had something to say about that: “to generalize is to be an idiot.”

Luck plays an outsized role in politics just as it does in life. In Everything Is Coming Up Trump, Chris Cillizza lists six ways luck has been with Donald Trump recently:

• President Joe Biden bombed in the June 27 debate, affirming for many viewers that he was simply too old (and not competent enough) to do the job

• For the next two weeks, the Democratic party tore itself apart, with lawmakers and other influentials insisting that Biden would drag the entire ticket down if he stayed on the ballot even as the president narrowed his inner circle and insisted he would remain in the race

• The Supreme Court ruled that presidents should be given broad immunity when it comes to actions taken while in office

• An attempted assassination against Trump left him bloodied but not permanently injured, rallying his base behind him — at near-messianic levels — and creating the possibility he will be viewed as a sympathetic figure by larger swaths of the public

• Trump is set to announce his VP pick as soon as this afternoon and may make a surprised appearance — as the conquering hero — at the first night of the Republican National Convention. [Donald Trump has since announced his VP pick as Senator J.D. Vance]

• The classified documents case against him — which was generally thought to be the most open and shut of the four indictments — was dismissed Monday by Judge Aileen Cannon.

We can add to this list yet another seemingly providential lucky event for candidate Trump. President Biden has tested positive for Covid effectively putting his campaign on hold temporarily.

Should candidate Trump gloat in the face of such luck? Maybe.

During the last Presidential election Joe Biden had his own run of good luck according to a book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes: Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency.

Almost no one thought Joe Biden could make it back to the White House—not Donald Trump, not the two dozen Democratic rivals who sought to take down a weak front-runner, not the mega-donors and key endorsers who feared he could not beat Bernie Sanders, not even Barack Obama. The story of Biden’s cathartic victory in the 2020 election is the story of a Democratic Party at odds with itself, torn between the single-minded goal of removing Donald Trump and the push for a bold progressive agenda that threatened to alienate as many voters as it drew.

In Lucky, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes use their unparalleled access to key players inside the Democratic and Republican campaigns to unfold how Biden’s nail-biting run for the presidency vexed his own party as much as it did Trump. Having premised his path on unlocking the Black vote in South Carolina, Biden nearly imploded before he got there after a relentless string of misfires left him freefalling in polls and nearly broke.

Allen and Parnes brilliantly detail the remarkable string of chance events that saved him, from the botched Iowa caucus tally that concealed his terrible result, to the pandemic lockdown that kept him off the stump, where he was often at his worst. More powerfully, Lucky unfolds the pitched struggle within Biden’s general election campaign to downplay the very issues that many Democrats believed would drive voters to the polls, especially in the wake of Trump’s response to nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd. Even Biden’s victory did not salve his party’s wounds; instead, it revealed a surprising, complicated portrait of American voters and crushed Democrats’ belief in the inevitability of a blue wave.

Go figure. Or don’t. Oscar Wilde warns us about thinking too much: “Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.” So: sit back, watch and laugh. Perhaps the cycle is about to turn again. Perhaps President Biden will withdraw from the race. Perhaps the Democrats will nominate a new young charismatic candidate who energizes voters and consigns candidate Trump to the fate of Thomas E. Dewey. Maybe.

Maybe I will ignore it all and read a good book. I’m currently reading Fluke: Chance, Chaos And Why Everything We Do Matters by Brian Klass. It’s a fascinating read. Maybe I’ll review it in a future post but why wait. Read it now and enjoy the dog days of summer. We will know which candidate luck favors on November 5, 2024. Maybe.