"Existential Threat"

For John, BLUF:  Things are heating up already for 2020.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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"The president is literally an existential threat to America," said Joe Biden.

From The Althouse Blog, by Professor Ann Althouse, 12 June 2019.

Here is the lede plus one:

uoted in "Biden and Trump exchange fire in Iowa, ignoring others in the field" (WaPo), teased on the front page as "In Iowa, the feud between Trump and Biden gains strength/President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden ridiculed one another in the harshest terms they’ve used so far."

Then Professor Althouse plays the Professor and asks us about what Mr Biden is saying:

What, if anything, do you think Biden is trying to say when he calls Trump an "existential threat"?  Underscored with "literally," it should mean that, with Trump, there's a danger that America will cease to exist.  I think he's trying to say the America we know and love is threatened by Trump.  But to find that meaning, we can't take "literally" literally.

To me a literal existential threat means Impeachment today with Conviction immediately following.

Ms Althouse quotes Ms Susan B. Glasser! From the 26 April 2019 issue of The New Yorker, April 26, 2019:

In his launch video, which is three minutes and thirty seconds of Biden mostly talking into the camera, he calls Trump a “threat to this nation . . . unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime” and an existential challenge to the very idea of American democracy.  The election of 2020 is “the battle for the soul of the nation,” Biden says, and, if Trump is reëlected, “he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of” the country.  In short, Biden adds, “Everything that has made America America is at stake.”

That is it.  He has rolled his dice.  There is nothing stronger he can say, unless we have an Edwin Edwards moment:  From 1983:  "The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy." (He won!)

I believe the former Veep peaked too soon.  Plus are are going to have the Princess Bride moment, repeated, where Inigo Montoya says "You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means."

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Regards  —  Cliff