Listening to Ezra Klein, I Started Thinking About Fatherhood, Grief, and the 2024 Election
Listening to Ezra Klein’s recent interview with Jake Tapper on his new revelatory book “Original Sin,” I started to think about the ways in which the Biden and Trump presidencies intersected. As Tapper talked through all that the Biden administration had been withholding prior to the 2024 election, I kept thinking: Trump and Biden have a particular chemistry. And it’s deeply personal.
Unlike Trump’s 2016 rivalry with Hillary Clinton, which felt opportunistic and, at times, performatively cruel, his battle with Biden hits different. There’s a visceral charge between them — something that feels less like opposition and more like recognition. As if each man sees in the other a distorted mirror image of himself.
Both Trump and Biden are avatars of a certain American masculinity: aging patriarchs who position themselves as protectors of their families, embodiments of traditional values, and survivors of personal loss. But they also both carry a kind of emotional intensity — a theatricality — that bleeds into how they campaign, how they speak, and how they perform their grievances. This isn’t just politics. It’s personal drama. Rivalry as character study.
As Tapper detailed the ways in which the Hur Report (the one that characterized Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”) became the straw that broke that camels back, I thought about the ways in which both Trump and Biden wanted the justice system to turn a blind eye to them and their families. His son, Hunter was an unofficial advisor to the President, much in the way that Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner were to Trump in his first term (except that they actually were named). As Hunter went on to be charged in federal court, his relationship with Attorney General Garland became increasingly strained. It turns out that he actually did feel he and his family were above the rule of the law, despite his endless rhetoric about Trump’s utter disdain for accountability. He went further than Trump had, by issuing those sweeping pardons to him and other members of his family before leaving office in January.
Both men come from a similar family ethos, one that includes blind loyalty to each other, fierce protection, and the duty to provide opportunity. It wasn’t too long ago that we were talking about Barisma, when Biden was seemingly complicit and also willingly useful in getting Hunter appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Barisma Holdings during his Vice Presidency. Both families suffer from the hails of addiction and tragic deaths that shaped their relationships to pain and trauma. Both had fathers who took them to work and instilled their need to both please and achieve, in order to win their love.
All of this is very counter to the family dynamics of the Clintons; that’s what makes Trump vs. Biden more electrifying — and more unstable — than Trump vs. Clinton ever was. With Clinton, Trump’s attacks were strategic. He tapped into a well of public resentment that predated her candidacy and played to perceptions shaped by her husband’s presidency. It was impersonal exploitation. But with Biden, it feels different. Trump seems offended by him — almost insulted by the idea that someone like Biden could beat him. Biden, in turn, looks like he’s constantly bracing himself against what he perceives as indecency. There’s real contempt. And it goes beyond politics.
That contempt, ironically, may stem from their similarities. Both men are steeped in legacy, loss, and the mythology of “regular guy” American strength. And maybe that’s why they can’t stand each other: they recognize the archetype the other is trying to inhabit — and reject it as fraudulent. Like they’re both carrying father-wounds, grief, egos fed on attention, and a compulsive need to prove themselves right in front of the entire world.
What stood out in the Klein-Tapper conversation was how Tapper, acknowledged this emotional undercurrent. The characters in his D.C. thrillers aren’t just political players — they’re emotionally broken, morally slippery, and haunted by their pasts. And as he described them, it was hard not to hear echoes of our actual leadership: men driven less by strategy than by grievance, trauma, and the need to be seen.
There was an unusual frankness to the interview — a shared recognition between Klein and Tapper that what we’re watching unfold isn’t just a policy contest, but a stage play powered by aging egos, old resentments, and unresolved father wounds. It was a reminder that much of American politics is not just ideological — it’s theatrical, emotional, and deeply, dangerously human. There is more to theses stories than pure policy or ideology; there is an unconscious, psychological underbelly that informs every decision, every rivalry, and every message. We are shaped by our origins, our personal histories, which create our public selves.
Our public selves—the curated versions of who we are that we show to the world—are never formed in a vacuum. They are shaped, often subtly and sometimes dramatically, by our personal histories. These histories include our childhood experiences, family dynamics, traumas, privileges, marginalizations, cultural inheritances, geographic locations, and the stories we were told (and tell ourselves) about what is acceptable, admirable, or dangerous.