Unthinkable but Possible
Biden v. Trump 2024 is a disaster waiting to happen
Back in 2020, Democrats and progressives could support Joe Biden against Donald Trump with a more or less clear conscience. Kindly old Uncle Joe was the avatar of normality—the comforting down-home alternative to the lunacy of MAGA. And it worked. As if to show that every cloud does have a silver lining, the fates arranged for a global pandemic to shield Biden from the scrutiny that he, as a presidential candidate, would otherwise have undergone. He was able to hide out in his Delaware basement while Trump self-destructed.
But times have changed.
Once he was installed in the Oval Office, it didn’t take long for people to conclude that Joe Biden was anything but normal. First, they realized that he’s really, really, old. Then they noticed that he’s showing his age. Then he demonstrated his incompetence by engineering a disaster in Afghanistan that he had the audacity to call “the greatest airlift in history.” Hey, and it only cost thirteen American service members their lives!
Biden’s slide in the polls dates from the Afghanistan debacle, which was wholly due to his own bull-headed stupidity. The President’s military advisers cautioned that an abrupt abandonment of that country would have parlous consequences. He ignored their warnings. And as Afghanistan imploded, Biden seemed during his public appearances to be quite overwhelmed by it all.
After Afghanistan, things just went from bad to worse. The American people watched with growing disapproval as the President and his administration stumbled from crisis to crisis, culminating in a painful inflationary spiral that only now is beginning to subside. But relief has come too late to restore Biden’s standing with the public. He has been judged in the balance and found wanting.
It’s true that Biden is better liked than his probable 2024 opponent, Donald Trump. But that advantage is trivial: The President’s approve/disapprove rating is more positive than Trump’s, but not by much. The best that can be said is that he’s slightly less disliked than The Donald: hardly an accolade. Large numbers of voters—Democrat, Republican, independent—wish that neither man would run for president in 2024. But the parties seem incapable of granting that wish. The Dems are sticking us with Biden; the GOP is sticking us with Trump.
Up to now, political pundits have assumed that be he ever so disliked, Biden would still defeat Trump. If you can’t be the better choice, be the least worst choice: So their thinking went. But recent events are calling that assumption into question. Though publicly Democrats insist that Biden’s their guy, in private the express deep misgivings.
There’s the problem of the President’s age. He eighty, and an old eighty at that; the evidence of his physical and mental decline is piling up. Is Biden up to the rigors of a presidential campaign? Probably not. And what if he suffers a bad fall or some other health crisis in the middle of the campaign? Democrats are worried about these things, as well they should be.
It gets worse. After months of obfuscation and denials from the White House and Democrats, the scandals swirling around the President’s son Hunter are coming into focus. The Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland has been straining every nerve and muscle to make the mess go away, lest its taint spread to the Oval Office. That effort collapsed with a bang this week in a Delaware courtroom, where a federal judge nixed the sweetheart plea deal arranged for Hunter, which would gently have slapped his wrist while immunizing him from all future prosecution.
We now know that Joe Biden was lying when he assured us that he had no involvement in, and knew absolutely nothing about, his son’s shady business dealings. We now know that the notorious Hunter Biden laptop, supposedly a specimen of “Russian disinformation,” was the genuine article. We now know that the Justice Department deliberately slow-walked its investigation of Hunter’s financial shenanigans, running out the clock on the stature of limitations. And it’s become very evident that all this was done to protect Joe Biden, not just his son.
It seems incredible to think that Donald Trump, with all his liabilities, could regain the presidency. But thanks to the accelerating decline of Joe Biden, the possibility is there. The idea of President Gavin Newsom makes me gag—but even he’d be preferable to Biden or Trump, who’ve both so clearly demonstrated their unfitness for any public office, much less the presidency.
Maybe the Democrats think they can take a chance on Biden—but it’s a risk that America can’t afford. Win or lose, a Biden candidacy in 2024 is a recipe for disaster. Pick someone else, already!
PICK SOMEONE ELSE ALREADY
Great title and great picture