The first Joe Biden–Donald Trump race was the epitome of lesser-of-two-evils. That we’re lurching toward Biden-Trump II is a sign that our republican experiment is on the verge of failing.
The Trump side of the dichotomy is an obvious failure – the guy is doing everything he can to tell people that he’s reading straight from the Adolf Hitler playbook, the latest manifestation of his adoration being his use of the “poisoning the blood” verbiage that is a direct quote of the Nazi Fuhrer.
The Biden side of this is just … pathetic.
The Joe Biden of 2008, 66 years old, running for vice president, was an important part of the Obama-Biden team.
The Biden of 2024, 81 years old, god love him, but he’s clearly diminished.
Trump, who turns 78 in June, is just as clearly deteriorating, not doddering, like Biden, instead increasingly lashing out at even his loyalists.
It’s angry grandpa vs. quiet, sitting in the corner, snoozing grandpa.
The focus of media attention on the 2024 race to this point has been on the Republican side, because Biden, as a sitting POTUS, doesn’t currently have viable opposition on his way to nomination, which is as usual, given the circumstances.
The last time a sitting president had an intra-party nomination challenge was 1992, when Pat Buchanan ran a doomed race against “Read My Lips, No New Taxes” President George H.W. Bush, Buchanan’s only achievement being to weaken Bush for the general election.
I’m surprised that we’re not seeing a redux of 1980, when Jimmy Carter, clearly weakened by inflation, the Iranian hostage crisis and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, had to fight back Ted Kennedy, who won 12 of that year’s Democratic primaries.
Bush, in 1992, wasn’t really all that weak, until Buchanan decided to punish him for his tax transgressions; Carter was in 1980 where Biden is now, hopelessly underwater.
And then there’s 1968, when Lyndon Johnson, beset by his many failures in Vietnam, dropped out of the Democratic Party nomination race in March, a way-too-late-in-the-game move that ultimately ceded the general election to the guy who left politics in a bad mood after losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960, the once and future crook, Richard Nixon.
It’s too late for someone to enter the early 2024 Democratic primaries, a la Buchanan or Kennedy, so the only way Democrats get out from under having Biden, badly behind in the polls to the criminally indicted Trump, go on to the fall general election for the inevitable loss is for him to fall on his sword, a la LBJ.
And the only way that happens, unfortunately for the future of America, is if Trump drops out, which isn’t going to happen, or if Trump is convicted in one of his many criminal trials, which may happen, but may not matter.
That’s the particularly sad and frustrating thing with where we are right now.
Trump has told us that he will be a dictator, he’s telling us that he admires the Hitlers, Putins and other despots of current events and world history, and there are enough eligible voters out there who have no problem with that to make it almost certain that he’ll be elected president in November.
Biden saved us from ourselves in 2020 as the only candidate in the Democratic field who could beat Trump.
He can save us in 2024 by realizing he’s the only Democratic candidate who can’t beat Trump.
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Chris Graham
