Could Trump and Biden be the same person?
Even though diehard supporters of President
Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump will never accept it, the 2024 presidential candidates actually have quite a bit in common.
Biden and Trump are two older White men, born in the 1940s — before televisions were common in homes, before the birth of rock and roll and before the desegregation of public schools in the United States.
Both enjoy the backing of organized labor, take a hard line on immigration and support Israel in its war against Hamas. Both want to make it harder to achieve refugee status, think of themselves as tough on crime, and have a spotty history of clumsily saying the wrong thing when talking about race.
Most recently, both candidates are siding with the steelworkers union in opposing the attempted acquisition of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company that last year bought the iconic American company in an allcash $14.1 billion deal. The sale could still be derailed by federal regulators.
Are these two individuals actually the same person?
Now we can add one more item to the list of common traits: Both Trump and Biden have angered supporters by going their own way on two of the most divisive issues facing the country
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— abortion for Trump and immigration for Biden.
Pro-life conservatives and proimmigrant liberals both feel betrayed, and each camp is disappointed in its candidate — yet, not to the point where they're likely to abandon their guy and risk having the election won by an opponent who they truly detest.
On abortion: Trump announced in a video released on Truth Social this week that he believes policy should be set by the states. Right-wingers wanted a national ban, or at least national limits as to what stage in a pregnancy a person can seek an abortion.
This outraged former vice president Mike Pence, who has been dependably pro-life. He wrote on the social media site X, formerly Twitter: “President Trump's retreat on the Right to Life is a slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020.”
Meanwhile, on immigration: Biden has adopted several of Trump's draconian enforcement policies. For this, he caught flak from groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the administration for imposing Trump-like asylum restrictions that the ACLU claimed violated both U.S. and international law.
When Biden maintained Title 42 — the federal code provision that lets U.S. officials restrict migration to preserve public health — expanded the “Remain In
Mexico” policy to include Haitian immigrants, and built portions of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, the 46th president bore an uncanny resemblance to his predecessor.
It appears that Biden now sees wisdom — or at least some practical value — in Trump's approach to asylum claims, which included demanding that wouldbe refugees apply in their home country and settle in the nearest safe country.
While it's tempting to say that Biden and Trump flip-flopped on these issues, or that they misled supporters, that's not fair.
Neither Biden nor Trump has changed his position. They're pretty much where they've always been. This is the same Biden who, while serving in the Senate, voted for bills that fortified the U.S.-Mexico border and made it easier to deport the undocumented. This is the same Trump who — before he was president — contributed to campaigns that boosted pro-choice Democrats like former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and supported Planned Parenthood.
Any suggestion to the contrary is just wishful thinking. Proving once again that, in politics — as if life — the worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.