Biden is deluded if he thinks he can beat Trump again
Agood rule in American politics is that everything always gets weirder. It may be about to be proved right again. This week in Iowa, speaking about the 2024 presidential elections, Donald Trump stated that he will “very, very, very probably do it again, OK?” Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that Joe Biden and Trump will face each other in a rerun of 2020 – much to the chagrin of many Americans who found it strange and depressing enough the first time round.
Some Republican strategists desperately want that not to happen; Trump will always be highly off-putting to many independent and undecided voters. But Democratic strategists would be wise not to assume that Biden is the man to beat the dreaded Donald again.
Biden turns 80 in two weeks. On Tuesday, speaking in Florida, he claimed once more that his son Beau died in Iraq, when in fact he passed away in Maryland. In the same speech, he said that America had the lowest rate of inflation of any major country (not true) and claimed, bizarrely, to have spoken to the man who discovered insulin (he’s not that old, folks).
Biden is trying to rustle up support ahead of the mid-term elections next week. The polls do not look good for him or his party. American voters are concerned about their own cost-ofliving crisis and skyrocketing crime levels. They don’t respond well to their commander-in-chief telling them all is well when it isn’t. People expect politicians to lie to them. The concern with Biden is that he has lost his political antenna.
Even if, as expected, the Democrats take what Barack Obama in 2010 called a “shellacking” – a thrashing – in the mid-terms, Biden’s capacity for delusion may hold up. It’s been reported this week that he and his closest advisers are working on his 2024 re-election campaign.
Biden’s job approval rating is not much lower than that of Obama or Bill Clinton at similar stages in their presidencies. Both those Democratic leaders won re-election. Why can’t Joe?
Well, the answer is simple: Biden was no Obama or Clinton even in his prime. Can anyone really imagine the 46th US president functioning effectively by December 2028, pacing the West Wing in the last few weeks of his second term? He’ll be 86 by then.
Biden won the presidency in 2020 chiefly because he wasn’t Trump. But it was also because Americans generally regarded him as a decent moderate. He was a liberal man who had been tough on crime and drugs in the 1990s. He had not overreached as vice-president. He appeared to be a solid member of the Silent Generation, unfazed by the noisy woke indoctrination of his Democratic Party.
But Biden’s administration has turned out to be mind-blowingly woke. In the face of economic and social crises, the White House has endlessly prioritised far-left concerns about the environment, racial “equity”, and sexual progress.
The president has played the benevolent grandpop, liberally dispensing his blessings on the kids. Last week, as reports confirmed that food prices had shot up over 13 per cent year-on-year, Biden sat down with the transgender Tiktok influencer Dylan Mulvaney to discuss what it means to be a woman. That’s not exactly the leadership that working-class Catholic voters in crucial swing states such as Pennsylvania are crying out for. It’s also not the “normalcy” that Biden promised to bring back in 2020.
Under Trump, at least until Covid struck, Americans enjoyed a healthy economy, even if the country was bitterly divided. Under Biden, the country remains polarised, life is increasingly expensive and the president seems out of touch. While in 2020 Biden was the only Democrat who could beat Trump, Biden may now be one of the few who would lose to Trump in 2024.
A rematch between the pair looks increasingly likely, and the current president’s divisive embrace of woke causes will cost him