Trump, Biden have much in common
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
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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 all-cash $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 — abortion for Trump and immigration for Biden.
Americans on the right and the left are scratching their heads and trying to figure out what just happened. The short version is that Trump is not conservative enough for the right on abortion, just as Biden is not liberal enough for the left on immigration.
Pro-life conservatives and pro-immigrant 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.
Among those who noticed was far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who criticized Biden in response to media reports that the president planned to further restrict asylum claims at the border.
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. By supporting