A friend who is a devoted supporter of Donald Trump took me to task last week, decrying my aversion to the great man with a single sentence: But John, he said, the best argument for Donald Trump is Joe Biden.
He’s right, of course, though I’d suggest not necessarily for the reasons he thinks he is. As my friend sees the world, Joe Biden’s record in office is sufficiently bad that it would justify support for almost any alternative: There were no wars of significance while Trump was at the resolute desk, whereas now the world finds itself mired in perma-conflicts in Ukraine and the Gaza strip, each of which occasionally threaten to bubble up into much wider and more dangerous conflagrations. Pre-Covid, Trump had the US economy trundling along nicely, while under Biden the inflation crisis that began in late 2021 has settled down into an apparently permanent increase in the cost of living. On just about every policy area that matters to those of us in the west outside the United States – energy production, global security, trade, freedom of speech on the internet and standing up to China to cite just some examples – Trump’s record in office is better than Joe Biden’s. He has a case, and a strong one, my friend.
But there’s another more important way in which he is correct: That is that the existence of Joe Biden fundamentally undermines the moral case against Donald Trump, which remains strong on its own merits but pales to insignificance when set against his opponent. Put in plain language: If Trump’s opponents truly believed all the stuff they say about him, then they would not be running an 82-year-old man who is clearly and observably suffering a steep cognitive decline against him.
The debate that took place last week was the first US Presidential Debate that I’ve missed in my adult life. This, I’ve discovered, is a good thing: Instead of watching the debate like a nerd, I consumed it in the way that millions of American voters will have consumed it – I got the highlights in short clips on the internet.
As someone who does an occasional TV debate myself, I’m instinctively sceptical of short clips: It’s depressingly easy to take someone’s worst moment in an hour long performance and cast it out of context. But Biden’s problem wasn’t that there was one bad moment, but that there were at least a dozen, and they all had the same theme: This guy’s mind is gone.
This is meaningfully different, of course, to other bad debate performances. When George H.W. Bush looked at his watch, or when Al Gore kept sighing, those were stylistic flubs: They made viewers feel annoyed, or gave journalists something to talk about instead of policy. This was something more: It was made clear to any rational viewer, over and over again, that Joe Biden simply is in no way fit for the most powerful office in the world. Nobody who watched that debate or its highlights will ever truly be convinced of anything else: There’s nothing Biden can say and nothing his campaign can do to make people un-see what they saw.
The irony of course is that the determination to stick with Biden is the mirror image, in many ways, of the American right’s determination to stick with Trump.
In Trump’s case, nobody behaving truly rationally would nominate a candidate who has already been on the ballot twice and never done better than 46.9% of the vote in a two-way race, or who has national favourable/unfavourable ratings of about 38/62 against. This is not to mention, of course, all of the other legal or moral or ethical issues that might dissuade a party from nominating Donald Trump for President of the United States. But if you leave those aside, and act purely on electorally rational grounds, nominating him is not logical. Nominating Trump is purely emotional – a bet that he would somehow triumph through sheer force of will.
With Biden, we’re seeing the same thing. Trump fans annoyed about the previous paragraph will, ironically, likely see the logic of it when applied to Biden: It simply makes no sense for a political party to nominate a candidate who – in the last poll after the debate – 72% of American voters think is too senile to be President. Or who, in other polls, fewer than 40% of Americans think is doing a good job. A political party acting rationally would not nominate such a candidate when there are alternative candidates on offer.
This is what makes the current US election so troubling: Not one, but both of the two big parties in the United States are acting fundamentally irrationally. Either party could have made victory in November a virtual certainty simply by nominating somebody else: Joe Biden versus a boring generic Republican Governor would not be a contest. Equally, Donald Trump versus a boring generic Democratic Senator in middle age would not be a contest. The polls tell us that, consistently.
The biggest problem for the Democrats is, of course, that of the two cases being made to the US electorate, the Republican case is much more coherent: Donald Trump, like him or loathe him, is more competent and effective than Joe Biden. The Democratic case by contrast amounts in effect to “we’d rather a walking corpse than the other guy”. The problem with it is this: If the other guy is so bad, why are you nominating a walking corpse? The very existence of Biden hollows out the argument against Trump. It might be possible to prefer four years at Bernies to Donald Trump, but it’s not possible to sneer at somebody who doesn’t.
In many ways, of course, the very best thing Trump could do now is copy the Biden campaign of 2020: Shut up, hide away, and leave uncle Joe wandering the stage in confusion. Let the voters focus on Biden, not on you. Instead of campaigning every day, appear every now and then to make sober-sounding speeches on policy. Biden’s the guy with the burden of proof as the election stands, and it’s not a burden of proof he’s likely to meet.
This will not, I suspect, be the Trump strategy. But what he has, now, indisputably, is a one line answer to all of his critics: It’s me or that guy, and I’m at least still cogent.
If he wins, as now seems very likely, it will be because the Democrats irrationally handed him the election on a plate. They deserve everything they get – as does the media which propped Biden up for as long as it did.