To stop four more years of Biden, Republicans must turn away from Trump
Hugo Gurdon
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The presidential race has only just started, but it doesn’t seem that way. It is already old and has settled into a weird and tedious pattern that bodes ill for the country.
President Joe Biden launched his campaign on April 25, so the only serious Democratic candidate is now formally engaged in the contest. It’s no longer just two flakes of political chaff — “guru” Marianne Williamson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose sole weapon is the ability to drop his own name.
BIDEN AND MCCARTHY BUMP HEADS ON THE CEILING
Biden has been campaigning for months, rather more than his main declared opponent, former President Donald Trump. Trump launched a third presidential bid last November in a spasm of thin-skinned bravado after his 2022 midterm humiliation. So, he’s been running, if that’s what one calls his efforts, for nearly half a year.
After a lengthy phony war, the two 2020 nominees face each other at last, and are instantly in a dreary groove that sickens and bores Americans. The nation does not want this to be its choice in November 2024.
Biden’s strategy is to make himself a gusher of lies while pretending to be the champion of honesty and the savior of democracy. His launch video, as has been noted, was wall-to-wall falsehood. He wrapped himself in the mantle of “freedom” even though he is unprecedentedly hostile to freedom of religion, expression, parents, drivers, and workers. He falsely accuses Republicans of planning to cut Social Security, suppressing minority voting, banning books, and much else.
This slew of slander came shortly after Biden’s campaign was revealed as the instigator of one of the big hoaxes of the 2020 election — the suggestion by 50 intelligence pros that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore the hallmarks of a Russian operation — just as Hillary Clinton’s campaign was behind the Russia-Trump collusion hoax, the biggest deception of the 2016 campaign.
On the other side of the ledger, Trump’s method is to unintentionally project weakness and the expectation of defeat behind a mask of insouciant self-assurance. His campaign began like an involuntary kick produced by a hammer blow to the tendon below the knee. Midterm voters, by rejecting his favored candidates, had just delivered the hit to Trump’s pride, and his reflexive response was to boot the nation in its soft parts, as though saying, “Right, if you won’t stop disliking me, I’m going to run for president again! That’ll teach you!”
Trump’s campaign ever since has involved one glimpse after another of his inner doubts and grim recognition that even if he wins the GOP nomination, he’ll probably go down to defeat again in the general election. His latest reveal came just hours after Biden’s launch when he whined that he hadn’t been consulted about Republican primary debates, that they would be unfair, and that he would not participate. What’s he afraid of? He’s not alone, of course, for the increasingly infirm Biden has also ruled out participating in primary debates.
So, in sum, we have the current president spouting transparent dishonesty to voters who already hold him in historic contempt 1-18 points underwater, and 10.9 points in the RealClearPolitics average on job approval. On the other hand, we have a deeply unpopular former president leading the GOP pack but heading as though on a metalled road to another election cycle of failure.
This is catnip to Democrats, who know there is one thing voters want less than a second Biden term, and that is a second Trump term. Trump makes Biden re-electable no matter how awful, deceitful, and nationally debilitating the Democrat’s first term has been.
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Nearly half (47%) of all voters dislike both Biden and Trump, and among these disaffected and decisive citizens, Biden beats Trump 54%-15%, which is the makings of a Democratic reelection landslide. People want to vote for a GOP candidate because they prefer Republican policies, but that preference doesn’t overcome their inclination to vote for whichever party pushes the ejector seat button and gets rid of its 2020 nominee.
If Republicans and conservatives want to avoid four extra years of Biden’s ruinous spending and disingenuous centrist cover for extreme leftism, the party must choose someone new to run against him. Trump partisans need to look in the mirror and ask the voter staring back at them whether he or she is willing to pay for a defiant vote for their hero with another term for a president who is crippling the country they claim to want to make great again.