Is Trump running for a second Biden term?
Hugo Gurdon
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Despite outward appearances, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump increasingly resemble each other. And they are taking steps to be even more alike.
Their old age — 80 and 77, respectively — is a key similarity everyone knows about and dislikes. Voters repeatedly tell pollsters they would prefer younger candidates. But the two men’s policies are also lining up with each other more than in the past and would deny voters a real choice on some issues if 2024 pits the two against the other, as looks horribly likely.
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Trump, for example, is making a pitch for Big Labor’s support despite Biden claiming to be the most pro-union president in history. The former president is backing the United Auto Workers, which is on strike to squeeze a 40% pay hike and unfunded pension liabilities out of management at GM, Ford, and Stellantis. Trump intends to rally with the auto workers in Detroit to back them against management, a move that prompted state Rep. Mike McFall to tell the Wall Street Journal that Trump is “hitting a chord with some union workers.”
The GOP front-runner’s aim is to accelerate the exodus of blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party into the Republican camp. Democrats, sensing a real danger, want Biden to rush to the picket line and steal Trump’s thunder. A sitting president speaking on a picket line would be an extraordinary move. It suggests we’re on our way to having two candidates equally willing to demagogue against business and economic growth.
But it isn’t all Trump copying Biden. Although Biden reversed many of Trump’s policies when he took office in 2021, he notably kept Trump’s $362 billion worth of tariffs in place on imports from China. This has made manufactured goods more expensive for consumers but is intended to give the false impression that the president, like the former president, is on the side of ordinary workers. In reality, tariffs raise the prices of component parts and factory inputs such as steel, and they have cost more jobs than they have saved.
Trump, sticking his finger up in the wind to find out what he believes, is now also moving closer to Biden and away from his own party on abortion. It was Trump’s choice of three excellent originalist justices for the Supreme Court that led to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the muddled and tendentious 1973 decision that invented a constitutional right to abortion.
Biden boasts about his support for abortion and made it a leading issue during congressional elections last year. He and Democrats are going to put it front and center again in 2024.
And where is Trump on the issue? He is now attacking his Republican rivals from the “pro-choice” Left’s position. He described Gov. Ron DeSantis’s endorsement of a ban on Florida abortions after six weeks of gestation as “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.” He also refuses to say what limits he would find acceptable on abortion, which Democrats always do when they’re pretending they don’t support abortion up to the moment of birth.
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Trump has never been a conservative. He has opposed reform of entitlements even though they’re careening toward insolvency, he is a big-government spender, he supports strikers making demands that would ruin companies if accepted, his trade policies are now those of the sitting Democrat, and he has turned against the pro-life policies of his own party.
It has long been understood that Trump could just as easily run as a Democrat. Now it is plainer than ever.