Unpopular Presidential Candidates: Something Is Going to Break

Have you ever seen a big mechanical breakdown? The arms and belts of a machine get into some kind of hinky relationship and begin dancing. There’s this moment of suspense about whether the process under way will slow down and the machine will implode relatively safely. But, as often as not, the problem is that inertial and load-bearing parts of the system have broken away, so everything just speeds up terrifyingly. You know an arm or belt is going to escape its current centripetal motion and just launch at terminal velocity. You can just hope that you’re not standing in its way.

That’s how I feel watching the 2024 election shaping up. Some of the brakes in the system are clearly not working. A man who has been indicted four times for 91 criminal acts shouldn’t be running for president of the United States. And he really shouldn’t be the front-runner. And yet he is. Also, the sitting president’s Justice Department shouldn’t have an open investigation against its chief political rival, one that will allow the attorney general or his deputies to bring forth testimony and hearings at times that will manipulate the political cycle. None of this should happen, but we all feel that each action — Trump running again, Biden indicting him — is the logical and necessary consequence of some other previous failure. Like a mechanical breakdown, the physical laws of the universe are being obeyed — all the political momentum is understandable and even somewhat predictable. But the engineering failure guarantees that the result is a disaster.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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Have you ever seen a big mechanical breakdown? The arms and belts of a machine get into some kind of hinky relationship and begin dancing. There’s this moment of suspense about whether the process under way will slow down and the machine will implode relatively safely. But, as often as not, the problem is that inertial and load-bearing parts of the system have broken away, so everything just speeds up terrifyingly. You know an arm or belt is going to escape its current centripetal motion and just launch at terminal velocity. You can just hope that you’re not standing in its way.

That’s how I feel watching the 2024 election shaping up. Some of the brakes in the system are clearly not working. A man who has been indicted four times for 91 criminal acts shouldn’t be running for president of the United States. And he really shouldn’t be the front-runner. And yet he is. Also, the sitting president’s Justice Department shouldn’t have an open investigation against its chief political rival, one that will allow the attorney general or his deputies to bring forth testimony and hearings at times that will manipulate the political cycle. None of this should happen, but we all feel that each action — Trump running again, Biden indicting him — is the logical and necessary consequence of some other previous failure. Like a mechanical breakdown, the physical laws of the universe are being obeyed — all the political momentum is understandable and even somewhat predictable. But the engineering failure guarantees that the result is a disaster.