The 2024 presidential race seems to promise that no matter who wins, America will lose.
Most post–Labor Day doldrums are difficult to wrest oneself from, but this year’s in particular have turned into a Charybdis for political commentators. As others (Jim Geraghty in particular yesterday morning) have already observed, the situation in the 2024 GOP race is one of yawningly boring stasis: Nikki Haley seems like she’s making a move in the polls at Ron DeSantis’s and Tim Scott’s expense in New Hampshire and Iowa, but let’s not delude ourselves — they’re squabbling over table scraps. Donald Trump remains the prohibitive favorite in the race both nationally and in all early states. Meanwhile on the Democratic side, Joe Biden molders on, shambling listlessly forth through the “guardianship” phase of his presidency as a half-sentient shell of a man mired in genuine old-school corruption and faced with an electorate whose mood is currently more curdled than heavy cream left to steep on the windowsill for a month.
And that’s going to be our 2024 presidential matchup, folks. Biden versus Trump. There’s really no sense in pretending otherwise. Barring an act of God, force majeure, or a few errantly open manholes spanning the distance between Bedminster and Rehoboth Beach, Americans will be asked to vote two Novembers from now for the same two exceedingly geriatric, venal, and incompetent puppet-candidates they were asked to vote for in 2020. Can you feel the excitement building?
No. Of course you can’t. Few reading this, I would wager, are genuinely enthused about rerunning this race. The stakes may be high — Democratic partisans obviously view stopping Trump as the equivalent of keeping Attila the Hun from sacking Rome, while Trump’s fanatics rightly consider this their one shot to prevent their Orange Man from wearing orange — but for me nothing about the choices on offer does anything except generate a welter of despair. Nobody cares about me, however. How about all those people who will, either happily or grudgingly, pull a lever for Joe Biden or Donald Trump in both the primary and general elections? What are they thinking? Every man has his reasons, after all — what are theirs, which I cannot share? That is a far more interesting and instructive exercise.
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When it comes to President Joe Biden, the first question inevitably has to be: What kinds of crazy stories does a Joe Biden true believer tell themselves in order to believe? This is, I will admit, the toughest of all of these inquiries to answer (and thus the one to tackle first), as I have a hard time imagining such a creature exists. Biden — unlike Trump, unlike Obama, even unlike Bush and Clinton — does not inspire personal loyalty. He or his team understood as much in 2020 and instead sold Biden as a “normalcy” candidate, a return to pre-Trump sanity.
This is where his incumbency plays such a critical role, for here surely we must all agree: Joe Biden would not be running for the presidency in 2024 if he wasn’t already sitting in the Oval Office. The vast majority of his voters, who outside of informed activists likely cast their vote for him in 2020 for one reason (“safe harbor” is the easiest summary), now find themselves locked uncomfortably into his continuing candidacy despite his rapid ageing and increasing familial and financial controversies. Perhaps they say to themselves, as consolation, “Well at least he’s Doing Something.” This is the refrain you hear from Biden’s professional cheerleaders (about which more presently), which is why I suspect they do not think this at all. My more mundane guess is that most Democratic voters understandably default to Marty Feldman–like partisan priors: “Could be worse; could be a Republican/Trump.” (What do they say about Hunter Biden’s corruption scandals and the president’s possible role in them? Nothing, is my guess; you wildly underestimate how capable partisans are at looking away from or dismissing something inconvenient that they cannot psychologically afford to acknowledge.)
But then what do the pros think? The fact that Joe Biden’s best claim to the affections of normal voters is as a caretaker president does not, of course, trouble Democratic professionals in the slightest. This is in fact his greatest appeal to the progressive managerial class, who have dreamt all their lives of fielding a senile, ethically compromised but media-protected (and thus easily manipulated) puppet-president whose occasional embarrassingly atavistic or otiose public moments are easily compensated for by the free hand he gives them to make real policy in Washington. This is why you see relentless cheerleading for Biden as “the best president of my generation” from online communicator types: They’re not even lying per se when they say so, because people of their professional activist class — feeling like they are if not in the driver’s seat of the Democratic Party then at least capable of reaching the gas pedal while Uncle Joe is asleep at the wheel — couldn’t be happier with him, as long as he doesn’t go dying on them. (Alas: He might.)
When it comes to former president Donald Trump, the first question inevitably also has to be: What kinds of crazy stories does a Donald Trump true believer tell themselves in order to believe? And this one is obviously the easiest of these questions to answer; check my inbox someday and you will understand why I have no difficulty whatsoever in believing these people exist. Trump’s less “political” supporters simply view him as an avatar of their opposition to the current cultural, social, and economic changes wracking America — it is usually little more complicated than that, just as it is for Democratic partisans on the other side of the fences — and it doesn’t matter if those different voters oppose different things. Trump, broadly for his fans, stands for a rejection of all of them, and he’ll tell you whatever populist rap he thinks you prefer to hear as the winds blow. That such rejectionism is both infantile and fatal for any hope of change is beside the point: This is a prerational sentiment fortified by Trump’s singular personal charisma.
One recurring theme of Trump’s career is how he constantly misplays or forfeits potentially winning hands because of short-sightedness. It is impossible not to note the massive irony that, were it not for January 6 and all it entailed, he would not only be exempt from serious legal jeopardy and the guaranteed 2024 Republican nominee, but also the easy odds-on favorite to win against a doddering, faltering Biden, warts and all. That went out the window forever with January 6. The unbreakable barrier sealing Trump’s truest believers away from reality is their refusal to understand just how permanently the entire election debacle sealed in the minds of swing voters a view about Trump’s fitness for office. He may not have lost you — you’re his partisan, you think he’s being persecuted by the system, after all — he has merely lost everyone who actually counts when it comes to deciding elections on the margins.
But then what do the pros think? As a confession, I haven’t encountered a single nonaligned Republican campaign professional or analyst enthusiastic about Trump’s candidacy or the down-ballot prospects for Republican ballotmates in 2024. Pretty much the only enthusiasm you will see for him lies with (some, not all) of his own campaign operatives — and tellingly the ones more marginal to the inner workings of the operation are the more enthusiastic. As already stipulated above, a Joe Biden actuarial event may suddenly boost Trump’s chances in a general election — it is more likely than people think, yet not something to bank on happening when your own party is nominating a man only three years younger. But absent that, every serious person believes Trump’s nomination is a one-way ticket to a loss, even if (in the best case scenario) it’s another agonizingly close electoral one like 2020. (What do these people say about Trump’s classified-information-retention scandal? Nothing much, is my guess; you wildly underestimate how capable partisans are at looking away from or dismissing something inconvenient that they cannot psychologically afford to acknowledge.)
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Somewhere on Earth 2, I like to think that Gavin Newsom is running against Ron DeSantis for president and America is faced with a genuinely stark decision about its political trajectory in November 2024. Instead, here on Earth 1, we have this impossibly muddled rerun. Voter turnout was higher than usual in 2020 (67 percent) for a presidential election. And why not? People turned out in massive numbers even in the midst of a pandemic and handed an outright numerical majority to Biden in the misbegotten hope that he would at least represent some sort of beneficial change from the madness of the Trump status quo. Now America has taken his full measure and longs for a replacement. That potential replacement on offer is none other than . . . Donald Trump, who after losing an election proved himself to be a wildly unstable man fully intent on overthrowing the government to remain in power.
This is our future. A year from now, in September 2024, it is entirely possible that I will be able to write this same column word for word, with minimal updates for current events. (Trust me, another Trump indictment will not sap his supporters’ enthusiasm.) For the first time in my living memory, or anyone else’s for that matter, the 2024 presidential race promises us that — because we have seen both these men in and out of executive power already and know exactly what we’ll be getting — no matter who wins, America will lose.