The Biden-Trump rematch is a nationwide exercise in denial

Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden is the other guy. This, we are frequently reminded, is their principal advantage in the eyes of many. It may be the only advantage Biden has left after decomposing in real time on the debate stage. Ironically, though, not being each other is one of the few important things these two men have in common. In 2024, a sizable portion of the electorate — maybe the majority — will vote not for a presidential candidate but against his opponent. It’s enough to make you wonder whether the whole affair is an apotropaic exercise, a mass effort to stave off something worse. Maybe we are scared — not just of Biden, or of Trump, but of what the alternatives might be. We have chosen to stick with the devils we know.

Tedious and demoralizing as it is to tread through a reenactment of the exact same choice we faced in a dismal 2020, it’s also oddly soothing: at least we remember in outline how this movie goes. Biden wheezes out a distracted imitation of his party’s most deranged racial hate speech and sexual phantasmagoria; Trump mugs and cheeses his way through a farcical parade of litigation. Everyone accuses everyone else of treason or domestic terrorism, the rhetorical pitch so high as to be comfortingly meaningless.

No one seriously thinks the idiots who staggered through the Capitol on January 6 represented an organized insurrection. No one really believes, as Robert Kagan of the Washington Post pretends to, that we will be “a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of a dictatorship” if Trump wins. When I was in grade school, people used to say they would move to Canada if George W. Bush got a second term. I do not recall a mass exodus. “Trump will overthrow the government” is the new “I will move to Canada,” with the extra advantage that you don’t even have to say you’ll do anything in particular. It’s a familiar script — and that’s what’s appealing about it. Like abuse victims, we are reenacting our old traumas because it’s safer than dealing with the fallout if we move on.

Even before the debate made #swapjoeout a trend among the Democrat twitterati, about half of all voters polled by Pew in April said they’d replace both candidates on the presidential ballot if they could. But with whom? It is unlikely that calling in the young guns would calm things down. Neither party looks particularly well-positioned to appeal to moderates. If anything, the current political atmosphere seems favorable to radicalism: cascading immigration, towering debt, emboldened foreign adversaries and protracted wars abroad foster high anxiety and invite extreme responses. That, or denial, which might be what we’ve tacitly opted for by staging a rematch between these two tired old men.

Trump, for all his genuinely irresponsible grumbling about revising the 2020 election, doesn’t have the wherewithal to effect “the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” That’s a very good thing and a rare sign of national health. But more troublesome for his project is the fact that he also never managed to wrest control of the government from a permanent bureaucracy inclined to hamper right-wing executives. His signature border wall remains unfinished and, under Biden, ineffective. By letting down his guard amid the confusion that Covid kicked up, Trump allowed health officials to run roughshod over the country and inflict a crippling blow on his reelection bid. It will take a firmer hand to really “drain the swamp.”

But are Americans ready to contemplate what that would look like? The Supreme Court already sent DC operatives into full-blown crisis mode by dissolving the miniature bureaucratic fiefdoms that have run the country for forty years under Chevron deference. Just imagine if the executive got involved. After decades of bipartisan buckpassing to the administrative state, it would be seriously jarring for any president to overhaul the unaccountable Alphabet Agencies that set the terms of Americans’ lives. Laying out a responsible budget would likely involve multiple high-octane government shutdowns and dramatic reforms to entitlement programs that Trump has no interest in touching. He’s far more eager to sort out immigration, but after four years of open borders, that too will take pretty drastic action. All of these are genuine challenges, but it’s unclear that the people who swoon with horror at the mention of Trump’s name would be heartened by a younger Republican with more focus and conviction in these key areas. That’s what was on offer in Florida’s Ron DeSantis, but even if the base had wanted him, he would hardly have reassured the people voting Biden for fear of Trump.

Meanwhile, as grotesque and pitiable a spectacle as the Biden presidency has been, it’s obviously serving Democrats as a flimsy stopgap against the flood tide of youthful radicalism that now threatens to burst the levees. From the outside it looks like “back to normal” was a hilariously dishonest sales pitch for a spiteful old coot who has spent four years haranguing Americans for their inborn moral deformities while importing a permanent underclass to depress wages and swell his constituency. But within the Democratic Party, sad to say, Biden does represent a short-term compromise between the Nancy Pelosis and the Rashida Tlaibs of the world — or, if you like, between the no-black-and-white-America Obama of his first term and the I-Am-Trayvon-Martin Obama of his second.

As squads of keffiyeh-clad campus cuties loudly demonstrated this spring, all the energy and momentum is with the “get whitey” caucus, even if most Democratic voters and backers are horrified to discover that “intersectional solidarity” includes Hamas. This is what decolonization looks like — and Democrats must find some way of keeping it quiet long enough to win over as many oblivious legacy voters as they still have left. If Biden manages to secure a second term, he or his successor will surely abandon even peremptory efforts to keep the wolves at bay. So far, however, party leaders have been relying on Joe to remain conscious just long enough to keep the wheels on the short bus. He was already starting to give the impression of a man occasionally waking up from an afternoon doze to find himself in a hostage situation, when a post-debate appearance with his maniacal wife made that metaphor literal. It’s unlikely Joe can hold out much longer. I’m sure he would happily fork over the nuclear codes if his sadistic handlers and their army of screaming teenagers would just let him go home and have an ice cream cone.

Would the Democrats put up with such an embarrassment if they had any better substitute capable of herding these cats over the finish line? The fact that they are now, at last, talking seriously about a replacement is a sign not of dawning sobriety but of abject panic. Only a humiliation as stark as the ninety minutes of mumblecore to which we were all subjected could possibly have driven party leadership to consider taking the drastic measure of airlifting in someone new. Even so, it may be logistically impossible at this late stage. If there were someone younger, more exciting, and more able to broker a plausible temporary peace among the coalition of the ascendant, he or she would already be on the ballot. But the options are Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man with literal brain worms, or someone like Gavin Newsom, a sinister lizard person who has unblinkingly announced his intention to plunge the country into a California-style sinkhole. A younger, less hinged Democratic Party is coming — and none of the actual adults in the room want to see what that looks like just yet. So we’ve been putting it off.

That’s how we ended up with Biden versus Trump, the rematch. It’s what we chose to pass the time, hoping that our real problems would go away if we waited long enough. It’s not just the advanced age of the two participants; it’s the spiritual decrepitude, of Biden especially, but of Trump too in his own way. These are two intimately known quantities, bickering over their golf games and griping over a few repeated points of fixation as old men do when they lose their focus on the present. Despite his relative vigor, Grandpa Trump’s still on his kick about how they stole 2020. Uncle Joe’s crusade against imaginary domestic extremists is about the only thought he can keep hold of for more than thirty seconds at a time. There’s safety in mumblers, who can be trusted to go off on their pet issues but are too caught up in futile score-settling to do anything meaningful.

Outside the window of the geriatric ward, China is making a bid for economic supremacy, Russia is bearing down on Ukraine and Iran is organizing its proxies to harass our allies and cut off major trade routes. At home the kids, unsupervised, are engineering a Lord of the Flies-style wrestling match for rights of authority over the emerging racial and sexual hierarchy. To distract ourselves from these alarming developments, we have chosen to bunker down and take bets on a retirement-home feud. The whole thing betokens society-wide fragility and a willingness, perhaps even a desperation, to kick the can down the road.

In 1518, the Venetian diarist Marino Sanuto came across an ancient prophecy that “when the young rule, the world will either advance or fall asunder.” The early modern Republic of Venice was renowned for its stability, which it achieved by customarily restricting high office to vecchi, i.e., to elders. Since old age in those days began at forty, the point was to benefit from the wisdom and experience of men in what we would now consider the prime of life. Something like the spirit of the Venetians is evident in the minimum age barrier to candidacy for president set in the Constitution. The very fact that we have a “senate” — literally “a group of old men” — suggests the American founders were not hostile to old age per se or insensitive to its advantages. Eventually, though, wisdom and vigor give way to senility, complacency and fragility, which is how you end up getting kicked around by the Turks.

When Sanuto found that prophecy, the average age of European princes outside Venice was thirty-three. Arguably the world was on the brink of both falling asunder and advancing. Luther having just posted his theses, the future held years of sectarian conflict and global warfare — but also artistic and religious revival, scientific progress and imperial adventure. Our own era, like that of the Renaissance, is fraught with opportunity and danger, new communications technology and shifting balances of power. The digital revolution will only continue to change the rules of warfare, religion and family life, as the printing press did before it. The various social and geopolitical crises currently brewing suggest a period of gathering turmoil and disruptive energy. When a new generation of politicians finally takes the stage — when the young rule — it’s likely the world will advance, or fall asunder, or both. Under those circumstances, the current standoff between two senior citizens feels less like a long-awaited cataclysm and more like a safe space we’re hiding in until we’re ready, or forced, to deal head-on with our real issues. Sooner or later — and after what we saw on that debate stage, I’m betting sooner — the creaky political apparatus that produced Biden and Trump will grind to a sputtering halt. The rest of us will be left holding the bag. Eventually, we’re going to have to buck up and venture outside our padded walls. We can’t stay safe in the old folks’ home forever.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2024 World edition.