It’s time to break free from toxic twosome
It is early days, with seven months to go before the first of the primaries ahead of next year’s US presidential election and 16 months before polling day on November 5, 2024. But amid deepening challenges the world faces, there is increasing talk of an alternative to what Greg Sheridan categorised in The Weekend Australian as “surely the worst presidential choice in history: Donald Trump or Joe Biden … the deranged versus the decrepit, the perennially furious against the increasingly feeble, two purveyors of self-serving, incoherent waffle who both look increasingly sleazy”.
It may be too soon to say with certainty who might make up that alternative. But last weekend’s failed putsch in Russia, the country with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, was a reminder of the need for a US president and leader of the free world capable of providing strong, coherent leadership to deal with Moscow and Beijing.
If Western politics were not so deranged, Sheridan wrote, the US would be heading towards a race between Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, 44, and California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom, 55. Such a contest would be “free of personal scandal” and offer “a clear choice between two coherent but contradictory views of how the US should be governed, involving two politically successful governors, both handsomely re-elected, overseeing vast economies”. Whether that possibility becomes a reality is for the two parties to decide. But it is a prospect they should consider rather than being swept along on a rerun between the septuagenarian Trump and octogenarian Biden.
Although Mr Trump is way ahead in the polls for the Republican nomination – against Mr DeSantis, former vice-president Mike Pence and former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley – he is weighed down by political and legal baggage. Sixty-seven per cent of independent voters believe Mr Trump should have been indicted. And 65 per cent reckon Mr Biden is “too old to effectively serve another four-year term”.
As Adam Creighton wrote on Monday, concerns are growing about Mr Biden’s determination to run: his decline, the reality that if he were he to die in office Vice-President Kamala Harris, widely regarded as incompetent, would succeed him, and mounting evidence Mr Biden lied about his business dealings with his wayward son Hunter. Bank records “have already revealed payments of millions of dollars to the Biden family from shady businesses in China, Ukraine and elsewhere”, Creighton wrote. The US and its allies need a break from the “deranged and the decrepit”.
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