Keeping the US out of war? Reviving the American dream? No, stopping the other guy from winning.
Joe Biden, wittingly or otherwise, has revealed the arrogance and weakness of his 2024 presidential campaign, telling donors on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) his embattled bid for re-election rested on stopping Donald Trump – what some might see as the ultimate Trump Derangement Syndrome.
“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” the 81-year-old president told a group of Democratic donors in Boston. “But we cannot let him win.”
The man whose name Joe Biden has practically refused to utter in public since his inauguration in 2021 – preferring to lambast the “MAGA movement” – has been weighing on the President’s mind, it turns out.
After months of insisting that he simply wanted to “finish the job”, it was the clearest insight yet from Biden into his personal rationale for seeking a second term, by the end of which he would be 86, far and away the oldest president ever.
For any voters who prefer a candidate who wants the job for mainly positive reasons, Biden’s candour can’t help him.
But the very premise of Biden’s claim – that he’s uniquely positioned to defeat Donald Trump again – is far from clear.
For a start, Trump is consistently leading Biden in national polls, including in battleground states, by a handful of percentage points, a remarkable achievement given the political and legal controversies that dog Trump, not to mention enmity of the bulk of the mainstream media.
Trump’s probability of winning next year, according to an average of eight political betting markets tracked by RealClear Politics, has risen to the highest level yet, 37 per cent (up from 15 per cent in January), compared to Biden’s 29 per cent.
Whatever the merits of the Democrats’ legislative record, voters haven’t bought Bidenomics, and the President’s fearmongering about the risks of a MAGA dictatorship under a future Trump presidency haven’t cut through.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the increasingly unimpressive Biden is the only candidate Trump can beat.
Former Democrat Robert F Kennedy is polling around 20 per cent despite, higher than any former independent presidential challenger, a factor likely to help rather than hinder Biden given his family’s pedigree.
TDS could help Trump yet further: former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney said on Tuesday she was considering a tilt at the top job “in order to stop Trump”, yet someone so loathed by Trump’s supporters – for her role in the January 6 committee that impugned the former president – could only peel votes away from Biden.
To be fair, Trump may want the top job for obscure reasons too: to stay out of prison.
The former president faces a chance that he’ll be sentenced to jail before the November 5 election, by one or more state or federal courts.
The opportunity to pardon himself would be a powerful campaign motivator.
If so, Biden could do both of them a favour, not to mention the US public which is desperate to avoid 2020 all over again.
Biden could promise to pardon Trump on all charges under the federal indictments, on the condition he they both promised publicly not to run for president again.
Those two ageing political warhorses wouldn’t be the only ones to be relieved.
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