The Patriot Post® · Trump vs. Biden: The Sequel
Donald Trump and Joe Biden both have historically high negative poll numbers. The only candidate more disliked than Trump is Biden. Roughly two-thirds of Americans don’t want to see a rematch of the 2020 election because sequels are rarely as good as the first one. Yet primary voters had other ideas, so after Super Tuesday, here we are with another general election matchup of president and former president.
Until Democrats figure out a way to get rid of Biden, anyway.
First, a brief note on him. As is usually the case with incumbents, the Democrat primary has hardly been a contest. Yet Biden actually lost a primary yesterday … in American Samoa. That’s not exactly earth-shattering, but it’s amusing that he’s the first sitting president in 44 years to lose a primary. In several states, he has also lost noteworthy chunks of the vote to challengers named “uncommitted,” “no preference,” and “noncommitted delegate.” Evidently, they were tough debate opponents.
The overwhelming majority of Americans think Biden is too old and cognitively declining to be president, and he’s trailing Trump in nearly every poll. As veteran journalist Brit Hume put it last night, “He is palpably senile, and the country sees it.”
A recent New York Times poll certainly had everyone in a tizzy, and one story about it in the Times had a revealing headline: “No Matter Race, Age or Gender, More Voters Say Trump’s Policies Helped Than Biden’s.”
Nevertheless, Biden’s social media handlers posted way past his bedtime last night, “Today, millions of voters across the country made their voices heard — showing that they are ready to fight back against Donald Trump’s extreme plan to take us backwards.”
Millions of Americans voted for Trump yesterday, but whatever.
“This is a movement,” the former president said when announcing his third bid way back in November 2022. And it is a movement. Few politicians in recent memory can claim the devoted following Trump has. He didn’t do much real campaigning, didn’t talk much about policy proposals, and didn’t even show up at a debate, yet he easily dispatched the slate of GOP challengers this cycle. Trump never fell below about 43% in the polls, and he gained strength with every Democrat indictment or lawsuit.
Yesterday, he won 14 of 15 contests, including doubly sweet victories in Colorado and Maine, which, until a unanimous Supreme Court stepped in, had tossed him off the ballot. He lost only Vermont, and that by just four points. His victories were usually by huge margins, and his march to the nomination has rarely been in doubt.
Nikki Haley certainly doesn’t command any sort of loyal following, which is why she finally admitted reality and suspended her campaign this morning.
By virtue of being the last Trump opponent standing, Haley became the de facto protest candidate — the one who got crossover votes and money to keep her going. She relished that, of course, but she’s no RINO. She’s the conservative former governor of a bright red state and served well as Trump’s UN ambassador. She campaigned hard on real issues facing the country. While certainly imperfect, she would have made a fine Republican nominee and arguably would have wiped the floor with Biden, Kamala Harris, or whoever else Democrats propped up to defend Biden’s record.
Clearly, however, she didn’t have the support of Republican primary voters. The GOP has been Trump’s party since the summer of 2016, and the party’s voters are sticking with him amidst the relentless and unjust lawfare being waged by Democrats.
“It is now taken as obvious that the sympathy for Trump stemming from multiple indictments put the nomination out of reach for anybody else,” wrote National Review’s Philip Klein. “But the fact that the reflex among Republican voters was to rally behind him suggests that they never truly left him in the first place.”
Trump did, after all, put up an overall impressive record as president. COVID was a costly exception, as was his habit of shooting himself in the foot, especially after a policy success. Yet a majority of Republican voters have remained faithful to Trump because they identify with him, and he with them. No one identified with Haley, or Ron DeSantis, or Mike Pence, or Asa What’s-His-Name. And you can’t beat something with nothing, so to speak.
Trump was magnanimous in his victory speech Tuesday night, and he’ll do well to keep that up. He didn’t mention Haley at all, speaking instead about unity in the party and promising that “success will bring unity to our country.”
For her part, Haley spoke this morning to suspend her campaign. “I said I wanted Americans to have their voices heard,” she said. “I have done that. I have no regrets.”
Notably, she congratulated Trump and wished him well but didn’t endorse him. She challenged him to win over those who didn’t support him, but she must know that party unity is critical to victory in November, and that depends as much on her as him.
Finally, we see headlines every single day about a woman named Taylor Swift, who’s evidently famous for something called Eras and for watching her boyfriend win the Super Bowl.
Okay, we tease — there’s no way this author’s wife and daughters would let him get away with not knowing who she is.
Swift is arguably the world’s most popular entertainer at the moment, with an impressive anthology of music, often about relational trouble with the men in her life. In any case, she urged her 282 million Instagram followers to vote Tuesday, saying, “I wanted to remind you guys to vote the people who most represent YOU into power.” Trump and Biden subsequently prevailed.
Coincidence?
(Updated)