Over the 17 years I have run this tiny blog, I have been a doomer. It isn’t some outlier opinion. I knew when I started that I would be documenting the hell that is the 21st Century.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump are confirmed for their 2020 rematch. The presidential campaign, now underway, will probably be the worst in US history. This campaign is already the longest. It started in 2022 when Trump announced. Yeah.
In many ways, I wish this was just like the 1956 rematch between Ike and Stevenson. Eisenhower cruised to victory. Stability and conformity prevailed. But these are not stable times. Joe Biden should be leading Trump by 10 points. Instead, he and Trump are tied in most polls.
Biden stuck in a statistical tie with Trump is the result of a lot of poor strategy and performance by his White House. Biden has not interacted with the public. He hasn’t released videos on YouTube. It’s obvious he doesn’t write his own Tweets, although I suspect he approves them.
The refrain of this post is quite simple. Biden and the nation are in grave danger because he’s tied with Trump when he should be 10 points ahead. I will be repeating variations of this a couple of times. I apologize in advance.
The United States Is A Very Sick Nation
As I have blogged many times here, the United States is in decline. Fro decades, pop culture predicted it was coming. But now it is here. We're sick. We have a gun crisis. We have a masculinity crisis. We're well into our environmental catastrophe. As a people, the United Sates is fat, depressed and more than a few of us are suicidal. I think Obama pushed the crazies over the edge, and they in turned pushed all the decent people over the edge by carrying Trump into the White House in an improbable upset victory in 2016. Now we have all lost our minds.
The United States is seriously unhappy, under the weight of cascading economic crises. Rent inflation. House insurance becoming unavailable. A housing shortage. Auto insurance is becoming very expensive thanks to reckless kids wrecking and stealing cars (or stealing them and then wrecking them). And where can an affluent American move to retire? The southwest? There will soon be no water. California? Is anywhere in California safe from wildfires? Texas? Not only is the water going away, but so is freedom. The only people who can sleep soundly at night in the United States are either blissfully unaware or are very rich.
And then there's our absolutely terrible memories. This is the nation that supposedly never got over our immoral and illegal war in Vietnam. We supposedly never forgot the Great Depression or the queues for gasoline that doomed Carter's presidency. But in just 9 years, we have forgotten about Donald Trump. From his stupid ride down an escalator to his daily abuse of the people, to his complete collapse during the pandemic, we have collectively forgotten how terrible Donald Trump is. There are tens of millions of people who genuinely believe that life under Trump was fine, including the year 2020. In fact, there are millions of people who never accepted the horror of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even those who were very sick, or had lost people have simply forgotten. It's the Mandela Effect on a grand scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory Or put another way, we have gaslit ourselves? If things seemed to have recently gotten worse under Biden, that means things were better under Trump, right?
Well if that's the case, then these idiots just need to be reminded of how worse things were under Trump. This campaign began in late 2022. And yet, Biden is tied with Trump in the polls. Millions of people have had an opportunity to give Biden another look and their answer is still, "Nah. I want Trump back."
Biden Is Down
In a previous post, I wrote how July 2021 was probably the closest we got to normality and stability since Donald Trump came down his stupid escalator. COVID deaths dipped to 1,543 reported deaths. Considering that the nation lost over 25,000 people the week Trump's terrorists stormed the Capitol, it felt like the pandemic was about to end. Biden wasn't wildly popular, nor engaging, but he seemed to be cruising at 50% popularity. 50% popularity translates to 50% of the vote, which translates to a second term. You had this, Joe.
But soon after that magical week, Joe Biden started to slide. By October, his Gallup approval rating had dropped to 49%, and it would never get back to 50%. Joe was sliding underwater.
Trump Is The Most Privileged American Alive
The fact that Trump successfully delayed all of his criminal trials is a massive failure on our part. How could we allow him to dictate the schedule of his own prosecution? Would an ordinary black man be granted the same privilege? Would I? Would you?
The campaign is meaningless. The votes are locked in. This is the worst year since 2016 already!
Should the candidate be allowed to run if he should instead be standing trial for attempting an auto-coup (an attempt to block the transition of power and declare himself president for life)? I argue letting Trump run is undemocratic. Letting him run free is basically us shooting ourselves on Fifth Avenue. We are doing this to ourselves. We are playing a dangerous game. We are essentially flipping a coin, and if it lands his way, he is president for life.
Biden Lost Well Before November
As of today, both the BDS movement and abortion are more popular than President Biden. Poll history tells us he can't possibly win with approval numbers this low. I don't buy into 'history repeating itself like poetry' bullshit, with all the Gen-X journalists comparing 1968 to 2024 (I am also a proud Xer, born in '73). But this summer looks like a looming disaster for Joe and the Democrats. They made it clear that the US must prop-up Israel forever, no matter how small the benefits to the American people and no matter how many times young Americans question that policy. The Democrats have also made it clear that while they welcome Republicans and anti-abortionists to their big tent, they have zero tolerance for critics of Israel.
Joe Biden should be leading Donald Trump by 10 points. He’s not. Why?
It’s because Biden has bled too much support. All incumbent presidents lose voters between their election and re-election. We can call that a haircut (the banking term). But Joe Biden has lost significant support among key demographics. We’re talking double-digit drops with Black men, Hispanics, Asians, and voters under the age of 40. All of those drops explain why Joe Biden’s lead in New York State has dropped from 20 points to just 10. Biden will easily win New York State. But a 10 point drop in a Democratic-majority state spells big trouble for states with smaller differences in registered voters.
These drops in support are going to cost Biden key swing states. Take Georgia, for example. Voter suppression and lack of enthusiasm for Biden has swung Georgia firmly back into Trump’s column. In Arizona, Democrats outnumber Republicans, and yet Democratic Senate candidate Reuben Gallego is leading in the polls while Trump is leading Biden in Arizona. Michigan is slipping away. Incredibly, so is Nevada, again, where Democrats outnumber Republicans. My current (and very pessimistic) electoral map looks like this:
Biden should be the one with 280 electoral votes. Biden should be 10 points up in the polls. But he isn’t.
Sometimes I think Trump is actually weaker than Biden. Trump is unhinged, slower and older than he was in 2016. He is also a big loser. But Trump also has 70 million votes in the bag no matter how bad he is. Joe Biden needs to be great to get votes back. Trump just needs to be alive and he gets 70 million votes. Advantage, Trump.
The Disaster Of Letting The People Decide Trump's Fate
Letting the people decide our future -especially when 70 Million of them want the autocrat- is never a good move. It wouldn't be a good move if just a few right wingers in the Dakotas want a dictatorship. Trump has a legion of 70 Million. Also, it has been proven for centuries: Americans are really dumb.
Letting the fascist onto the ballot was the fatal error. Fascists have a pattern of winning elections. Letting the people decide between a boring old man and an entertaining ghoul who promises to kill migrants and his political opponents is never a fair fight.
The GOP autocracy is coming now, folks. Not 2028. It's happening now. Come up with a resistance and/or exile plan.