Back from the sacred sublimity of a monarch's coronation to the moral disaster that is modern electoral politics!
As the country inches closer to 2024 and a projected Biden-Trump rematch, it may be more important to imagine what will be different this time than to obsess about what will be the same. Obviously, if the top two candidates are the same, that is an important continuity. But a rematch is not necessarily a rerun, and there are important differences this time around.
In 2020 Trump was obviously the incumbent president, and so the election was inevitably in some sense a referendum on him personally. This was, of course, exacerbated by the unique way in which Trump had been the virtually uninterrupted center of national attention ever since his 2016 campaign against Hilary Clinton. The media proved to be obsessed with Trump not just because he was uniquely newsworthy but because he provided precisely the entertainment value that the media prefer. (We all remember, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”) As the breathless, minute-by-minute coverage of Trump's NY indictment illustrated, the media's addiction to Trump continues.
But, if the media's commercial obsession with Trump has not changed all that much, the country's perception of him has. In 2020, Joe Biden ran primarily against Donald Trump the man, Trump the exceptional outlier in normal American politics, someone who seemingly singlehandedly had stolen the soul of America. Obviously, if he is the candidate, Trump will be the face - and the voice - of the opposition to Biden. But Biden seems to have grasped, as has much of the country, that what Trump has come to represent is no longer the peccadilloes of a particular personality but rather a potent political movement with an extreme authoritarian agenda. It is no accident that Trump's supposedly principal Republican rival, Ron DeSantis, has tried to distinguish himself as being a Trump without Trump - and, in some respects, a more venomous Trump at that.
After years of avoiding as much as possible even mentioning his predecessor, Biden is now vocally campaigning not just against Trump as some idiosyncratic outlier but against the bigger MAGA movement. He seems to recognize that the danger - the cultural, moral, and political dangers - are even more so this time. His goal must be to make MAGA the focus, to make it a referendum on MAGA rather than on Biden the incumbent.
On the other hand, Biden suffers from the perennial problem of unreliable constituencies, characters who could conceivably decide to vote for a third party or just stay home because they are insufficiently enthused by Biden and have no qualms prioritizing their self-absorbed disgruntlement over the threat of Trump back in the presidency. Meanwhile, one of the particularly problematic aspects of the politics of our era is the prevalence of a widespread generalized disgruntlement. If it really were the case that "It's the economy, stupid," then things might be different, given that the economy is actually doing rather well. But instead of "It's the economy, stupid," it may be more like "It's the anger, stupid." And, in today's politics, the anger is almost always directed at the incumbent.
All of which means that Trump's chances of moving back into the White House - while still not overwhelming - may be more likely than many Democrats think. A rematch is not guaranteed to be a rerun.
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