As we are running towards 2024’s first presidential debate, which Trump probably will attend, because he will never pass up an opportunity to talk (unless it’s under oath) it’s becoming more clear that the Biden Administration sees the debate as a make-or-break moment. Because Biden, after everything we’ve found out about Trump, is still running behind.
This week the FiveThirtyEight poll shows Biden and Trump still tied. Quinnipiac is showing Trump 49, Biden 45. The 270toWin national poll for this week shows Biden 44.33 percent and Trump 44.67 with “Other” holding the remainder.
That IS with the post Trump trial bump.
And we know this is an issue with Biden as opposed to Democrats generally, because of polls. The Nevada Independent quoted an AARP poll showing that Biden is behind Trump in Nevada by 3 points as of June 25 (prior to Robert Kennedy Jr. being factored in) while incumbent Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen leads Republican challenger Sam Brown by at least 5 points. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown is running 5 points ahead of his Republican challenger in Ohio, according to Politico. Trump leads Biden by 7 points in the same survey.
As Joan Rivers would say, can we TALK?
Certainly I can understand why people would hate Trump. I can even understand why some people would love Trump. He is, that much more than Ronald Reagan, an exemplar of the Republican attitude that being a great entertainer is synonymous with being a great politician. He is a dumbass for public amusement, who gleefully insults his own audience, knowing they will gleefully respond, because they think they’re flipping off the libs together. He is the Lord of Misrule that the drunks at Mardi Gras elect to be king for the duration of the festivities. The problem of course is that Ash Wednesday always comes, and with it, the hangover.
In this case the hangover was Trump Virus (TM) which ruined the economy that Trump keeps bragging about, and is the reason you no longer have local buffets, or 24-hour supermarkets, and is the reason why they actually raised minimum wage over ten whole dollars an hour in some states, with the effect that had on the economy. If not for that, Trump might have actually been re-elected. But he wasn’t because everybody could see that in a real crisis moment, he was too stupid and immature to react appropriately. But now he’s not the one in charge and everyone wants to blame Biden for the way things are, due to policies that were largely a reaction to Trump fucking everything up. As usual, all Republicans have is America’s national short-term memory.
What I absolutely cannot understand is not why some people love Trump; I understand that all too well. What I do not understand is why some people are not just un-enthused by Joe Biden but absolutely loathe him. Because while it’s easy to see both why some people love Trump and some people hate him, the worst thing you can say about Joe Biden is that he’s too dull to hate.
But just as Trump’s fan club exaggerates Trump’s alleged virtues (like his Christianity) outside their reality, they assume Biden is some kind of tyrant or monster. But part of that is Trump’s propaganda campaign acting like Biden is the real threat to freedom because he’s the one in charge and his administration is prosecuting Trump, completely avoiding all the reasons why. It’s bad enough when Trump acts like “I’m rubber, you’re glue” is a serious political strategy but it is absolutely infuriating when the mainstream media enables him to do it.
That might explain why polls also show Democratic voters blame Biden for the Gaza war (which was provoked by Hamas and its anti-American sponsors), 29% of those polled thought the Biden Administration was behind the Trump/Stormy Daniels trial (a New York case that had actually been delayed while Trump was in office) and 17% of voters actually blame Joe Biden for the Dobbs decision killing Roe v. Wade.
It could just be that many Americans are fucking hammerheads, which is my Occam’s Razor explanation for an increasing number of things these days.
The main issue affecting Americans in regard to their daily lives under Biden is inflation, and again, Biden Administration policies like the American Rescue Plan directly contributed to that, but they were a direct reaction to the effects of COVID on the economy, and those lingering effects included supply shortages that would have affected prices whether there was a government stimulus or not, and were also present in other countries that also had post-COVID inflation. Actually, the joke is that if not for COVID Trump might have actually won re-election because up to that point things weren’t so bad for most people, but once he had a moment of real crisis and challenge everybody could see that not only was he not up to it, he was actually making the problem worse by allowing the disease to spread for lack of an organized policy. And yet at the same time, the worse things got, the more Trump insisted on hogging the spotlight of the government’s coronavirus plan (or lack thereof) and demanding even more media than he already got. And so there was an inevitable contrast between this whining, braying prima donna who demanded credit for everything without getting results, and Joe Biden, who was and is the exact opposite. It worked for Biden then, but ironically, that very contrast may be what is hurting him now.
On a personal level, Biden’s biggest weakness, especially when challenging Trump’s ethics, is Hunter Biden and a gun prosecution that Hunter could have avoided but probably didn’t precisely because the system wanted to seem like it was being “fair.” But the fact that Biden has problems with a ne’er-do-well son who has drug problems is actually something that could make more people empathize with him. I’ve said this before, but the reason Biden keeps hitting that “I know what it feels like” schtick is because he can. He does know what it feels like cause he’s been where a lot of people are. Whereas Donald Trump has suffered real tragedies in life, namely the death of close relatives, but you’d never know because he doesn’t want to dispel his image of the invincible strongman who never loses. Acknowledging death (among other things) would mean acknowledging that there are some losses you can’t avoid.
Maybe that’s why Biden isn’t popular with the kind of people who like Trump. Cause they don’t want to acknowledge that reality.
Biden is normal. Biden is the guy who goes to church (and knows how to pronounce ‘II Corinthians’ correctly) and doesn’t cheat on his wife. Biden represents normal America, including ‘flyover country’ a lot better than the wannabe billionaire who said flat-out, “I don’t care about you, I just want your vote.” And everybody who heard Trump say that at the time all had a good laugh, because they think that supporting Trump is a big joke on the establishment. Which it is.
Nobody likes the establishment. Sometimes for good reasons. But all the bad things you could say about Biden and his family pale in comparison to the Trump Crime Family. While all the good things you could say about Biden come down to the fact that he’s normal and well adjusted. And clearly nobody in America wants that. It’s not entertaining. And clearly, being entertained is more important than our national security. Clearly it doesn’t matter that the president is real old and has a crooked son, cause otherwise Trump would be that much less popular than Biden. What matters, it seems, is that Trump is abnormal. He’s larger than life. He has pizazz. He’s compelling to watch.
You what else is abnormal? You know what else has pizazz? You know what else is compelling to watch? A train wreck. Or a car crash. Everybody loves to slow down to watch a car crash. A train wreck is intensely fascinating. Unless you’re in it. Then it’s either terrifying or lethal.
Now it ought to go without saying that if you survived the last year of the Trump Organization in Washington, meaning, if you are more than four years old, you know why you don’t want to give a human train wreck control of the most powerful office in the world, but apparently that’s just too much to ask of some people.
As John Oliver put it recently, don’t dismiss the premise of a second Trump term by saying we survived the first one, because not everybody did.
I don’t have to agree with everything that Biden, Harris, or the Democrats want. In fact, between the normie Biden Democrats and the Trump Party, I’d rather vote for the Republican Party, but that party doesn’t exist anymore. I’d really prefer to vote for the Libertarian Party, but THAT party doesn’t exist anymore either.
As it is, the only choice is between a normal guy and a retarded traitor who gave intelligence to the Russians. And I don’t want the best and most powerful country in the world run by a retarded traitor. I don’t know, maybe I’M weird.
But that also means that if you were going to vote for, say, Jacky Rosen for Senator in Nevada as opposed to Sam Brown, you might as well vote the full Democratic ticket now, because it’s not like a Democratic Congress can do more than put a kids’ BandAid on the hemorrhage if Trump gets in power. If you voted against the Republicans’ special ballot initiatives to ban abortion in your state, and you voted for Democrats in the midterms, there is certainly no logical reason not to vote for Joe Biden now.
As Joe himself would say, this is a big fucking deal.