Overnight President Biden announced that he intends to run again for the White House in 2024 and beat Donald Trump in a rematch of their 2020 contest. This would be funny if it wasn’t a tragedy for both the US and the wider world.
We thus have the prospect of a man who will be 82 in two years’ time, and is already, in the words of historian Niall Ferguson ‘manifestly senile’, facing off against a 78-year-old Trump if, as widely expected, the orange man announces another presidential run next week. The absurd spectacle of two vain old men fighting for a future neither will live to see is enough to make friends of the US weep.
Biden made his statement even as the votes in the US midterms were still being counted. Although he treated those elections as a glorious victory for his Democratic party, the reality is that the Republicans still look likely to gain control of the lower House of Representatives. Meanwhile the struggle for the Senate will probably remain in doubt until the deadlocked key swing state of Georgia votes again in a run-off ballot next month.
The absurd spectacle of two vain old men fighting for a future neither will live to see is enough to make friends of the US weep
This means that although the much-anticipated ‘red tide’ did not sweep across the States as pollsters and pundits had predicted, Joe Biden’s presidency – as I wrote here earlier this week – is effectively over. Control of both Houses of Congress is vital to any president’s ability to get legislation passed. In the bitterly divided atmosphere of today the Republicans have still won enough seats to block Biden’s agenda, making him the lamest of ducks: a president in name only with a paralysed programme.
Vice President ‘cackling Kamala’ Harris is clearly unelectable. So bereft are the Democrats of talent that the best they can offer for 2024 is four more years of Biden on the sole grounds that he can once again whip Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have problems of their own. Followers of Trump still refuse to accept that Biden beat their hero fair and square in the 2020 race for the presidency. The elections revealed a party split between his followers and more moderate figures like Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis who gave the GOP its one unalloyed triumph on Wednesday – turning the Sunshine State from an evenly divided swing into a Republican bastion.
This was largely down to the votes of retirees who have made Florida their home. The most prominent of these seniors is of course Donald Trump himself. The former president, observing the scene from his Disneyesque fantasy fortress of Mar-a-Lago, could not disguise his petulant jealousy at DeSantis’ success, nor his bitterness that the election-denying Republican candidates he had endorsed were largely the main losers of the midterms.
So monstrous is Trump’s vanity, however, that the fact he is unacceptable to two thirds of Americans will not stop him from having a third run at the White House. Or even – should he lose the party’s Presidential nomination to DeSantis – running as an independent, splitting the Republican vote, and handing the Presidency to an incapacitated Biden.
The midterms revealed an America that is more deeply divided than it has been at any time since the Civil War of the 1860s. The fissures are multiple: young against old, black against white, liberal city dwellers against rural conservatives, women angry about abortion restrictions and young people concerned with climate change versus those more worried about inflation, crime and immigration . In such an over-heated atmosphere the inflamed competing egos of two vain and deluded old men are the last thing the country – or the dangerous world – needs.
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