Is Donald Trump America’s Marine Le Pen?

‘Democracy,’ said H.L. Mencken, ‘is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ As we approach 2024, America seems to be proving his point. On Tuesday, a highly unpopular octogenarian President announced that he would be running for re-election next year. Most of Joe Biden’s supporters don’t want him to run and a vast majority of young Democrats would prefer someone younger stood in his place. But everybody knows the reason Biden is staggering on. It’s because his Republican opponent in 2024 will in all likelihood be the man he beat in 2020: Donald J. Trump, arguably the most divisive leader in American history. 

Even if Trump doesn’t win the Republican nomination, Biden’s advisers seem to be betting the White House that Trumpism, the movement which now dominates the Republican party, will still be sufficiently off-putting to the electorate to guarantee their man another four years in power – assuming Mother Nature and Father Time don’t have other plans.

That’s why, in his campaign launch video, Biden talked about the ‘MAGA extremists’ who want to undermine democracy and the freedom to have an abortion or marry someone of your own sex. A sinister montage showed an image of Trump shaking hands with his rival for the Republican nomination, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis. 

The Democrats’ 2024 plan is clear, then. Team Biden wants to turn Trump into an American Marine Le Pen. They want to make the Christian nationalists of the American right play a similar role to the far-right in France – a voter rump that is too strong to die but still toxic to the majority. 

Americans don’t have to like Biden – the French don’t like Emmanuel Macron. Independents and swing voters are never going to side in sufficient number with the ‘deplorables’, as Hillary Clinton called them.