The Democrats’ complacency is Trump’s greatest weapon

There is a great mystery lying behind the 2020 US presidential election: how come a country of 350 million, which leads the world in academia, science and more, is unable to find two more inspiring candidates than Donald Trump and Joe Biden? Where is the voice of hope, or even just a reassuring voice of calmness and competence? Instead, come November, citizens of the most powerful nation on earth will be forced to choose between a narcissist and a man whose claim to his party’s candidature appears to be based on the principle of Buggins’ turn.

Biden’s longevity is impressive — and we would never dismiss a candidate simply on the grounds of his age — but the reason he was formally adopted this week as the Democratic candidate for the presidency at the age of 77 is that, despite numerous attempts to build a campaign over the past three and a half decades, others of his generation kept outshining him. Now he has finally made it onto the ballot paper, but his chief selling point is not his intellect, his ideas or his character — it is the fact that he is not Donald Trump. That hardly seems a wise strategy when Trump has already won one election against the odds and is quite capable of winning another.

Trump’s faults are there for all to see. To put it politely, his speeches are often outside the norms of political dialogue. Anyone who thought that his bluster was just a clever double-bluff used to win elections will have been disappointed. The memoirs of his (many) ex-staffers confirm that he governs as he speaks. But it is quite possible to despair at how he governs while noting that he has delivered much of what his supporters hoped for: an economy that was largely left alone and — up until the Covid crisis — boomed as a result; the stock market at record highs; no new wars; a policy on China which has been copied by his critics.