President Donald J. Trump delivers his remarks Saturday, Feb. 29, 2019, during his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Md. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
Vice-President Joe Biden speaks during a welcoming and swearing in ceremony for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon, March 14, 2013. (DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley/Released)
Joe Biden vs Donald Trump
Lance Morrow in the WSJ asks, what genius invented this election? Whoever wins, the country loses.
This time, a sense of helplessness, anxiety, and foreboding (perhaps it’s disgust) hangs in the air. Mr. Morrow likens it to the African Queen, when Humphry Bogart and Katharine Hepburn are chugging down the river toward the roar of whitewater rapids.
What’s the right metaphor to describe the fix that American politics is in? A football game that doesn’t start with a kickoff in the first quarter but goes directly into interminable, insufferable overtime? Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden—the seemingly inevitable matchup—dramatizes a massive failure: Whoever wins, the country loses.
Americans avert their gaze from a depressing cliché. It tells them they get the president they deserve. Have they really deserved Mr. Biden? Are they really to blame for Mr. Trump? The answer, both times, is probably yes. But so what? Americans never accept blame for the presidents they elect. Our politics is an impatient business that resists abstraction: headlong yet reactive, intimate yet theatrical. I think of the presidency as a national shaving mirror, in which America may display one after another of its multiple personalities. Today, Biden. Yesterday, Trump.
Do Americans have such a low opinion of themselves that they will tolerate a Biden/Trump match?
No one looks good in an Era of Bad Feelings. It’s as if the country were being framed: forced to declare that it is so divided, so self-stymied, that this is the best it can do.
Mr. Trump is an ingenious exception. He’s an apparently undebunkable outlier in the American political theology, a 21st-century heretic testing the old idea that the supposedly virtuous establishment has grown so corrupt that it can be overthrown only by an energetic sinner. Maybe.
But Mr. Trump’s is a dangerous conceit. To paraphrase Groucho Marx’s old gag: “He looks like a louse, and he talks like a louse. But don’t let that fool you. He really is a louse.”
Meantime, on the left, the so-called elites and the woke believers practice their own neoevangelism, abolishing the very concept of woman, for example. They are forever firing up novel and gaudy grievances, inventing new pronouns, new sects, new sexes even.
Yet, writes Mr. Morrow, this is the news: The culture wars are wearing thin.
The “new” and “novel” have become as old, tired and absurd as Joe Biden himself—and as ridiculous as the noisy but shopworn novelty item named Donald Trump.
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