UNITED STATES POLITICS | 2024 ELECTION

The Lesser of Two Evils Folly

The forgetful and the tyrannical

On one hand, American politics is simple. We’re a two party system that — at the end of each four year cycle — typically leaves its citizens choosing between two unbecoming figures to lead it through the next four years. It’s a relatively uncontroversial idea to most people, inside and outside of our borders, that neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump are particularly great candidates for the job. To many of us, it’s frustrating to grasp that our choice for president hinges between two figures that are double the average age of American citizens.

But on the other hand, American politics is more complicated than ever before. Dissension dominates the landscape and conspiracies swirl with a virulent intensity. The rational debate that could take place between opponents only a few years prior has dissipated to near extinction. Perhaps nowhere is the death of debate more evident than in Donald Trump’s status as the de-facto Republican presidential nominee.

Bucking a decades long political tradition, he’s repeatedly refused to debate with the people in his own party challenging his rhetoric. But even as his opponents try their best to distinguish themselves from the former president, they’ve displayed a marked reluctance to actually disparage him. When given the opportunity to criticize his actions, many on the 2024 Republican debate stage have come to the cult-wrought understanding that their political survival depends on a tacit endorsement of the very man they’re running against. And by all appearances, they’re right.

Though there are some on the debate stage that can acknowledge fault in the actions of the former leader, there’s not one openly willing to admit that Trump’s tyrannical negligence is indicative of a far greater threat to our country than any Biden poses. One of the most notable shifts in the era of Donald Trump is the very skewing of objective reason. It sounds unjournalistic to call a spade a spade and speak honestly about the rap sheet of criminal misdeeds that Trump can rightly claim.

I could call him a childish, criminal, Epstein-befriending fiend, but a thousand different journalists have compiled infinitely more comprehensive character studies. In Trump’s lone term in office, he jumped so freely between scandals, controversies, and criminal offenses that he effectively drowned the reporters and columnists addressing each one. They were lost in a sea of noise.

To simply attempt to bring people up to date on all of it has this unfortunate way of appearing hyperbolic. Honest recountings end up sounding like a fast-forward recap of a thousand-season TV show. Even the most objective reporting begins to look gratuitous when it’s just being glommed onto an ever-growing mountain. The scathing exposés that have ended countless other political careers bear little influence on the masses of people that still remain in Trump’s corner.

I’m hardly the first to wonder how history books of the future will attempt to do justice to the off-the-rails rollercoaster that is our strange politcal moment. The mugshot of our former leader has become the rallying cry for polar ends of our political arena. Where Democrats see an obvious criminal, Republicans see an enduring martyr. Where Democrats — and even an apparent majority of Trump’s former colleagues — see a grave threat to our very institutions, Republicans see our only chance at salvation from immigration, inflation and immolation.

Trump’s mounting indictments and appearances in court are beginning to lose their shock value. He powers through blunders by simply sowing new ones. Even the very real legal threats he faces are something he appears at times almost to welcome. He threatens judges on social media in cavalier defiance of the gag orders imposed on him. He never allows the weight of all of his terrible baggage to fully set in and hold him back. He continues on full speed ahead leaving a toxic trail of sludge in his wake.

One of the greatest distinctions between Trump and Biden is the way that their shortcomings manifest. Biden has certainly had more than his share of embarassing moments in his time in office. In those instances where Biden seems to lose his train of thought, the way he trails into oblivion is something almost pitiful to watch. At worst, he seems to buckle embarassingly under the weight of his gaffes.

Trump’s speeches, though, are each riddled with these same sorts of ineptitudes for which Republicans level “Sleepy Joe!” charges. But it’s in the bravado with which Trump perseveres through these botches that he fools his supporters. When Biden states that “It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of the men who do so — end of quote, repeat the line,” it’s decidedly a little discouraging.

But it’s orders of magnitude less dangerous than claiming “If we have [nukes], why can’t we use them?”

Biden never sank to the lows of his predecessor. He never repeatedly downplayed the pandemic sweeping its way across the country. He never engaged in a plot to remain in power undemocratically. He never floated using atomic weaponry against a hurricane.

Biden’s most hair-raising shortcomings are only a drop in the bucket when we consider that Trump plainly stated that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” or that “When somebody’s the President of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be.”

Trump’s despotic stupidity and rule by Twitter is a flagrant threat to our country’s very security. The growing list of indictments leveled against him and his various co-conspirators are a telling proof of the peril he poses.

Yet, so many of us on even the left are numb now to the idea that the most powerful men in the world can be such bumbling egomaniacs. As I write these words I can already feel them falling flat. It’s defeating to write about a subject when your words are so destined to be buried. The audience that I expect will read this has heard it all before ad unending nauseam. For the people who know what Trump is, my words can do little more than hammer in a sorely beaten nail.

The people I might hope to persuade aren’t likely to be bothered at this juncture. That ship sailed before even the 2018 mid-term elections. The few it left behind probably won’t be stumbling onto this article. If they do, they’re unlikely to find my words any more cogent than any of the other essays, appeals, or diatribes from any of the other writers who’ve tried before throughout these past few dizzying years.

We’re a country weary of all this turmoil, but still holding on with clenched fists to our divisions. If there’s an issue on which both sides agree, it’s that our system is broken. But far easier than building a new one will be continuing our divided struggle forward, no matter how futile or Sisyphean our efforts.

Trump has been one of the most destructive figures in American history, but he’s been confident enough in his chaos that his most ardent supporters struggle to see it for what it is. There are swaths of people who see something enticing in Trump’s wanton disregard for the country he governed — and wants to govern again. But if he comes to power again, he’s made it clear that this governance would be more akin to a reign. Whether our system of government could survive it is uncertain.

Through a distorted enough lens on the world, there’s little that can’t be reframed. Whether blasphemy, perjury, infidelity, violence, or insurrection, there’s nothing that can’t be adorned in a MAGA hat, glamorized, and recast.

It’s a difficult reality to come to terms with that so much of the American public lives at the mercy of their disgraced former leader’s every word. While Biden isn’t exactly a saint — and probably even appears slightly senile on his worst days — his supporters can grapple with his faults. They can take issue with his policy. But in the eyes of so many Republicans, Trump’s actions are simply above reproach. When he claimed seven years ago that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue, shoot somebody, and wouldn’t lose any voters,” he understood what he’d become.