President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are two of the most lamentable candidates ever presented to voters for admission to the White House. We don’t yet know which one of them will win, but the public has already said it wants neither.
In some ways, the two men are similar — both, for example, are outstanding fabulists and braggarts. But their records in the immodesty department have been sufficiently well documented to require no further rehearsal here.
More interesting and less commented on is a category of character in which they are complete opposites. And, ironically, each makes the nation tremble by being utterly unlike the other in this respect. It is the extent to which they ignore or listen to advice or buckle to pressure from those gathered around them.
Biden came to office promising to be a strong centrist who would hold the moderate line against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and their ilk. Those two militant pols were, in the ancient history of 2020, regarded as being on the radical ideological edge of the Democratic Party. (What sweet, innocent days those were, when it was plausible to think the worst from the fringe was a phenomenon so outré that it was referred to only tentatively as “self-styled” socialism.)
Once in office, however, Biden collapsed without resistance to wave after ideological wave rolling in from the Left. He proved no stronger than a sandcastle facing an incoming tide. On every issue — systemic racism, open borders, climate alarmism, immiserating deficit spending, gender-bending, et cetera — Biden floated along on the left-wing flood. He burbled and bumbled, and you can still see the bubbles rising to the surface where his principles were once thought to be.
By contrast, it was hoped and believed four years earlier that Trump, the outlandish president-elect, would shed his extraordinary crudity, bullying, and indifference to facts after arriving in office. Guided by wise counsel and constrained by global realities, he would govern more like a mainstream Republican than he’d ever seriously indicated before.
But he didn’t. No adviser, no constitutional principle or tradition, no precept of civilized modesty or code of conduct ever ameliorated his harshness or calmed the chaos of his administration. It is true that he achieved much — on taxes and the economy, federal courts, and the Middle East — despite being hounded by a savage and unconscionable political opposition. So his grating self-pity and persecution complex are somewhat understandable. But all expectations that he could be successful without shattering beneficial conservative norms were dashed.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
That leaves the problem America now has with the presidential choice it seems inescapably to face. Trump or Biden? The devil or the deep blue sea? It can stick with a visibly weakening incumbent who is less and less able or willing to draw the line at each fresh lunacy foisted on the nation by the extremist Left. Or it can reinstall the previous occupant of the Oval Office, whose adamantine armor of defensive self-belief is proof against all counsels of civilization, decorum, and sober statesmanship.
The nation is in need of a do-over. But instead, it is getting a rematch.
