Trump, Biden Tied At 46% In National Polls Pathetic Choice For 2024 Presidency

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

Labor Day, Monday, September 4, marked the unofficial beginning of the US election season. The choice for the presidency in 2024 remains up in the air. Seventy five percent of Democrats polled don’t want Biden to run as their nominee, while 69% of Republicans don’t want Trump to be the Republican nominee.

The main objection, and probably the only one, against Biden, in spite of his outstanding performance so far during his first term, is his age. He will be 86 at the end of his second term. The main objection against Trump – one in at least 91 – is that he continues to be a threat to the nation’s democracy.

Nevertheless, both these candidates are currently prohibitive favorites of their respective Parties for the 2024 presidency. They are defined more by their weaknesses than by their strengths. What is most distressing – and mystifying – is that an incumbent president, having brought back sanity to a disgraced White House, cannot put any distance in the national polls between himself and his rival, a former twice impeached president, convicted of fraud and sexual assault, arrested and on bail on 91 felonies.

They are currently tied at 46% each. However, polls are “fragmentary snapshots of a moment in time” and can change rapidly as circumstances fluctuate.

This is the most pathetic choice for the presidency American voters have ever faced in its history. The one hope is that the whole political landscape will change in the next 14 months, and Americans will finally come to grips with the dangers they face to their very democracy with the election of either of these candidates.

Should Trump regain the White House, the guardrails protecting the nation’s democracy will be gone. Biden may not survive a second term, and Democrats may well be compelled to change horses in midstream.

America was not always like this. US presidents after WWII, Democratic and Republican, have been much like the curate’s eggs: some good and bad at the same time, others having distinct good and bad parts. But every single one of them, from Roosevelt to Biden, even Nixon, had always revered the sanctity of the Constitution, the inviolability of the Rule of Law and the dignity of the Oval Office.

Bar Trump, who has shamelessly violated these fundamental institutions of American democracy.

President Roosevelt guided the nation well on the path to social and economic justice with his New Deal after World War II, representing the beginnings of the social safety net in America. Progressive policies Republicans contemptuously decry today as “Commie” ideology. Social and economic benefits enjoyed by citizens of all other developed countries.

FDR was succeeded in on his death by President Truman, who in 1945 was faced with the most heartbreaking decision any president could face: to authorize the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 6 and 9, 1945, killing an estimated 200,000 innocent civilians, men, women and children. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, officially ending a war in which 70 – 85 million people had perished. The alternative to this inhumane decision was to sacrifice millions more lives in the invasion of Japan, a nation which would not have surrendered under any other circumstance. Truman was considered to be one of the greatest presidents in US history.

Eisenhower continued with the New Deal programs, expanded social security, prioritized taxes where the wealthy paid taxes up to 90% which made for a thriving middle class. He played a major role in the construction of the nation’s highway network. Every Republican president who came after him pales by comparison.

Then came Kennedy, a war hero and the most charismatic president in the nation’s history who, with his charismatic style, soaring oratory and a beautiful wife, brought new glamor to the White House. His administration was renamed after Camelot, the mythical fifth century kingdom of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Kennedy is mainly remembered for his unflinching courage during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he stared down Khrushchev to dismantle nuclear bases and weapons in Cuba; and for his determination to conquer space, when he famously said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.

Kennedy was extremely popular with the ladies; his numerous extra marital affairs, notably with sex bomb Marilyn Monroe, were legendary. He is famously supposed to have told the British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan in 1961, “if I didn’t slip the presidential sausage to a woman once every three days, I would get a splitting headache”. Poor MacMillan had probably not enjoyed any sausage action in years.

Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the presidency on Kennedy’s assassination. He presided over the enactment of the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts. But he was most unpopular for his role in escalating the Vietnam War, which prompted him not to seek re-election in 1968.

Richard Nixon won the Presidency in 1968 and 1972 in landslide victories. He counted many signal achievements during his presidency, bringing about the end of the Vietnam War and negotiating a détente with the Peoples Republic of China.

However, his presidency will always be held in disgrace because of Watergate, an attempt at a cover-up of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building and hotel in Washinton D.C. Compared to the felonies of sedition and espionage surrounding the contemptible Trump, Watergate was a mere bagatelle.

Nixon’s vice-president, Gerald Ford succeeded him on his resignation. Ford’s only “achievement” during his presidency was his pardon of Nixon for crimes committed during Watergate.

Ford was succeeded by Democrat Jimmy Carter. He championed human rights, bolstered Social Security, added nearly eight million jobs and sought to improve the environment. He helped to bring amity between Israel and Egypt with the historic Camp David Agreement of 1978. He also established full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China.

Carter was a fine president but a terrible politician. He was outmaneuvered by the Great Communicator, Reagan, after serving one term, in 1980.

Carter, deemed the greatest ex-president in history, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 “for his decades of untiring efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social welfare”.

Since 1984, Carter and his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, have been personally involved in building and renovating homes for the poor with Habitat for Humanity. At age 94, he is still actively engaged in the project, in spite of the sad fact that Rosalynn is suffering from dementia.

Reagan was a worse president than he was a mediocre Hollywood actor. His infamous trickle-down Reaganonomics, which cut the maximum tax rate of corporations and the wealthy from 65% to 40%, began the process of decimating a thriving middle class.

The two Republican presidencies of the Bushes, George H.W. and George W. served as disastrous bookends for a prosperous eight-year presidency of Bill Clinton (1992 – 2000).

The older Bush started the Gulf War against Iraq. The younger Bush tried to outdo daddy, and waged an illegal war against the same country, also doomed to failure, with enormous costs to lives, property and international reputation. Both left their presidencies in financial crises with massive budget deficits, to be rescued by their successors, Clinton and Obama, in 1992 and 2008, respectively.

Clinton’s two terms boasted of the longest economic expansion in American history, added 22 million new jobs, the largest expansion of education and college opportunities since the GI bill, among many other achievements. His administration ended in a budget surplus of $230 billion.

The charismatic Clinton also had a penchant for the ladies, though he was an altar boy compared to JFK. His presidency was marred by an affair with an intern, and was impeached for lying under oath for the consensual “crime” he was alleged to have committed with her. The case against him was “blown” away, as his crime did not fall within the dictionary definition of sexual intercourse.

The two-term administration of President Barack Obama extricated a nation on the brink of recession. In eight years, he transformed it to a prosperous country with 72 final weeks of continuous economic growth, well on the path to social and economic justice. A nation that adorned the mantle of the Leader of the Free World, winning international respect and admiration. Achieved in the face of Republican obstruction at every turn, without a whiff of political or personal scandal.

Four short years later, from 2016 to 2020, the USA became a different country. Trump’s America has lost the confidence of its allies as he consorted with its adversaries; sacrificed the threat of climate change at the altar of pollution and corporate profits; cost the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans to the pandemic, in a cynical effort to safeguard the economy; employed unqualified family members to senior White House positions, which they used to steal the country blind; forsook the plight of the neediest for the benefit of billionaires and corporations; and, worst of all, rekindled racial and religious tensions simmering below the surface to the cusp of a second civil war.

For the first time in history, the nation’s budget deficit topped $ one trillion in 2020, at the end of Trump’s first and only term.President Biden, who defeated Trump by a landslide in 2020, has brought back a semblance of dignity to a White House which had been riddled with corruption, nepotism and a criminal repudiation of the Constitution and the Rule of Law.

There will be many twists and turns, for both Parties, before the November 2024 election. Biden did not run for the presidency in 2016, because of the grief after the death of his beloved son, Beau. Perhaps he could now take the honorable, save-face path to resignation because of the ongoing investigations and imminent indictment relating to gun charges and financial misconduct of his second son, Hunter, although there is no evidence of his own involvement. Take one for the team, as it were.

Such a resignation would open the door for younger, proven leaders like Vice President Harris, California Governor Newsom and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, to run for the Democratic nomination. Whoever wins, there will be a welcome breath of fresh air of young and vibrant leadership to the Party.

And the Republicans will be forced to field Trump, with all the legal baggage he is carrying, as their nominee. Should he be compelled to drop out by disqualification of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment or any other reason, up to and including imprisonment, they will have to find a suitable candidate at short notice, while the nation would probably be forced to cope with white supremacist violence that may erupt on the great big fall of Humpty Trumpty.

The 2024 presidential election will be one of the most momentous events in the nation’s history. Whatever the result, Trump has created a suspicion in one of the cornerstones of a democracy – the integrity of its electoral process. It is entirely possible that elections in the future may be decided not by the ballot but by the bullet.