First, a statement of the bleeding obvious: It’s completely bonkers that Joe Biden has announced he’s running again.
Nobody of sound mind, which therefore excludes President Biden, thinks it makes any sense for this increasingly slow, senile, doddering, dopey incumbent to even try to win re-election given that he can barely string a coherent sentence together.
He says he wants to “finish the job,” but I very much doubt he can even remember what job he’s started. And shocking polls show even most Democrats don’t want him running again.
I don’t say any of this with glee.
Biden’s essentially a good, decent man who has overcome a series of devastating personal tragedies to serve his country admirably as a politician for more than 50 years.
But it’s become increasingly painful to watch his embarrassing stumbles and gaffes.
America deserves and urgently needs better than this in such difficult times, and that means a leader bursting with more youthful energy, drive and purpose.
But if there’s one thing even more bonkers than Biden running again, it’s surely Donald Trump running against him again as the Republican nominee.
As Albert Einstein is reputed to have said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
There was a time when Trump was a political King Kong, swatting away all rivals during his one-man wrecking-ball rampage to the White House in 2016.
But that was seven long years ago.
Now he’s become a political suicide bomber whose only power seems to be blowing up his own party’s chances of winning anything.
Trump has become his own worst nightmare: a loser.
We saw his reverse Midas touch in 2018, in 2020, in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs, and again in 2022.
Yet still the GOP inexplicably lets him keep his vote-losing vise on the party, and if it continues to do so, it will lose again in 2024.
In fact, as things stand, the ONLY way I envision the Republicans losing next year to decrepit Joe Biden is if Trump is their nominee.
Oh, I know, I know — Trump’s way ahead in the GOP polls, which shows how massively popular he remains …
He’s an unstoppable force, so everyone else in the nominee race should just give up …
The Stormy Daniels indictment only made him stronger … blah blah blah.
But honestly, all of this is delusional nonsense, as cold, hard polling data show.
A new WPA Intelligence report based on seven recent national popular vote polls shows that Biden would beat Trump by an average of 3.1%.
And in the six likely key battleground states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Trump trails Biden by between 1% and 4%.
If that pattern holds to November 2024, Biden would hammer Trump 319-219 in the Electoral College.
None of this should surprise anyone.
Why do you think Biden’s announcement that he was running again is basically an attack ad on “MAGA” Trump?
Comatose Joe is desperate to face his old enemy again, partly because Trump’s nearly as old as he is, so age won’t be such a glaring factor, but mainly because he knows he can beat him.
However, swap Trump out for his closest competitor for the Republican nomination — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — and it’s a very different story.
The same WPA report reveals that DeSantis would beat Biden in the popular vote by 1.2% and is leading him in five of the six battleground states (they’re tied in Wisconsin).
And this is all before DeSantis has even declared himself a candidate!
You can tell how much Trump fears DeSantis by the way he’s been going after him so aggressively, from (pathetically) mocking the way he allegedly eats chocolate pudding with his fingers — DeSantis denied the charge when I interviewed him last month — to the absurd and demonstrably false claim that he’s ruined Florida, which begs the question: If it’s so bad, Donald, why have you gone to live there?!
Of course, the real reason Trump fears him is because DeSantis is a winner.
He was the stand-out victor in otherwise disappointing midterm results for the Republicans, turning a meager 33,000-vote majority in 2018 into over 1.5 million last November.
And he did it by being Trumpian in policy but non-Trumpian in style.
DeSantis prefers order to chaos, calmness to hysteria, focus to distraction, and although he’ll battle ferociously with anyone, he has respect for the behavioral expectations of high office.
He doesn’t go for the constant vile personal abuse and social media bitching that Trump loves, but which turns off many voters, including — crucially — independents.
“I just want to get scores on the board,” DeSantis told me several times.
And right now, he’s the most successful conservative politician in the United States.
He also happens to be 36 years younger than Biden, and 31 years younger than Trump.
That’s a massive gap when age and physical fitness for the job is a clear factor in voters’ calculations: 68% of Americans think Biden’s “too old for another term” and 48% of Democrats agree.
WPA founder Chris Wilson concluded the report: “Nominating Donald Trump ensures Joe Biden a second term and a disaster for Republicans.”
The alarm bells couldn’t be louder for the GOP, nor the solution more obvious.
But are they listening?
