Biden against Trump 2024, the sequel

The conditional is the favorite grammatical mood in Washington these days.

Joe Biden could announce his presidential candidacy for the 2024 elections this Tuesday. Donald Trump would have it better than ever since January 6, 2021, the day of the assault on the Capitol, to become the bet on the White House for the Republican Party.

And Governor Ron DeSantis, after months of presenting himself as the only one capable of making American conservatism turn the page on Trump, would do better to wait another four years to jump into the arena of national politics: the polls, one behind on the other, they paint him as a hopeless loser before the former president.

So even at a very early stage in the election campaign, so many probations together lead to one conclusion: At this point, a movie sequel to the 2020 Biden-Trump showdown is the most likely scenario.

That of the current president is the safest and most imminent prediction.

The US media confirmed last week with sources from his Administration that he plans to take advantage of the fourth anniversary of the day on which, a year and a half after the appointment with the polls in 2020, he launched the campaign that led him to evict to announce his revalidation. to Trump.

On Tuesday's agenda is one of his favorite pastimes: meeting with unions to boast about the commitment to infrastructure investment that his administration wrested from Congress.

So he's thinking, now as then, to launch his ad with a video.

On that occasion, Biden based his message on the white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, the city of Thomas Jefferson, which ended in the summer of 2017 with the death of a woman who participated in the counter-demonstration.

To justify her order, she recalled what Trump said that day: "There were very good people on both sides."

That equidistance sparked outrage across the political spectrum, but it did not detract from its author's popularity among his loyal fan base.

Nor did the news of the first

for the alleged Russian plot, or his second impeachment trial, for the attack on the Capitol, or, more recently, his indictment and arrest for the accusation of an obscure payment to buy the silence of the porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Not even the various legal cases that he still has pending (among them, the alleged sexual assault of the journalist E. Jean Carroll, whose trial begins this week).

Quite the contrary: the latest scandals have only served to revive his comatose expectations of being chosen by his party for the presidential elections.

The dump of history

It would be his third campaign for the White House, since he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 and began to chain one electoral failure after another: he lost in the 2018 legislative elections, in the 2020 presidential elections (despite the fact that he still resists, without evidence, to admit it) and in the mid-term elections last November, in which it seemed that he had received the lace.

It was there when the world began to talk about DeSantis, who has not yet confirmed if he is running, as the young and implacable politician (he is 44 years old) who was going to send Trump straight to the dump of History.

Six months later, DeSantis looks exactly the same as Trump did in November: a hopeless incapable of winning.

After some sensational electoral results, the governor of Florida has fallen victim to both his extremist policies on issues such as abortion, education or the ban on books ―an agenda that has caused many Republican donors to withdraw their support, fearful that this will scare away out-of-state voters—as well as the cruelty of Trump's personal attacks, an art at which the former president is an accomplished master.

For now, he's also beating him at home: the tycoon is garnering much more support than DeSantis among Florida state legislators.

Biden — who also faces an investigation into the handling of classified documents from his time as vice president and has a son, Hunter, in legal trouble — has spent these months sitting back and watching his enemies fight each other, and waiting for subsided one storm after another, while defoliating his daisy without much suspense.

For a long time, Washington has not wondered if he would appear, but rather when he planned to announce that he would, as shown by the fact that no serious opponent has jumped into the ring (the only two who have stepped forward do not seem to be: the writer Marianne Wilson and the environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist of the illustrious last name Robert F. Kennedy Jr).

Some of his hypothetical rivals have already sided with him and the theory that if he could beat Trump once he could do it again.

Biden has never been a friend of running when it comes to announcing his candidacies, and several times he has thought long and hard before letting the opportunity pass him by, as he did in 1980, 1984 and 2016. The decision crystallized this time, according to The Washington Post

on April 15, on the plane back from his recent trip to Ireland, during which he said he would launch his campaign “relatively soon”.

That same weekend, the filming of the video began, which is expected to be short, no more than two minutes.

They also started designing the website, crucial for raising money.

The main change in the president's status as of Tuesday will be precisely that: once he becomes a candidate, the law allows him to ask for money from his donors.

Up to $2 billion is being sought, according to the

Donald Trump speaks at the National Rifle Association convention, held April 14 in Indianapolis.Michael Conroy (AP)

It's an expensive undertaking, even if it doesn't elicit waves of enthusiasm.

His popularity ratings have been stuck at an admittedly meager 40% since the summer of 2021, when he dishonorably withdrew troops from Afghanistan.

That ended his honeymoon (rather, his grace period) with the country.

The idea doesn't even electrify his voters: Only 47% want to see it on the ballot, according to the latest Associated Press poll.

The age problem

The main reluctance is age.

At 80, Biden is already the oldest president in history, and if he were re-elected, he would be 86 at the end of his second term.

Aging is not an exact science, but, as

in his editorial this Sunday, it is legitimate to worry about his powers to fill a position like that of president by then.

"[Biden] must speak about his health openly and without shame, and end his pretense that it is a matter that does not matter," says the editorial, which makes the president ugly for not tackling doubts "and conspiracy theories." about their status in the fastest way: “answering uncomfortable questions in front of the cameras”.

"Since 1923, only Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan have taken fewer questions from reporters, and neither represents a model of presidential opening to which Biden should aspire."

If age does not play in his favor, Biden at least has the consolation of having History on his team.

The occupant of the White House has traditionally had it easy to win a second term (although there are the exceptions of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr. or Trump himself).

Rarer still are, in a country where defeat is one of the greatest stigmas, cases in which the same candidates face each other on two occasions: the last time was in 1952 and 1956, and in both races Dwight Eisenhower led Adlai Stevenson by a wide margin.

The only thing that seems certain is that, whatever the result, it will not be so baggy this time.

The conservative newspaper

published a poll this week that gave Biden the winner in a hypothetical revalidation of the 2020 confrontation with a narrow 48% -45%.

Unavailable to the demoscopia, Trump, who this week will launch a new book with his correspondence, reacted on his Truth social network with one of his unmistakable messages, in which he stated: “In the polls, I am beating Biden by a large margin, except in the Globalist [sic]

one of the worst and most partisan media in the world.

(...) Don't buy their asshole... They are FAKE NEWS!!!”.

If the rhetoric sounds familiar, brace yourself: 2024 is shaping up to be a great harvest for

in American politics.

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