Apr 19
If Biden Runs Again, Trump Wins
Watching America kill itself over the past six years has been made all the more painful by the hard fact this self-immolation has been entirely predictable.
The USA remains locked in the vice-like grip of an ageing leadership caste that is now totally divorced from the lived reality most Americans are trapped in. America’s leaders refuse to accept the plain simple truth that they have utterly failed the American people and the world.
A pandemic that will never end because America gave up too soon. Wars breaking out all across the world that only escalate. Inflation at levels not seen for a generation.
It feels like the end of the world because it is — the end of a world, the postwar world, where now-ending dollar supremacy underwrote American economic power and the widespread belief that America was a less-bad hegemon than any other to emerge from Europe’s long attempt to conquer the planet let most of the world tolerate America’s power.
But instead of performing an honest public accounting of what’s happening and how America has to swiftly reboot itself to survive the decade intact, self-absorbed buffoons like Biden and Trump are busy driving it off a cliff.
I wouldn’t care, my family now being reasonably well insulated from the wreck, except that America’s collapse risks taking the whole world down with it. Just like Russia, America is run by oligarchs who can’t imagine a planet without them having the bulk of the power.
So pretty much as foretold in the Norse Eddas, the world we know will wither away and sink into the sea because the powers that be drive the system to ruin through their own lack of understanding. A cycle that has repeated many times throughout humanity’s sordid history, which is why it’s so incredible that every generation of so-called leaders winds up making the same basic errors.
Joe Biden is one of the least competent, prepared, and capable individuals to ever slither into the Oval Office, particularly at a time like this. His supporters are obsessed with ignoring the growing evidence of America’s ongoing collapse, leading the country to the exact same end result Trump will: division.
Who actually likes Joe Biden? According to polls, mostly older Black voters and white people with college degrees. Everyone else, particularly young people, can hardly stand the guy. In many ways the Democratic Party has been reduced to the party of college educated people who believe if you cite the proper sources you automatically win every debate.
Problem is, most people won’t think that way. Most voters can’t be persuaded, they vote based on their group affiliation and judge candidates based on whether they seem to belong. This is why negative partisanship is so powerful in a two-party system — if you hate both, you’re out of luck.
Yet Biden’s astonishing arrogance knows no bounds — despite being almost tied with Trump’s dismal polling averages at this stage of his presidency the old fool is still insisting he’ll run again in 2024.
Now, this is partly a bluff — American “leadership” is all about pretending to have power right up until events prove you don’t. He, like Trump, is careful to leave space to change his mind by claiming ill health.
But the trouble is that Biden’s bluff might turn into an actual attempt to run again if he isn’t smacked down hard and soon. If you look at how the man was made President, the patterns that drive he and his team are abundantly clear.
First off, let’s unravel the myth of Joe Biden a bit. The dude is a twice-failed candidate whose first bid went down because of plagiarism and the second because he was up against Obama. He was selected as Obama’s Veep because Biden was a white centrist who had been around forever and had no real base of support.
Despite the Veep job being a joke, it wound up giving Biden something critical: the support of elders in the Black community who appreciated that he was willing to play sidekick to Obama for eight years. This makes perfect sense — Black Americans have been kicked around and abused by the American system for hundreds of years, so having a member of the white establishment stand behind their guy had to be powerful.
And because Black Democrats have no other political home, they’re trapped. Despite Biden being a Clinton-era hack who embraced criminal justice “reforms” that doubled down on Black incarceration, drug wars, and helped make student loans impossible to discharge through bankruptcy, no other prominent Democrats can claim to have so closely backed the first Black Commander-in-Chief.
This was his one key advantage heading into the 2020 Primaries where Biden performed dismally up until the South Carolina Democratic Primary, which is dominated by Black voters — especially older folks who across all demographic groups vote at higher rates than the young.
And it was this advantage that Biden leveraged to steal the 2020 Democratic Primary.
Yes, Biden won the 2020 Election — but first, his team conducted a brutal end run around the usual primary process and wound up scoring the ultimate jackpot when Covid came to play.
It is totally fair to say that the reason Biden is President now, and not Kamala Harris, is the simple fact that powerful wealthy backers set out to install him at any cost after Trump’s election.
After the 2016 election ended in the disaster I myself was able to predict by picking up on clear polling error correlations in the rust belt, team Biden absorbed Hillary Clinton’s supporters who decided that it was her gender that allowed Trump to win. Within days of Trump winning they began sowing the seeds of a mythos that aimed to protect their elite centrist control over the Demcorats, pretending that a woman or a leftist could never possibly beat Trump.
More or less, the exact same people who ran Clinton’s campaign and lost miserably after making sure Sanders couldn’t win the 2016 primary turned around and tried to obscure their pathetic failure by blaming sexism. They began working then to insist only another centrist could beat Trump by winning back older white voters in the Rust Belt states that were formerly Clinton’s firewall.
This is one of the major strategies used by political agents in both mainstream parties — shaping the landscape. It’s a tactic cribbed from a military concept where a force tries to push its opponent into moving across unfavorable ground, ideally full of traps and other nasty surprises.
What most people don’t realize is that the primary enemy of the Biden-Clinton triangulating Democrats is not the Republican party, but the Progressive Left. Most seats in the House and Senate are now owned by one party or the other because the parties are now both bound to Red and Blue cultural values that have become mutually incompatible.
Lack of real competition is the death of democracy, and the primaries are nowadays where the real decisions are made. Which party wins the general election is mostly determined by how many of their supporters they can whip into a frenzy by either promising them stuff they want or making them afraid of the other side’s candidate.
And unlike general elections, primaries are the province of the parties who hold them. Party leaders can set whatever rules their internal processes allow, and rigging primaries is accomplished by manipulating these rules.
In 2016 Sanders made a surprisingly strong run against Clinton because all the anti-Clinton elements could coalesce around him. In 2020 the Democrats were terrified that Sanders might actually win the nomination thanks to his power base, so they did something clever: they altered the primary debates to make it easier to qualify, leading to twenty or so candidates.
What this accomplished was the dilution of any unity on the left, inducing Warren and Sanders supporters to fight each other, which they did thanks to their legions of undisciplined social media followers believing this was finally their time. Better yet the fact that Sanders was the leader of the progressive pack made it possible to scare every voter concerned with getting rid of Trump into backing a “more electable” candidate, which according to standard American political theory is supposed to be a centrist.
Trump’s ability to turn out almost as many new voters as Biden and the Democrats in 2020 proved electability arguments weak — clearly the Democrats didn’t understand a huge swath of the electorate’s thoughts on the matter. But American leadership is always predicated on not being proven wrong or held responsible for things going poorly, so difficult truths were swept under the rug after Biden’s win and Trump’s attempt to overturn it.
Both Trump outperforming his polls and Biden’s near debacle in the critical Rust Belt swing states — sadly the national popular vote is irrelevant, remember — were predictions I made before the election using the systems theory I worked out in grad school. There is far, far more continuity to American politics over the past decade than most of the routinely wrong pundits in major media seem to need to believe.
Powerful forces are at work starkly similar to the ones that led to the rise of a global fascist Right between 1920 and 1940:
- Failure of the wealthy elite to recognize the intrinsic danger posed by the gap between the haves and have-nots leads to people who fear for their future seeking an explanation for their angst.
- Entrepreneurs emerge, willing to prey on the bigotries we all hold no matter how carefully we work to keep them in check, profiting by ginning up fear of the other.
- Everyone decides their way is right and must be fought for to the last. Conflicts escalates until resources are depleted and the system resets.
America is walking a well-trod path to collapse and division. Joe Biden is actively working to make it worse, just as he has since he stole the Democratic Primary in 2020.
Back to that — so, the Democrats’ jungle primary plan worked like a charm. In 2019, well before most people even started paying close attention, polls were all over the place and the media was starting up its horse race narrative.
For the Democratic leadership this situation had another upside: public weariness with Trump brought a huge amount of attention to the early primary. Donations began to surge in, filling the party’s coffers and binding voters to candidates who after the primary all handed their donor lists to the party to help mobilize people come November.
The issue was that the Democrats needed to walk into 2020 looking unified — but the media needed drama, and despite the Democrats’ efforts there was no way all these candidates were going to make it through a series of high-stakes debates without coming into conflict. To deal with this party elders began pushing an interesting idea — that the debates were supposed to be civil and positive, the party showcasing its strengths without members attacking one another.
Team Biden was deep into these discussions from minute one — he was the party anointed going in, according to most pundits. With Biden’s gaffe-prone nature and age clearly impacting his ability to think on his feet the debates and in the primary too, where he would have to interact with lots of voters, keeping debates controlled and civil was essential. He was trying to pitch himself even then as the sane, stable, safe alternative to Trump — a centrist who would rock no boats and give America relief from four years of governing proclamations through Twitter.
Biden also had another deep problem: being around D.C. for almost forty years he had been involved in a lot of legislation including supporting Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Worse, he also had a reputation for shifting his positions to whatever was popular, so you can go back and find footage — as John Oliver’s show recently did — of Biden passionately articulating support for positions the Democratic Party claimed to oppose by 2020.
Basically, Joe Biden came into the election with so much baggage he was almost designed to be Trump bait. A significant chunk of the Democratic Party more or less latched onto a Disney-esque belief in the rightness of their cause and inevitable victory and ignored the simple fact that Biden wasn’t dramatically more popular than Hillary Clinton was in 2016 and essentially reified the Trump argument of the Democrats all being corrupt insiders.
Kamala Harris was the first candidate to be bold enough to openly confront Biden over his record. And true to the Democrats identity as a party that only cares about Black people when it needs their votes, she paid a heavy price.
Biden rules like a paternalist Catholic king who sees the country as his household. The worst thing you can do is upset his delicate elitist sensibilities by calling him out on his hypocrisy — you’re supposed to know what team you’re on and to be a loyal soldier who follows orders.
Kamala Harris broke the rules. She pointed out that Biden had worked actively with racists in the past when she was an aspiring young woman. Her strike, legitimate and bold, was an icepick to the back of the skull in the eyes of old school Democrats who demand young people and women do their jobs and wait their turn.
The dogs of war were unleashed on Harris, and the brief polling surge she experienced was followed by a hard shunning. Sanders supporters, proving that they are willing tools of the centrist Democrats they claim to loathe, went after Harris with the “Kamala is a Cop” meme ignoring the fact that she was their best bet for keeping Biden or another centrist from doing to Sanders what Clinton accomplished in the 2016 primary.
Why? Because no Democrat was going to win the primaries without locking up the Black vote. Black people are not a homogeneous demographic, but in American politics identity more and more forces a person to vote with their group, however coarsely defined. You can decry them as immoral racists all you like, but rural white people are doing this too, and mostly out of self-protection because rural America is dirt-poor whether Black or white.
The primary reason they are mobilizing as a group is that they’ve been convinced American politics is a zero-sum game where if the other side’s coalition advances your own must be losing. Seeing Black solidarity and knowing they can never be members, only potential allies, they are ignoring moral rallying cries and, as most people do, reverting to following the political creed of people who look and sound like them.
Biden’s people understood this — they rely on it to stay in power. The entire Democratic Party is now an engine for convincing American ethic minority groups their only hope is to vote Blue, but actually doing anything useful undermines their business model. When you have a dependent client base, you have no incentive to offer them anything, only rent-seek.
And that’s why they destroyed and subjugated Kamala Harris. As the primary went on, it became clear that no candidate could win unless they locked up the Black vote starting in South Carolina. Harris was following Obama’s path to the letter — her name was already being spoken of as a major candidate as soon as Trump won in 2016 and Cory Booker wasn’t catching on.
Biden had to stop Harris. And by the end of the year the unrelenting assault on Harris had bled her campaign of funding and elite support. She dropped out, later to be grudgingly offered the Veep slot herself to bolster Biden’s claim to be anti-racist.
Not that it helped him at first. Biden spent the rest of 2019 lagging so badly in polls he looked certain to be an also-ran if any candidate consolidated support and won the early primaries. He got a tremendous breather when the Iowa caucus app crashed, neutralizing his extreme loss there. New Hampshire as always going to go poorly, and though he recovered slightly in Nevada his people went into South Carolina in a make-or-break situation where they had to mobilize Black voters.
They did — and then Covid struck, rescuing Biden’s fortunes completely.
Heading into Super Tuesday in February of 2020 it was already clear to anyone following the news in Europe that the pandemic was going to suck. The Democrats were under serious pressure to stop Sanders, who was starting to amass delegates and could potentially force the party into a bitter contested convention.
And so all of a sudden a most consequential and likely forced chain of events unfolded: all the candidates not named Sanders ended their campaigns before the vast majority of Democratic Primary votes were cast. Sanders won California, the biggest prize, but that was downplayed. Fearful of nominating someone the media had decided could never win, the Democrats simply re-engineered their primary to narrow their voters’ choices.
That’s how the parties rig their primaries in America’s “democracy” — the strange thing was that the Republicans didn’t do this to Trump in 2016. The Democrats learned the lesson before the GOP did, and so America was saddled with a truly awful choice: Trump or Biden.
If not for the Covid pandemic and Trump’s idiotic, self-destructive response, Biden would have lost.
How do I know this? Because the outcome of the election — a dangerously close result — was dangerously close to what I had predicted while most other experts insisted wasn’t possible. I wish I hadn’t deleted my Twitter in disgust at the company’s actions after the election — banning Trump only after it was clear they needed to curry favor with the Democrats — because I laid out time and again in short form how their scientific assumptions about the electorate were dangerously wrong.
Biden won thanks to about 42,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin. That’s it. The margins in the critical swing states that tipped the electoral college were even tighter than in 2016. The most centrist, perhaps least disliked Democrat in America only barely won, and the closeness of the result gave Trump the opening he needed to push his electoral fraud.
Remember: this election saw the highest turnout in decades — 67%. Ten percent more Americans turned out than in 2016 yet despite everything that had happened since the result was almost identical, the lack of a major third party candidate likely the only reason Biden won at all.
Part of the reason turnout was so strong, especially in key swing states, was the expansion of vote by mail as a consequence of the pandemic. Suddenly millions of Americans got to vote the way I, being a rural person living in northern California and later Oregon, always have.
2020 was the first Presidential election since the 1980s where states like Georgia with a history of suppressing Black voters were no longer forced to run election practices changes past the federal government thanks to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by the Roberts Supreme Court. Had voting by mail not been an option, Republicans would have been able to have poll watchers that would likely have suppressed some portion of the Black vote.
Now I’m not saying the Democrats don’t engage in their own sorts of dirty tricks, only that those the Republicans were planning to do in a number of states until the pandemic struck have a history of working at the margins. And if you can keep just one out of a hundred Black voters in Atlanta from turning out, Biden’s narrow victory likely turns into a narrow loss.
Since Donald Trump has left office, likely in part due to being kicked off social media and therefore unable to trigger alerts on people’s phones so often, he appears to have become even more popular despite refusing to accept he lost. He remains the most beloved Republican politician, rivaling Reagan. It is almost impossible to believe he won’t win the GOP primary in 2024.
In a Biden-Trump rematch there is almost no way Biden can possibly win, not after he alienated centrists by pretending he was going to be the next FDR and now ticking off progressives by tacking center. The Democrats have adopted a Republican-like insistence on pretending they can ignore facts that don’t conform to their worldview that is making too many insist Biden’s polls still have time to recover.
They are probably wrong. Polls just aren’t shifting that much any more, as you can plainly see from the chart above. Biden is badly under-performing Obama, whose midterm losses were brutal in 2010. Once the GOP holds the House he’ll be hit with an endless series of investigations and prove incapable of governing unless his oh-so-predictable pivot center miraculously works.
This is most unlikely to because of how deeply entrenched partisan feelings are. It is also difficult to motivate people to change their minds in times like these when everything seems to be collapsing so trust is offered only carefully if at all.
Americans already say they don’t trust Biden and it’s clear why: he insisted Afghanistan would not fall to the Taliban, then it did. He said America was declaring independence from Covid when Delta was already surging in Europe. Inflation was supposed to be temporary, a function of re-opening the economy, yet it persisted even during the Omicron wave this winter.
People now rightfully anticipate prices to keep rising — and so they will, because expectations drive behavior, and aggregate behavior is the economy. The Federal Reserve is set to dramatically hike interest rates which might do the trick, but will also pinch consumers between high rates and high prices for a time which will hurt. Cutting Russia out of supply chains will only boost fundamental prices too because Russia exports food, fertilizer, nickel, and a bunch of other raw materials critical to the global economy.
As President, Joe Biden has been a magnificent and tragic failure. If America were a working democracy his unpopularity would negate any dreams of re-election and, quite frankly, lead to his being replaced with Kamala Harris immediately.
This is of course why he keeps her at arms length even now that after substantial outcry he appears to have stopped giving her doomed assignments. She has been allowed to travel to meet allies abroad, yet there are clear indications that the smear campaign against her has not relented. It appears Joe Biden’s wife loathed the idea of Harris taking the Veep slot, powerless as it is, out of anger at her debate performance.
It all makes perfect sense if Biden really does want to run in 2024, because once again Kamala Harris is the greatest danger to his hopes. I am seeing more and more indications that Pete Buttigieg is being cultivated as Biden’s natural successor, with a stream of favorable fluff pieces and even some minor guerilla advertising working to shape the future primary landscape in his favor.
But Mayor Pete is young enough that the old men in charge of everything can safely ignore him — the lobbyist and consulting class has plenty of time to shape him into a Macron-esque centrist who will promise to fix everything but fail, opening the door to the right. He serves an important role as a constant reminder to Harris that she does not have the favor of the “big guy,” as Biden’s son appears to call him.
Hunter Biden is another important reason why Biden is a ticking time bomb. As it turns out the American media did suppress a potentially damaging and fact-based story about the Biden family without cause during the 2020 Election.
One of the hidden roots of all the stop the steal nonsense has been the media’s clear effort to favor Biden throughout the 2020 election season. Once he was clearly going to be the nominee, the American media that had inadvertently made Trump by fixating on him in 2016 appears to have subconsciously decided to make up for it by giving Biden the cover from hard scrutiny he needed to get elected.
See, the deeper purpose of the party primaries, manipulated as they often are, is to reveal every candidate’s dirty laundry and bad habits far enough in advance a hidden scandal doesn’t burst out the month before the election. Biden escaped this scrutiny because he wasn’t a front-runner until he was. Then, after Trump had downplayed Covid, pushed to reopen the country too soon, and unleashed federal thugs on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in D.C. and Portland, the idea of his winning a second term was too much to bear.
Encouraged by Team Biden, the indications of corruption Hunter Biden’s laptop reveals were cast as some kind of misinformation or Russian plot. Only a year and a half later has a Washington Post report revealed that the story was legitimate all along — the Biden family is implicated in shady dealings with foreign actors.
Now, it doesn’t look like anything illegal happened, and Joe Biden is only referenced obliquely, not by name. But the outward appearance is that of a well-connected family member using his dad’s reputation to earn money — and potentially kicking back a portion of the proceeds to “the big guy.”
This, if true, is the classic kind of American corruption that rich and powerful people get away with because they literally write the laws to ensure it’s all allowed. Members of Congress can trade in stocks whose valuations they can impact and Nancy Pelosi has a net worth of over $100 million. The Pentagon and major defense contractors are defined by a revolving door that ensures the American military needs whatever Raytheon or Lockheed is selling at a markup.
Most Americans perceive the federal government as broken already— and they tend to punish incumbents when things aren’t going well. And America is not getting better in the next two years, there just isn’t time — the shocks of the pandemic and war in Ukraine will continue to reverberate and potentially magnify.
The biggest mistake you can make in a systems collapse is to act like it’s not happening. To mitigate the damage and clear the path for a working reboot you’ve got to reorganize and embrace new theories, not keep trying to make broken old ideas finally pan out.
Biden Democrats can’t accept that they are out of ideas. That being a bridge to the future sometimes means getting out of the way of the generation following behind you that has other ways of getting things done.
And so they’re setting up a Trump redux almost as if this was their plan all along. As if they’re telling the rest of us that it’s their way or the highway, that we must vote Democrat and accept years of inaction or get punished with Republican rule that sets us back another decade.
The truth about Joe Biden is that just like Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, and Dianne Feinstein the best possible thing any of them could do is retire and walk away before it’s too late. But a generation raised as narcissists during a unique period in American history that will never be repeated refuse to see that they’re destroying everything they ever cared about.
Their America has already died. A million Covid deaths —and more under Biden than Trump — proves it.
It’s almost over. And thank goodness. Such leaders should be remembered with nothing but scorn. I certainly won’t vote for Biden or another Democrat until the Boomer generation has left the scene — if ever. I’m done being lied to, of seeing hope turned into a tool to make a few rich people even richer.
I only wish the process of pushing through the wreckage and rebuilding wasn’t set to be so hard thanks to them.
Because on top of everything else the climate crisis scientists spent twenty years warning about is here.
And that’s something the youth of today will be forced to fix all on their own.
