Opinion | In Biden vs. Trump, it’s too bad both can’t lose - The Washington Post

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On Nov. 6, 1860 — Election Day — a Springfield, Ill., lawyer who had been a one-term congressman 11 years prior, and soon would be president, said elections are like “‘big boils’ — they caused a great deal of pain before they came to a head, but after the trouble was over the body was in better health than before.” This nugget is from Erik Larson’s just-published “The Demon of Unrest,” concerning the coming of the Civil War that preserved the body politic.

The one soothing certainty is that when the boil of this year’s election is lanced, politics will be cleaned of one deeply disapproved candidate. Another, however, will be elected. Many voters think of this year’s choice somewhat the way Henry Adams said many voters thought of the candidates in a previous rematch of presidents (Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland in 1892): “One of them had no friends; the other, only enemies.”

Biden’s most remarkable achievement as president has been to produce “Trump nostalgia.” Analyst Charlie Cook notes that when Donald Trump left Washington 14 days after the Jan. 6, 2021, debacle, 55 percent of people polled by CNN considered his presidency a failure. Trump is the only president in more than 70 years of modern Gallup polling to not reach 50 percent approval while in office; his presidency is now rated a success by 55 percent.

Since September 2021, shortly after the late-August Afghanistan pullout diminished Biden’s primary claim to stature (valuable experience, the presumed residue of even undistinguished longevity), Biden’s approval in Gallup polls has ranged from ominous (44 percent) to miserable (37 percent). Matthew Continetti of the American Enterprise Institute notes that Bill Clinton was the most recent president to leave office with a better-than 50 percent approval. Not since 2004 has a majority said the nation is on the right track. And the 2008 presidential election (John McCain vs. Barack Obama) was the most recent in which both candidates had positive favorable ratings.

Continetti reminds us of Biden’s bewildering challenge (to Time magazine in May): “Name me a president that’s gotten as much done as I’ve gotten done in my first three and a half years.” Gladly.

Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the country (the Louisiana Purchase). Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act that helped to populate the prairies and West, and the Morrill Act that produced the land-grant colleges, while improvising financing for the armies that prevailed at Antietam, Gettysburg and Vicksburg. More recently, there was Franklin D. Roosevelt (Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority and much more), Lyndon B. Johnson (the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), Ronald Reagan (tamed inflation, ignited growth, fueling the defense buildup that ended the Cold War).

FDR, LBJ and Reagan, unlike Biden, could claim mandates for their ambitious agendas (LBJ’s after 1964) because they won landslide elections. Biden’s legacy will not be defined by the worst inflation in 40 years. The bad news is that this and everything else will be eclipsed by the shocking selfishness of his quest for a second term during his obviously accelerating decline.

And his opponent? Since 2016, Trump has specialized in policy pronouncements that are just noise. Remember his vow that Mexico would pay for the border wall? And his promise to eliminate the national debt — not the annual budget deficit, which would have been improbable enough — in eight years? (In his four years, he increased the debt almost $8 trillion.) Reticence, which is not his default position, has been his understandable response to the Congressional Budget Office’s recent report that debt service this year will exceed defense spending and Medicare spending.

Americans have responded to this year’s political theater of the absurd — Samuel Beckett, look to your laurels — by believing absurd things. In May, a Harris Poll found that 55 percent say the economy is contracting. (Gross domestic product has been growing for four years.) That 49 percent believe the S&P 500 has declined this year. (It is up 14.2 percent since 2023, when it rose 24 percent, and last week reached a record high.) And that 49 percent think the unemployment rate is at a 50-year high. (It is under 4 percent, near a 50-year low.)

Is it any wonder that the public, which is told strange things by candidates, believes strange things? Biden’s longevity and Trump’s resilience suggest that perhaps soufflés, which are mostly air, actually can rise repeatedly. Which is strange.

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Opinion | In Biden vs. Trump, it’s too bad both can’t lose - The Washington Post
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