It has been clear for months that Donald Trump did not want to run against Joe Biden in 2020 or any another year. It is perfectly understandable. Biden, at least on paper, is the strongest candidate that the Democrats have – he is a moderate, with broad appeal and a safe choice for independent voters looking for calm after the storm of the Trump years in office. Perhaps, Biden’s greatest strength is that he can help the Democrats with that one demographic that was key to Trump’s election: white working class men. There is no reason to believe that Trump would lose said demographic to Biden. However, in politics often it is not necessary to win a particular demographic – getting a larger share is enough to win the election.
Therefore, the imperative for the Trump campaign was to remove Biden early on and hope that the Democrats nominate someone beatable. Much easier to tag Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders as socialists than the former vice president. However, as history has shown, facing the dream candidate does not automatically translate into a easy victory. Reportedly, the Jimmy Carter campaign was hoping to run against Ronald Reagan in 1980 who was viewed as too extreme for American voters – Ronald Reagan won in a landslide. Apparently, the Hillary Clinton campaign made a similar calculation as far as Donald Trump being easier to defeat than the rest of the GOP field – the glass ceiling is still intact.
Initially, the Trump campaign tried to ignore Biden (at least publicly while trying to dig up dirt on him in Ukraine) and tried to make so called “Squad”- i.e. Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley – the face of the Democrat Party. The president, his campaign and Twitter minions flooded social media with a series of attacks on The Squad. Omar and Tlaib were singled out for a series of op-ed pieces accusing them of antisemitism – a very transparent and desperate play to win Jewish voters.
At some point the Trump campaign must have realized that the effort to make The Squad the face of the Democrats simply was not getting any traction beyond Fox News Trump base. Most voters who are not blinded by partisanship understand that Omar, Tlaib, AOC and Pressley are freshman lawmakers. They don’t wield any power. They do get a lot of media attention but they are not running for president. As Nancy Pelosi famously said, “They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”
As the Trump campaign was giving up on The Squad as a viable campaign strategy, the Democrats inadvertently offered the president a helping hand. Late in 2019, the House Democrats decided to pursue the impeachment of Trump over denying for a couple of weeks military aid to Ukraine to pressure them into announcing an investigation into the Bidens.
Instead of hurting Trump, the Democrats almost delivered a fatal blow to their front runner. While Trump’s ambiguous words left room for his supporters to see pure innocence and his detractors pure evil, the Hunter Biden’s cushy job at Burisma was clear cut and easy to understand. Everyone knows that if you are an average American and your child is discharged from the Navy for failing a drug test, chances are he’s not going to land a $50,000 a month job serving on a board. But if you happen to be the son of the Vice President of the United States, those sort of opportunities are easy to come by.
In the end, Biden was able to overcome his Ukraine problem simply because all the other candidates running for the Democratic nomination gave Uncle Joe a pass. Even Bernie Sander who supposedly was running to end corruption in Washington couldn’t bring himself to take a shot at corruption standing next to him at the debates. Perhaps, all the other candidates thought that their ideas and resumes were going to be enough to defeat Biden – or maybe they were relying on Trump to do the dirty deed. Alas they were all mistaken. Today, Bernie announced that he was suspending all his ads on Facebook after suffering another string of defeats.
After Iowa and New Hampshire, it appeared that Trump had achieved his objective as pundits from across the political spectrum declared Biden finished. In the end, after taking a look at the other options, the Democrats decided to stick with Joe. It will be Trump vs. Biden after all – barring some unexpected calamity. Lucky for Joe, he stopped sniffing ladies’ hair just in time to avoid the Coronavirus.
