Washington: If you think you’ve seen this movie before, it’s because you have except the second time will be even more nerve-racking. Yes, world: get ready for Biden vs Trump 2. That’s a potential takeaway from the scandal embroiling Donald Trump over his alleged hoarding of secret government documents almost two years after losing reelection to Joe Biden.
If Trump was previously considered likely to announce a 2024 come-back bid, one school of thought is that the FBI search of his Florida estate, allowing Trump to depict himself as a martyr, makes that decision almost certain. “I believed he was gonna run before — I’m stronger in my belief now,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News.
If Trump does run, goes the theory, then Biden surely does, too. Despite being the oldest man ever in the job at 79, Biden sees it as his historic mission to rid the United States of Trump. And so, after surviving the tense, at times nightmarish 2020 election, Americans may do it all over again.
This time it would be in reverse the incumbent a by-then 81-year-old Biden and the challenger a 78- year-old Trump. Given Trump’s constant lies that he won the 2020 election and searing evidence of his role in stoking the violent January 6 assault on Congress, a rematch would be ugly.
“If you think Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns were nasty, you ain’t seen nothing,” said American University history professor Allan Lichtman, a leading authority on US presidential elections.
Good for both sides?
To practitioners of the dark political arts, the FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a- Lago resort is a game-changing moment that, ironically, could benefit either side. For Biden the logic is obvious. The biggest name in the Republican Party is on the ropes, facing not only the FBI probe but legal cases linked to allegations of everything from subverting the election to fraud and rape.
That’s embarrassing for Republicans and energizing for Biden’s Democrats, who increasingly dream of avoiding a predicted wipe-out, or even scoring their own surprise victory, in the November midterm elections to decide control of Congress.
“Trump is like a steroid boost for Democrats,” Jim Kessler, at the Democratic think tank Third Way, told The Hill.
As the Republican-supporting Wall Street Journal editorial board says: Republicans “should be making the midterms a referendum on Mr. Biden’s first two years. Democrats would prefer to talk until November really, until the end of time about Mr. Trump.” Yet Trump will also see benefits.
