A Biden Vs. Trump Rematch Is What Voters Want | Opinion
BROOKE ROLLINS , FOUNDER, AMERICA FIRST POLICY INSTITUTE
ON 8/16/23 AT 6:00 AM EDT
The advent of a new presidential campaign season brings with it the usual political- and media-class sentiment: no one wants to go back (to whatever one thinks there is to go back to), everyone wants to move forward. The conceit of progress that has gripped the American psyche for well over a century always demands the next click in the ratchet. It is the sort of perennial existential discontent, questing for the next thing, that is superb for, say, settling a frontier. It is much less salutary when the "next thing" is a new frontier in state power or societal overthrow.
That desire for novelty has meant the probable (though by no means certain) general-election rematch of
Donald Trump and
Joe Biden is typically regarded with dread by those whose principal occupation is to talk, not to do.
This is the wrong way to think about it. Change, for its own sake, is not an intrinsic good—ask any resident of a "progressive"-run city, most of which seem to be regressing into primal states. But more important is that, if Americans choose a Trump-Biden rematch next year, it is because it is what Americans want, and because the ideas each man represents are still hotly contested. If they are the nominees, it will be because each of the two men remain the leading choice as the most apt representative of their respective basket of ideas. In this light, 2024-as-rematch is not some failure of civics, a tired re-run set up by an electorate unable to move on. It is instead a sorely needed litigation of a contest still in motion, with a nation at stake.
I won't presume to speak at length to the qualities of Joe Biden in this regard. That's properly left to the progressives and leftists who elevated him once, and will probably elevate him again. From the outside, he seems entirely appropriate as his movement's standard-bearer: a man whose governance has been wholly surrendered to the imperatives of its most radical elements.
The managed image of Biden as an experienced DC moderate, a man of managerial competency and temperamental steadiness, is belied by events. The narrative of moderation is countermanded by a record of extremist gestures and genuinely radical policy, from a politicized Armed Forces leadership that focuses on "white rage" as much as Communist China, to White House celebrations of sexual-preference niches. The tale of competency has to account for the wreckage of defeat in Afghanistan, inflation, and a pervasive discontent of nearly the whole American citizenry with the country's direction. Say what you will about all this, but one thing that must be admitted is that it represents a particular set of ideas. Joe Biden has brought them to the forefront of governance, and so its proponents will return the favor, personally, for him.
As a veteran of the Trump White House and a movement conservative, I can speak to the qualities of Donald Trump in this vein. He too is the standard bearer of a particular set of ideas. Those ideas are best expressed by him, so I will speak to their effects, which were in evidence from early 2017 until the descent of the COVID pandemic in early 2020. What exactly did those three years of the Trump presidency bring to America? One of the greatest economic expansions in modern American history, peace, the return of industry, the repatriation of capital, middle-class growth, market gains, historic improvements in wealth and income for minority Americans, and on and on and on.
The commentariat likes to focus upon the former president's rough edges—as a Texan, I tend to see them as signals of refinement—but they miss the fact that most Americans simply don't care about those any more than they care about Joe Biden's putative personal decency. (We have to say "putative" for a man who refused to acknowledge his youngest granddaughter until the
New York Times shamed him into it.) They care about their own lives, their own families, and their own communities.
They note the difference. And in 2024, it looks like they want a do-over.
None of this is unprecedented in American history. Former presidents have run for non-consecutive reelection before. The election of 1892 was actually won by a former president when the electorate decided that his immediate successor had failed to deliver—and that his original policies were right all along. Don't count out Donald Trump's chances of joining Grover Cleveland in that current club of one. If and when the American people make 2024 a rematch of 2020, just remember that everyone telling you it's a failure of imagination and civics is wrong.
Americans aren't heading toward Trump versus Biden next year because they can't do better.
They're doing it because, for them, there is a real choice between the two—the most important choice of all.
Brooke Leslie Rollins is the Founder of the America First Policy Institute and America First Works, and former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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