With fewer than 160 days remaining until the American presidential election, it is clear the United States is on the edge of a precipice, being forced to choose between two unacceptable candidates.
The conviction of Donald Trump in a deeply flawed trial serves only to make the situation more acute. Should Joe Biden win the coming election, America may well fall into a deep crisis.
Two weak candidates rending the fabric of American society
The root of America’s immediate problems is that both main presidential candidates are completely unsuitable for the position of president. First of all, they are old men. Either or both could be suddenly rendered incapable of basic functioning, let alone of serving in the most important political position in the world.
It is worth remembering that of the 44 presidents who preceded Biden and Trump, four died of health problems in office, and all four of these were much younger at the time of death than the two men currently seeking another term.
The most famous death was that of Franklin Roosevelt, who was just over 63 years old and in the thirteenth year of his uniquely long presidency, when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. Roosevelt’s death came just before the end of the Second World War in Europe, and contributed to the awful way in which the Western Allies concluded the post-war negotiations with Joseph Stalin, meekly acquiescing to Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe.
A less-remembered presidential health failure may have even more urgent relevance today. Woodrow Wilson, president during the First World War, was not yet 63 years old when he was permanently incapacitated by a stroke on October 2, 1919. At that moment, the U.S. was deliberating whether to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, signed between defeated Germany and the victorious Allies, and join the League of Nations. Wilson was a proponent of both treaty and league, but he was no longer functional.
Incredibly, his wife Edith rather than the vice president informally took over the functions of the presidency until the end of his term. America did not ratify the treaty or join the league, and the slow road to a new world disaster began.
Now, at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, advances in healthcare have extended lives, but not without limit. In fact, the average life expectancy of an American born in the middle of the previous century is 66.5 years. Trump will be 78 this month, 15 years older than Wilson was at the time of his stroke. Biden is three and a half years older than Trump. Both men ought to possess the basic decency to leave politics and enjoy retirement, but neither does.
The possibility of either Biden or Trump suddenly becoming a vegetative president, unaware of his own surroundings and controlled by a coterie of advisors, cannot be ruled out, simply on account of their advanced age and the consequent significant risks to their health. These dangers will only be accentuated by the enormous strains of a four-year presidential term at a time of global crisis.
Neither Biden nor Trump have taken care to have a popular and effective successor available, should their health fail. Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, enjoys an average net approval rating of -11%, and is less well-known than that giant of American political life, Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
Who Trump’s running mate will be is still unknown, and most potential candidates are deeply unconvincing. It is not certain that if Biden or Trump were to die in office, their formal successor would possess leadership qualities that would be in any sense superior to that of a posse of anonymous advisors.
The two candidates are not only geriatric, they are deeply and perpetually unpopular. Even the reliably pro-Biden CNN is forced to state that the president’s approval ratings are at “historically low levels.” More specifically, Biden has not received even a 45% approval rating since a Fox News poll in mid-May—every poll since has been worse. The last survey to date in which Biden had positive net approval was in a YouGov poll of early May 2023, in which only 48% of voters liked his performance. It is extraordinary that the Democratic Party has not replaced such a weak candidate.
Trump’s poll results are barely better than Biden’s. The last four Harvard-Harris polls have recorded a small positive net approval rating for Trump, but for every such poll, several others show the man to have distinctly limited appeal. A case in point is ABC’s poll in early May, which recorded a -15% net approval rating for Trump.
Neither Biden nor Trump should be a viable candidate for county commissioner, let alone president of the United States. The fact that, unless health issues intervene, one of them is overwhelmingly likely to be elected, shows how far American national politics have declined.
The American people sense this. Two-thirds of them, a supermajority, believe the country is “on the wrong track.” The last poll which indicated that a bare majority of Americans were optimistic about the direction of the country was taken in October 2009, one and a half decades ago. That was the beginning of Barack Obama’s unsuccessful presidency, which sharply accentuated the divides in American politics and society.
It is all too obvious that Biden’s and Trump’s candidacies worsen the division that began in the Obama years, and share one essential feature – they reflect the personal interests of the candidate, not the interests of the people which any president is meant to lead. Two widely despised members of America’s aging upper crust are tearing the country apart in pursuit of their own priorities, with no care for the consequences.
A deeply flawed conviction brings the final crisis closer
The deeply flawed conviction of Donald Trump serves only to accelerate events. Stephen Collinson, in a largely favorable analysis of the outcome, did feel the need to note that the use of convicted tax fraudster and liar Michael Cohen as a central witness for the prosecution was a matter of significant controversy. This is an understatement.
The flaws of the trial are much more serious. Both the American federal government and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office previously decided not to pursue the case at all, and CNN acknowledges that it was “seen as a gamble” when the current district attorney announced charges.
Furthermore, falsifying business records, the crime for which Trump was convicted, is considered a misdemeanor, a minor crime, in New York. It only became a more serious crime, a felony, because prosecutors connected it to the more serious crime of violating campaign finance laws. That in itself is a dubious application of a law intended to cover rather different situations.
The core substance of the case against Trump is that he paid money to a pornographic actress who wanted to go to the newspapers with a story about their supposed relationship. However flawed Trump’s decision to do so may have been, it is Stormy Daniels who should be in more serious legal difficulty, not he. In substance, he was the victim of her extortion.
Yet, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass made the ridiculous and implausible claim that “Daniels’ first goal was to … protect herself and her family.” How that goal was served by obtaining cash payment from Trump, the only possible source of a hypothetical threat to Daniels in this instance, was left unexplained.
So ridiculous has the legal process in Trump’s case been that Mike Pence, a man who has broken with Trump and called his politics not less than a “road to ruin” for the Republican party, has publicly condemned the conviction as undermining “confidence in our system of justice.”
When a moderate and sober politician like Pence is forced by events to make such a statement, it is obvious that the trial’s outcome has only convinced the Democratic side of America’s political divide.
Trump’s conviction has led not to justice, but to the politicization of the very idea of justice in America. Even regardless of the outcome of the election, this cannot do anyone any good. That is the first problem. The second is that the trial has prepared the stage for bleeding post-election wounds.
If Trump loses, Republicans will claim that the case was grotesque election interference that helped Biden achieve an illegitimate victory. The fact that Trump’s sentencing has been scheduled for just four days before the Republican Convention will not make it any easier to deny such a claim.
If Biden loses, plenty of Democrats will declare the election of a convicted criminal, as they will insist on calling Trump, is illegitimate. Such attitudes might well lead to far worse consequences than the ugly Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, which led to a total of only nine deaths, four of these suicides. America has been happily spared serious and bloody political riots for most of its history, but this may not last.
A victory by a desperate Biden may be the worst outcome of all
Beyond the possibility of riots, an equally important question is what kind of presidency will emerge after the election. The elected president, if physically able, will serve four years – a far longer and more significant period than the five months remaining until the election.
Biden has already been a far from successful president. Average annual inflation during his term stands at 5.7%, the joint third-highest among presidents since 1952. It is forecast that America will have accumulated even more debt during Biden’s four years than during Trump’s – even though Trump was not known for fiscal restraint, and had to deal with the initial shock of the coronavirus.
Presidents do not single-handedly control either inflation or debt, but Biden’s profligacy is astonishing. His administration has pushed through about $1.1 trillion in spending on "green" priorities and infrastructure, in addition to $551 billion in tax credits. Taken together, these sums amount to more than 70% of Canada’s GDP. They are also three times larger than China’s giant economic stimulus plan announced during the 2008 financial crisis. This uncontrolled spending alone should disqualify Biden from the presidency.
If the problems of inflation and spending were not enough, Biden’s immigration policy has been even worse. 6.4 million people have been "encountered" crossing into America illegally during his term. Now, with the election imminent, Biden is planning to sign an executive order to attempt to automatically bar some migrants from entering. This serves to underline how unserious Biden has been about this problem in previous years.
Trump is neither a decent man nor a capable politician, but at least on the subjects of profligate spending and uncontrolled illegal immigration, he is capable of being a better president than Biden. American voters recognize this, as polling shows. A second Trump presidency might well have very little to commend it, but Biden’s is likely to be simply catastrophic. Avoiding catastrophe should start with not re-electing Biden.
- Dan Zamansky is a British-Israeli independent historian and author of The New World Crisis, a Substack analyzing the problems of today