Trump v Biden 2 is on – can anything stop them?

There has been a great deal of speculation about other candidates replacing the two frontrunners in this year’s election. The past week has taught us that those thoughts are nothing more than fantasies, writes Andrew Feinberg

US President Joe Biden delivers his third State of the Union address as Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson look on (Getty Images)

For much of the last year, a not insignificant portion of the American commentariat has entertained a succession of fantasies concerning the identities of the candidates voters will choose between when they select the next US president this November.

On the left, there’s been a long-running, well-funded, and to a significant extent delusional faction of activists, both political and legal, who’ve been labouring under the impression that the courts would find Donald Trump ineligible to serve as president and bar him from appearing on a general election ballot.

This mistaken belief has been expressed in a campaign of lawsuits in largely Democratic-leaning states to disqualify Mr Trump based on his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his support for the rioters who stormed the US Capitol in service of that goal on 6 January 2021, the day Congress met to certify his loss to President Joe Biden.

At the same time, another set of Democratic polls, pundits and party boosters has been watching with anticipation as the various criminal cases against the ex-president made their way through the courts, believing that the charges against him in Washington, DC would result in a trial and a guilty verdict against Mr Trump well before he formally accepts his party’s nomination, leaving him disgraced and wounded by a felony conviction during the last crucial months of the presidential campaign.

These court-watchers have jeered and cheered as two federal judges, one appointed by Mr Trump and one named to the bench under then-president Barack Obama, have endeavoured to move his two federal criminal cases forward at markedly different speeds, hoping that the law would catch up with the ex-president before voters could possibly return him to the White House and confer on him the power to pardon himself.

On the right, conservative commentators have spent the last three and a half years calling the man who defeated Mr Trump, President Joe Biden, a senile, diminished figurehead who lacks the cognitive competency to hold — much less win again — the highest office in the United States government.

Mr Biden’s detractors have advanced their own byzantine theories of how a shadowy, nebulous cabal of insiders who secretly control the 46^th president would engineer his ouster at the last possible moment, only to replace him with a more telegenic and popular figure who would represent the “true” Democratic party.

At the outset of his presidency in 2021, these right-wing pundits frequently claimed that the real power behind the throne was Kamala Harris, the vice president.

But as Ms Harris’ popularity waned amid a seemingly endless string of awkward moments and gaffes, the focus shifted to another Californian, Golden State Governor Gavin Newsom.

For anti-Trump and anti-Biden dreamers, the November 2024 matchup they saw was one between Mr Newsom and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but when Mr Newsom denied any interest in challenging or replacing Mr Biden and Mr DeSantis’ shambolic primary campaign flamed out early, the Biden doubters revived another fantasy involving former first lady Michelle Obama, a woman who, although overwhelmingly popular in the Democratic Party, has vehemently rejected any and all calls for her to seek to return to the White House in the West Wing, rather than her former place in the East Wing.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court shot down any chance of removing the ex-president from the general election ballot in a unanimous ruling rejecting a Colorado Supreme Court decision which removed the ex-president on the grounds that he’d supported an insurrection against the United States.

The high court ruled that individual states can’t remove presidential candidates or candidates for any federal office under a clause of the 14^th Amendment meant to bar insurrectionists from office, putting an end to the liberal fantasy of the judiciary stepping in to prohibit Mr Trump from running again.

On Tuesday, Ms Obama’s office released a statement to NBC News reiterating her long-held position of not being a candidate for president in this election or any other election.

Crystal Carson, her communications director, told the network the former first lady “will not be running for president”.

The former first lady’s demurrer came on the same day that any dream of a Trump flameout finally died at the ballot box, with Super Tuesday primary results giving Mr Trump resounding victories over his remaining challenger, ex-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, in all but one of the 15 states that held primaries that day.

Mr Biden also carried all but one of the contests in overwhelming fashion, finally putting to rest any doubts over his ability to command support from his own party.

And when he took to the House chamber on Thursday evening, he silenced months of whispered criticism and worry among Democrats who have started to internalise the Republican framing of Mr Biden as a diminished figure who is slouching towards senility.

His State of the Union performance has energised Democrats and shown him capable of taking the fight to Mr Trump, who he invoked12 separate times in his speech without deigning to say his predecessor’s name.

Over and over, the 81-year-old Mr Biden successfully sparred with Republican hecklers, turning attempts to embarrass him into viral moments and showing he is capable of thinking on his feat while demonstrating the energy he needs to win over voters.

White House and Biden campaign officials say this new, more aggressive version of the president can be expected to make regular appearances on the campaign trail and in other public settings, creating quite the conundrum for a Trump campaign that has been banking on polling which shows voters coding the 78-year-old and visibly overweight Mr Trump as more vital and fit than his successor.

The strategy versus reality divide was on display on Friday morning, when cable news pundits were lauding Mr Biden’s energy in between a Trump-backed political committee advertisement showing Mr Biden stumbling up the stairs to Air Force One next to a cackling Ms Harris.

Republicans are already gearing up to make the president’s mental condition an issue, with Trump appointee turned special prosecutor Robert Hur set to appear on Capitol Hill next week. And some GOP pundits were claiming Mr Biden’s energetic performance was the result of drug use, despite no evidence to back up any such claims.

As Mr Biden left the House chamber to thunderous applause, one Democratic member — New York Representative Jerry Nadler — said the strategy of making the president’s cognition an issue may no longer work for the ex-president.

“No one will be talking about cognitive impairment now,” he said.

But if Thursday night is any guide, Republicans will keep trying.