Get ready for Captain Chaos versus Uncle Joe. It's about to get worse than you ever could have imagined

It's become clear, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, that a statesman can't beat Trump. So Biden needs to make some serious choices

(EPA)

Get ready for the campaign from hell.

In one corner, a shameless incumbent president who is willing to do anything – even allow perhaps millions of his countrymen to get very sick – to salvage the economy and therefore keep the power he has amassed over the last three years.

In the other, a former vice president who has failed to generate any excitement among key voter blocs at all while providing a laundry list of verbal gaffes and stumbles. He does, however, have the moxy to match the tough-talking president from behind his signature aviator sunglasses.

Can two septuagenarians swashbuckle their way through what always was going to be one of the nastiest general election street-fights in American history – and that was before it became soaked in Covid-19 microbes that will turn the race into a national referendum on the incumbent’s crisis-management prowess?

You bet they can when their names are Donald John Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

Buckle up, folks. We’re about to be treated to – victims of? – Captain Chaos versus Uncle Joe. The luxury jet-flying New York CEO-turned-president against the Trans Am-driving everyman from the hardscrabble streets of Scranton, PA.

Brace yourself for months – and months – of two 70-somethings lecturing us all about economic theory, foreign policy doctrines, and how to fix the country’s corona-hobbled healthcare system. Wait, who am kidding?

Brace yourselves for two very old men calling each other names until Election Day – and likely for some time after.

Assuming the Covid-19 lockdown ends by the first Tuesday in November, when Americans, as of now, will cast their ballots, we may all demand to self-quarantine again after these two are finished tearing each other to shreds.

Trump will repeatedly hammer “Sleepy Joe,” likely transitioning to something resembling “Sleepy Socialist Joe” as he tries to link the former vice president – a true establishment Democrat – to the party’s liberal wing.

And Biden will spend months describing the 45th president as a tyrant and authoritarian, saying he has shredded the Constitution and soiled the Office of the President to better himself and his family.

Policy debates? Nope.

Detailed plans debated for hours during televised debates? A thing of the past.

With Biden now the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, what’s coming could redefine the term “politics of personal destruction.”

The current political environment in the United States will turn both men into weapons of personal destruction.

It’s a role we know Trump plays each day. After dropping his political street-fighter act for a few days last week amid the coronavirus outbreak, the president was back at it by week’s end.

He even managed to drop in a “Sleepy Joe Biden” dig on Tuesday during a coronavirus town hall broadcast on his favorite cable network, Fox News.

When it comes to the down-in-the-mud campaign Trump wants to pull Biden into, we know the former reality television host is, as he would put it, “straight out of central casting.”

What about Biden?

The jury is still out. He sometimes has trouble speaking coherently, and forgets what city he’s in for campaign events.

We know that Trump already is mocking the former VP over all that.

Soon, however, the president will circle back to Biden’s son Hunter, who has had some struggles in his life. (Who hasn’t? But that’s irrelevant for the transactional and shrewd Trump.) There is no shortage of fodder there for a shameless politician like the president to use against the younger Biden’s father.

Biden, who brags about his personal relationships with foreign leaders, often during the Democratic primary campaign appeared eager to play the role of statesman, as he dutifully did when then-President Barack Obama deployed him around the globe for high-level diplomacy.

Will Biden’s popularity with African American voters be the difference, allowing him to piece just enough of the so-called “Obama coalition” back together in just enough swing states to deny Trump a second term?

It’s certainly possible.

But the question this correspondent keeps coming back to is this: Can a statesman defeat Donald Trump? My gut says no.

So which Joe does the former VP want to be? The aviator-wearing, sleeve-rolled, plain-speaking son of Scranton? Or the diplomatic, suit-jacket-neatly-buttoned former vice president of the United States?

Only one man can answer that question. Who will it be, Joe?