Biden and Trump are right about each other — America should reject them both  

President Joe Biden delivered another speech last week condemning his expected 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump, as a threat to American democracy. 

The four criminal court cases comprising 91 charges brought against Trump by Democratic prosecutors at the state and federal levels were initially welcomed by Biden supporters as a death knell for the former president among independent and suburban voters. They applauded Trump’s rise among Republican and conservative voters, who were convinced that at least some of the charges were partisan and poorly grounded in law and fact. 

The double dynamic constituted a virtual guarantee that Trump would be the GOP nominee and the easiest for Biden to defeat, as he had done in 2020. It replays 2022, when Democrats successfully interfered in GOP primaries for the Senate and Congress by voting for the least qualified and most extreme Republicans they were confident they could defeat in the general elections.  

But, as this year’s polls began to show Trump’s strength not only among Republicans but in head-to-head matchups with Biden among non-aligned voters, his campaign is becoming increasingly concerned.  

One reaction was to blame Biden’s low approval ratings on the campaign’s public communications efforts — perhaps the American people hadn’t yet been sufficiently informed about what an excellent job their president was doing. The blame-the-messenger approach, however, had a fatal flaw: Biden himself was the messenger-in-chief, embracing and brandishing the term Bidenomics in the face of public dissatisfaction with the economy. 

Other advisers thought the strategy may have gone too far in relying on the court cases, media coverage, and Trump’s many outrageous comments to demonize him for alleged personal wrongdoing — and not far enough to highlight the larger issue of Trump’s danger to the nation. 

Biden’s speech last week was intended to address that existential issue. 

“Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time. It is what the 2024 election is all about … Donald Trump is willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power,” said the president.  

So far there has been no evident decline in Trump’s popularity. More mystifying to Biden advisers, there has been no rise in his own standing. Biden himself has shown frustration at his consistently low polling numbers. 

The Biden campaign’s tactical mistake in over-relying on criminal prosecutions and Trump’s obvious flaws to undo him is a function of a more fundamental misjudgment about Biden’s own standing with the American public. He and his people convinced themselves that Biden’s 2020 win was somehow a national vote of confidence in him, his ideas, and his persona, rather than primarily a negative reaction to the record and behavior of Trump.  

As the 2020 campaign unfolded, national polls, as well as three successive losses to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, showed Biden faltering badly despite his advantage of running as Barack Obama’s vice president. He had failed in his two previous presidential runs, the first of which ended in 1988 when he was caught embellishing his academic record and plagiarizing a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. 

Rep. Jim Clyburn and other moderate and centrist Democrats reasoned that the nomination of Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and progressive activist, would not be acceptable to the majority of American voters. 

Clyburn, a respected and influential national African-American leader, launched an emergency political rescue campaign for the next primary in his native South Carolina and urged the state’s large percentage of Black voters to rally behind Biden. They did, and turned the national momentum around for the rest of the campaign against Sanders, and then Trump.  

But 2020 was a special case, and Biden’s low approval ratings now simply reflect a continuation of the public’s view of him in 1988, 2008, and early 2020. Nothing he did in the past three years has altered the constant public perception of him as someone out of his depth for the presidency. 

In all his three presidential runs, Biden has touted his foreign policy experience as his strongest qualification for the presidency. It was apparently the main reason Obama chose him as his running mate in 2008. Yet, Robert Gates, who served as Defense secretary in both the Bush and Obama administrations, wrote in his memoir that Biden “has been wrong about nearly every major foreign policy issue over the last four decades.”

Sitting in Obama’s Cabinet, Gates presumably witnessed Biden’s role as foreign policy guru when he advised against the operation to eliminate Osama bin Laden; supported setting the “red lines” against Bashir al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, then ignored Assad’s defiant crossing of them; and enabled Russia to regain a strategic foothold in the Middle East with war crimes of its own in Syria. Biden also bears responsibility for his and Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran, which has strengthened its strategic position both in terms of military capabilities and intentions, freeing Tehran to enable its terrorist proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis — to wreak havoc against Israel and U.S. interests in the region. 

Biden himself has confirmed his own poor judgment on critical national security issues, saying in retrospect he wished he had voted for the first Gulf War and against the second instead of the reverse. His performance in office has largely continued his record of failed foreign policy decisions. His precipitous and tragically botched abandonment of Afghanistan severely damaged America’s credibility with both friends and adversaries. 

Despite his administration boasting that it knew for months in advance of Vladimir Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, Biden failed to use his vaunted personal relationship with Putin to deter the invasion. And, while successfully rallying NATO to support Ukraine — after initially expecting Kiev to fall quickly — the U.S. strategy has only contemplated staving off total Ukrainian collapse, not defeating and reversing the worst European aggression since World War II.  

Meanwhile, America’s enemies — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and their allies and proxies around the world — salivate at the prospect of perhaps the most bitter and divisive presidential election since just before America’s Civil War. Biden and Trump should demonstrate their patriotism by both stepping aside. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.