Donald Trump, for all of his flaws, would have a light shown upon his every transgression while Joe Biden would receive little if any public blowback for scandal, failure, or expansion of presidential power.
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There has been some back and forth here on The Liberty Hawk about the term “lesser of two evils” and its application and efficacy of choosing between them. I have contributed a few thoughts on the issue myself, but others have done far more admirable work. I have made it quite clear that I refuse to choose between two bad choices when there are alternatives available, even if they are not popular or well enough known to achieve the somewhat ironic status of “viable candidates” in the Presidential race.
As Geralt of Rivia and the young Matthew Broderick character David Lightman before him show, sometimes the only way to win the game is not to play. When faced with the choice between two evils, I choose not to choose. However, for the sake of argument, if I must choose between the two “evils” of Joseph Biden and Donald Trump, Joe Biden is not the lesser “evil.”
The choice we have before us in 2020 is between a septuagenarian multimillionaire credibly accused of sexual assault who has a questionable record of corruption and nepotism and a septuagenarian multimillionaire credibly accused of sexual assault who has a questionable record of corruption and nepotism.
I did not stutter. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are, essentially, for the purposes of the role of President of the United States in 2020, the same. They are both incoherent messes. If they have televised debates, the debates will be a wild ride of word salads. The debate may devolve into an actual fistfight between two old men with Secret Service details. They have both been credibly accused of sexual assault and have terrible records when it comes to appropriate behavior with women.
They are men of a certain era (Biden being part of the Silent Generation, Trump being a Baby Boomer, but born a few years apart), and there are certain things baked into that including, yes, misogyny and racism. Whether or not you believe any individual accusation, neither of the two men are paragons of virtue, despite their fawning followers’ assertion otherwise.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have children with less than stellar track records of separating the prestige and role of their father and their own jobs. Both come with decades of baggage – for Trump, it is mostly financial, but his first term has been scandalous without the conspiracy theories, and Biden has been in the Senate long enough to have worked with segregationists. The two men are utterly unfit for the Office of the President, and neither deserves our vote in November.
However, if I must choose, I would rather the man who has effectively deferred judicial and many cabinet appointments to Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society over a man who has appointed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Robert O’Rourke as advisors.
If I have to choose between two men who are approaching the life expectancy of American men, I would rather have Mike Pence one heartbeat away from the Oval Office than any of the names being floated as Joe Biden’s VP.
If I have to choose, I would rather the bumbling fool with a fragile ego and delusions of grandeur who the Press will paint as such and worse than a puppet of the Far Left who they paint as moderate. (If you don’t agree with the agenda of a Biden administration, prepared to be labeled a racist, misogynist, fascist, etc.)
Donald Trump’s many flaws, real and imagined, have been magnified and blasted across the country. No thoughtless off the cuff remark, no socially awkward exchange, no perceived or real scandal has been left unreported. Even when Donald Trump does something right, someone at CNN or MSNBC is here to tell you how he actually didn’t do anything right. The reporting coming from the White House Press Corps may be beyond parody at this point.
On the other hand, the media has tagged Joe Biden as the moderate choice despite not being moderate at all. Even if he himself is closer to the political center, he and his campaign have chosen to be decidedly progressive and leftist.
Barack Obama was not the most authoritarian or corrupt President in modern times, but he has been portrayed as far less controversial than he actually was. His administration spied on Congress, Journalists, and the American People. He is responsible for the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen on foreign soil. He accepted the Nobel Peace Prize with a speech justifying war.
Yet, despite all of this, many people will insist that the worst and only scandal of his administration was him wearing a tan suit. The closest you will get to criticism of his executive overreach is an SNL skit about DACA. The so-called firefighters let the fire rage because it was their guy pouring gasoline on the flames.
Does anyone really think Obama’s enablers would treat Joe Biden any differently? A President Joe Biden will have carte blanche and will likely never receive any public blowback for any attempts to expand his power or any scandal or failure. All the same people who labeled attempts to restrain Obama’s policies as obstructionist will be back with the same dismissals under a Biden regime. We already see this in the campaign where many of his gaffes and scandals are whitewashed or ignored entirely.
If the choice is between a President who may try to gaslight the public and be called out for it by the Press and a President who will enact progressive policies while the Press gaslights the American people into thinking otherwise, it isn’t really a choice.
Many Americans will look at these options and decide that the lesser of the two evils is the one that will sometimes give them policy and judicial wins. Americans who didn’t buy into the now-debunked Russian collusion narrative don’t see Donald Trump as an existential threat. Many see him as giving them policy wins after so many years of the Obama administration and his propaganda army in the Media working against them.
Of course, we do not have to choose between these two septuagenarian multimillionaires credibly accused of sexual assault who have questionable records of corruption and nepotism. There are other options available to us, even if Justin Amash has chosen not to run for President. Just like in Global Thermonuclear War, in elections where the only choices are deplorable, the only way to win the game is not to play.
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