An unpopularity contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump looms

Ask voters how they really feel and you find that the state of America’s union is unusually dismal. In September 2023, when the Pew Research Centre asked Americans to reflect on their country’s politics, 65% of respondents said that they were always or often exhausted; 55% said they were typically driven to anger; just 10% expressed frequent flashes of hope; only 4% found themselves regularly excited. When asked to describe politics in a single word, many plumped for divisive, corrupt, messy or bad. The coming year is likely to bring even greater malaise.

In the presidential campaign, all signs point towards a rematch of two old-timers: President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump. The main issue in the election will not be anything conventional, like the economy or foreign policy, but whether either man is fit to serve in the office. The year-long unpopularity contest will see Mr Biden argue that his predecessor is an existential threat to the republic. Mr Trump, unashamed by the attempted insurrection on January 6th 2021 or the many related criminal indictments he is fighting, will argue that the current president is too old and weak to deal with America’s problems. Both men will portray the other as a harbinger of the end of the country—and most members of their parties will subscribe to these competing eschatologies.

The current president will tout “Bidenomics” and argue that his massive spending on infrastructure has improved the lives of working people. Mr Trump will point to the discontent over inflation, which has eaten away at Americans’ real disposable incomes since Mr Biden took office, and the size of the national debt, which has also grown considerably. It is unlikely that Mr Trump’s policy proposals would improve the country’s fiscal position: he aims to leave entitlement programmes untouched while cutting taxes and triggering a trade war with the rest of the world through a 10% tariff on all imports. But both men correctly see the road to the White House as running through discontented working-class voters. Both of their economic pitches will aim to curry favour with this bloc, regardless of actual feasibility.

The strategy of Mr Trump, a man never confused with a policy wonk, will be to whip Republicans into a state of frenzy. His campaign rallies will echo the “American carnage” that he invoked in his first inaugural address: that Mr Biden is threatening to destroy America by failing to secure the southern border, failing to curtail crime or drug-overdose deaths, and giving in to the leftist flank of his party, which aims to turn America into a godless haven for abortionists, criminals, the diversity-equity-and-inclusion bureaucracy and trans people. Rather than accept his loss in 2020, Mr Trump managed to convince most of his supporters that the election had been stolen. When the alternative to the Oval Office is likely to be a prison cell, his rhetoric will be even more extreme and corrosive to democracy in 2024.

There are of course real differences in policy between the two men, but often in arenas that most American voters ignore. The two would lead foreign policy in wildly divergent directions. Though both are staunch protectionists, Mr Biden is not the isolationist that Mr Trump is. Now that it has been subsumed by the America First movement, the Republican Party seems ready to give up on funding Ukraine’s war effort against Russia. Though both parties try to outdo each other on hawkishness towards China, it is unclear whether Mr Trump would commit American troops to defending Taiwan. Allies in Europe worry about the permanent erosion of America’s central position in nato.

Fighting back against the onslaught of Mr Trump’s pugilism requires a kind of vigour that Mr Biden seems to lack, and will probably lack in greater quantity by the time of the election. The hope from Mr Biden’s supporters is that Mr Trump manages to defeat himself—through the constant reminder of January 6th that the criminal trials will bring, and the unpopularity of Republican positions on issues like abortion. American electoral margins tend to be slim, heightening the existential angst that members of both parties feel. The outcome cannot be predicted one year out. But an increase in the rates of exhaustion and anger looks very likely. ■

Idrees Kahloon, Washington bureau chief, The Economist, Washington, DC