The U.S. President Joe Biden, 80, has announced his candidacy for a second term. If it is physically possible for him to participate in the elections, he will certainly meet with Donald Trump in the final of the election race.
The prospect of choosing between these two causes mostly exhaustion (38%), fear (29%) and sadness (23%) in the Americans surveyed, but there are worse prospects for them.
“We will end with a third world war.” This is the forecast of former US President Donald Trump in case the current US President Joe Biden is re-elected for a second term. On Tuesday, the owner of the White House officially announced his intention to do so.
Unofficially (planned, they say) Biden talked about this for a long time, but his entry into the race came as a surprise to many. It seemed that if he did this, it would be later, because now there is nothing to brag about, and approval ratings are floating in the region of an individual minimum – below 40%. But the president decided that it was no longer possible to wait.
As befits surprises, the current one is accompanied by turmoil and confusion, which, in the worst case for Biden, will develop into confusion and vacillation. The prospects for his victory are somewhat doubtful: according to polls, more than a third of his voters in 2020 are not ready to repeat their choice in 2024.
At the same time, it is worth recognizing that Biden and his entourage have already won the first important victory. The point was that Biden would be dissuaded from participating in the race in favor of, to put it mildly, a younger and fresher candidate: there are more of those in the party elite who are interested in maintaining control over the White House than keeping a particular Biden as president.
By forcing events and moving forward in an emergency order, Biden saved himself from many unpleasant conversations and nullified the shares of those party members who were against his nomination, but wanted to agree “on the shore” – with the choice of a successor and without splitting the party. Now a split is unavoidable. Contrary to the tradition of a “second term”, the incumbent president is likely to have many competitors in the primaries, which may even be good for him – competitors can trample each other.
The “window of opportunity” into which the team of the sometimes inhibited leader quickly jumped opened up for her and him because of the criminal trial of Donald Trump. Not because he hit the reputation of the main rival or somehow weakened him, but exactly the opposite. Trump’s approval rating has grown, he now easily bypasses all potential competitors in the Republican primaries in the polls, donations flowed to him like a river.
For a confident run for a second term, Biden needs Trump as a rival – and no one but Trump. Because, firstly, only Trump, with his load of mistakes and shortcomings, can he defeat, and secondly, in the political culture of the United States it is considered a powerful argument against the skeptics among the allies of the chased “defeated him once, I will do it again.”
Trump, despite his almost equally respectable age and general odiousness, also has a chance for a second term, but not a preferred one. He will certainly become the main candidate from the Republicans, but the future of the campaign is largely dependent on the saturation of the process over him.
If a candidate is dragged through interrogations and meetings, he will not have time for shows at stadiums and speeches at rallies, for which he is a great master. If one process is not enough, it does not matter – a second one is being prepared. They want to accuse Trump of sexual violence against a journalist, which allegedly happened 30 years ago. Such accusations have a statute of limitations, but the prosecutor’s office in tightly democratic New York announced something like a year-long action – “expirations no longer apply” if the charges can be proved in court.
In any case, the legal expenses of the accuser were covered by the sponsors of the Democratic Party: if she loses, she will not lose anything (usually the unfortunate applicant must pay the losses of the stray defendant).
Violence is much more serious than a bribe to a porn actress (that is, the subject of an ongoing trial against Trump). But all the same, it’s a so-so blow to the candidate’s reputation due to the fact that there is nowhere to put a stigma on this reputation: Trump will not be able to become more scandalous than he is. So the new process is not an attack on his “good name”, but on his nerves, time and freedom of maneuver, which in total can leave Biden in the White House.
And then – the third world war. According to Trump.
You may not believe. Trump’s love for loud (sometimes obviously impossible) promises and apocalyptic forecasts is one of a hundred reasons why he is not loved at home. But the frankly dirty game that was and is being played against him justifies him in a sense.
He fights against the “beginning of the third world”, as his rivals (the same Biden, and before him Clinton) fought him as a “fascist threat”, a “dangerous fanatic” and a “round idiot”. He is neither the one, nor the other, nor the third, for all his shortcomings. You look, with the same logic and with the third world war it will somehow carry over.
Or maybe it won’t. Biden is on the path of confrontation with two nuclear powers – Russia and China. The main confrontation with China, but it is not hot yet, theoretically it is still possible to turn off this path. But in the case of Russia, Biden will definitely not turn anywhere – due to inertia and the fact that the withdrawal of the United States from the Ukrainian conflict will be its admission of incompetence and that tens of thousands of Ukrainians died in vain, and tens of billions of dollars were wasted.
And it would be okay if this turned into the collapse of his career – in the ninth decade and in the second presidential term, this is an insignificant loss. But this will also be the collapse of his entire political life for half a century. It just so happened that Biden’s fight with us is one of the main and last, and therefore became a matter of principle.
Trump is not burdened with personal grievances against Moscow, the corrupt interests of children in Kyiv and other troubles of his predecessor, but there is a suspicion that he was given a chance once, and the resistance of the system will be stronger. Even though he once managed to defeat her, what followed showed that Trump lacked either the strength, or authority, or talents to change the US foreign policy, but there was nowhere to take all this from.
The ideal option for Russia is for events to develop in the direction that Biden becomes less capable, that the fight against Trump becomes more provocative, that ultimatums are put before the Americans in the spirit of “life or death” (that is, “us or them”), that entropy multiplies , and the conservative half of America hated and despised the liberal half, and vice versa.
Then there will be no third world war, but there will be, if they don’t come to their senses, a second civil war in the United States. If you choose from these two options (and the Democrats offer to choose – either we, or Trump and a new civilian one), the second one is much cheaper and preferable for the world. The hero of Nikita Mikhalkov in the film “State Counselor” signed his letters to the SDD revolutionaries – “eat each other.” Considering the current relations between Russia and the United States, it is better not to come up with an appeal to whomever you address it – at least to the Biden reaction, even to the Trump resistance.
Dmitry Bavyrin, VIEW
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