Trump and Biden: Trading places, merging personalities?

I wasn’t the first to notice that Donald Trump and Joe Biden have traded political places. In fact, the trade is obvious.

Four years ago, Trump was an unpopular incumbent facing an opponent whose main selling point was “I’m not Trump.” With covid as an excuse, Biden kept a low profile by campaigning from his basement, thereby keeping the public’s focus almost exclusively on Trump and hiding his own fading mental competence.

This time around, Biden is the unpopular incumbent and Trump’s main selling point is that he’s not Biden. Trump will never keep a truly low profile and he certainly won’t hang out in his basement. He loves those MAGA rallies too much for that.

Nonetheless, Trump has managed to stay mostly out of the news, while he watches Biden stumble and the Democrats agonize. It’s telling that the main anti-Trump story of the past few weeks isn’t anything Trump has said. Rather, it’s Project 2025, a wish list for Trump’s second term put together by some of his most radical supporters. (Trump says he doesn’t know anything about it, but I don’t believe him.)

Some observers have also suddenly noticed a similarity between the personal traits of Biden and Trump. Consider this piece in the Washington Post called “Is Biden becoming Trumpified?” (That’s the paper edition title. It was sanitized in the online version. The Post wants to hedge its bets.)

The author observes that Biden’s son now enjoys the kind of outsized role that Trump’s kids have had; that Biden is now attacking the media and “the elite;” and that he’s phoning into his favorite cable news show (“Morning Joe”) the way Trump apparently calls “Hannity” and “Fox & Friends.”

In addition, Biden is now adopting Trump’s “I alone can fix it” posture. When pushed to explain why he won’t bow out of the race, Biden responds that he needs to complete the urgent work he started in his first term — as if no one else could do this. His press conference was one long effort to show that when it comes to foreign policy, he alone possesses a deep understanding of the world.

I view articles like this one by the Post less as insightful reporting than as part of the media drumbeat against Biden, now that he no longer looks like he will beat Trump. In reality, Biden’s personality has always resembled Trump’s, though I’ll stipulate that it’s not quite as bad.

Biden has always been a liar. He’s always been a nasty, blustering bully. He’s never had qualms about slandering innocent people when it served his purposes. And even more than Trump, Biden is a rank opportunist who has moved from one major policy position and ideological stance to another, depending on which one served his purpose at a given moment.

It’s true that Biden has never disputed the outcome of a presidential election he lost. But then, Biden has never lost a presidential election.

Unlike Trump, Biden has never been bragged about sexually assaulting women, at least as far as we know. Nor has he been found by a jury to have committed sexual assault. But whether Biden actually has committed sexual assault is a matter of dispute.

Biden has never been convicted of a felony. However, the reason he wasn’t charged with one is the prosecutor’s view that a jury would sympathize with Biden because he’s a forgetful old man. Moreover, Trump’s felony conviction was a travesty.

Biden’s awful personal traits were always there for all to see. Nonetheless, the Democrats made him their champion because he seemed like the most electable candidate in 2020.

Now that he seems like the least electable candidate, the Dems want to dump him. But Biden’s awful personal traits are standing in their way.