What Happens When the Real Campaign Begins?

Today, as I was scanning the headlines on Google News, I counted four stories about how Trump represents an ‘authoritarian’ threat to American democracy, because of his continued hold over MAGA going into the 2024 campaign.

I also read two stories on why Biden’s ‘cognitive decline’ renders him to be an invalid Presidential candidate for the blue team.

Of course, the stories about Trump’s authoritarianism all came from the Left, just as the stories about Joe’s obvious dementia came from the Right.

So, if those two guys end up being nominated by their respective parties to square off for a second time next year, you can probably expect that the two profiles — Trump the soft Fascist, Biden the shrunken brain — will be the basic competing narratives for the campaign.

If I turn out to be correct, I find this to be a rather interesting state of affairs because I don’t remember another Presidential campaign in which the competing candidates representing the two major parties defined themselves not in terms of what they have done and what they will do but create an entire campaign narrative based on running against the other guy.

I’m not saying that political candidates never say a negative thing about the person they run against. And there’s always some degree of balance…