A Domestic Report in the Lead-up to 2024
With the 2024 election creeping nearer, many Americans, myself included, think mostly of the future of the United States. However, the future can be learned only through observation of the past, and this is especially true when the past is on track to repeat itself. Reactionary politics and party infighting have led Donald Trump into a likely third candidacy, making 2024 a rehash of Trump vs. Biden in 2020.
Ironically, these are two of the least popular men to have assumed the presidency in the last century. Trump averaged 41% approval during his tenure, and Biden can barely crack 40%. In terms of presidential politics, these numbers are abysmal; even Nixon had an average rating of 49%, and somehow Jimmy Carter managed a mean score of 46%. The sheer and widespread dissatisfaction with our two top politicians has Americans looking around, thinking, “What the hell is going on?”
For most, there isn’t a good answer. Some say a change occurred in 2015, when Trump famously descended the golden escalator to announce his run for the Oval Office. Others blame the Obama Administration for turning identity politics into a campaign strategy to defeat Mitt Romney in 2012. Others still point to George W. Bush and his handling of the 2008 financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11 as reasons for the general public distaste of the Chief Executive.
In my view, it’s probably always been this way. The Founding Fathers, great men indeed, were hootin’ and hollerin’ rabble to the posh and domineering British Empire. After the Revolutionary War, the nation’s leaders quarreled viciously over the strength of their new government, laying the groundwork for our two-party political system. Not even a century later, a civil war broke out upon the election of Abraham Lincoln, now universally ranked as the best president in our history. Foundationally, America has been shaped by conflict.
In a similar vein, Americans want charismatic leaders to guide and direct our ingrained amped-upedness. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation in “fireside chats” on the radio, speaking soothingly to the millions of Americans suffering economic hardship. FDR was subsequently elected to four terms in the White House; the most of any president. Later, movie star Ronald Reagan has become the standard to which Republican leaders are held after serving two terms as president in the 1980’s. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that, today, our most likely candidates are a bombastic and criminally liable reality star and a geriatric lifelong grifter whose malfeasance and corruption becomes increasingly clear. Americans, as always, love a spectacle.
America is also no stranger to tumultuous elections. The aforementioned election of 1860 resulted in 620,000 lives lost on U.S. soil. In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, front runner in the democratic primaries, was shot and killed in Los Angeles. Much more recently, the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as the 2020 election was being certified, hasn’t left national headlines since it occurred.
The truth is though, despite the headlines and popular belief, the systems of the United States have proven themselves robust and resilient time and time again. For nearly 250 years, the due processes of our great nation have been continuously upheld in an unbroken chain of succession.
Why, then, do so many feel as if we are nearing the end of the Republic? Democrats and Republicans alike claim that the next election will be our last should the opposition emerge victorious. Someone must be wrong, and almost certainly, they both are.
Still, the broadscale public pessimism is worth consideration. The pandemic certainly exacerbated already existing concerns in American society. Scientific authorities shredded the institutional trust bestowed upon them by the public at the height of Covid, insisting upon their preventative measures long after such protocols were proven ineffective. The problem then was not the fact that they were wrong, but rather their insistence in the beginning that they never would be. The problem grew as they tried to squash other educated opinions, who had an equal right to be wrong as the establishment but were silenced nonetheless. It grew even bigger when they began to figure out that they were wrong, but they moved forward with a prescribed agenda anyway.
This type of irresponsible behavior by the federal government during the pandemic is well-documented. Peter Ben Embarek, head of the COVID-19 origins investigative team commissioned by the World Health Organization, has stated that it is likely the virus was released via a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where U.S. funded research was conducted to create viruses of similar genetic makeup to COVID-19. Despite this, the U.S. government said, in a statement on April 30, 2020, that it “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also released an article in March, 2020, dismissing the notion of a COVID-19 lab leak. An investigation conducted by the U.S. House of Representatives concluded in July, 2023, that “there was a coordinated effort between public health officials in the United States government and expert scientists to craft a narrative that would advance the zoonotic origin of COVID-19 in order to protect the Chinese government from any potential criticism and repercussions.”
The U.S. government’s refusal to give credence to a lab leak scenario and the mobilization of the bureaucracy to manipulate public discussion regarding the matter is only one of many examples in which the federal government exercised an overreach of power during the pandemic. The scientific community, including Dr. Fauci, insisted upon the efficacy of the vaccines in curbing transmission of the virus without evidence to support such a claim. The vaccines were later proven to be relatively ineffective in preventing one from contracting COVID-19. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration enacted a vaccine mandate in November, 2021, for businesses with over 100 employees; however, the conservative-majority Supreme Court struck down the ruling in January, 2022. Other infringements upon the rights of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic include the closure of religious institutions and places of worship, mask mandates in public spaces, and the lockdown of schools long after children were deemed to have an extremely low risk of severe illness or death as a result of COVID-19.
Concern regarding bias in the scientific and academic communities also precedes the beginning of the pandemic. University elites have been under scrutiny for perceived partiality often over the course of the last decade. In June, 2023, a Gallup poll showed only 36% of Americans report a significant level of trust in higher education, down from 48% in 2018 and 57% in 2015.
This widespread mistrust is well-founded. Harvard University reported in 2023 that only 1% of faculty respondents indicated their political affiliation as conservative, while 82% identified themselves as liberal. Similar striking contrasts in staff ideology are visible across both the public and private university system in the U.S. Liberal professors are also far more likely to express political bias in the classroom than their conservative colleagues. 49% of American college students report frequent referral to political doctrine by their progressive educators, as opposed to 9% who indicate the same by conservatives. Ideological indoctrination, outrageous tuition costs, and a less-restrictive labor market each contribute to both the persistent decrease of undergraduate enrollment since about 2010 and the tremendous public distrust of higher education more broadly.
While the pandemic brought concern about bias among scientific elites into the limelight, academics are not the only ones accused of blatant partisanship. Entertainment media is similarly inundated with ideologically motivated content. Hollywood has long been accused of a bias towards the left; well-known television executive Leonard Goldberg is quoted saying liberalism in Hollywood is “100 percent dominant, and anyone who denies it is kidding, or not telling the truth”; but only recently have companies seen financial loss as a result. Disney+ reported its first ever decrease in subscribers in December, 2022, and the company’s parks currently have the lowest attendance in a decade. Pixar saw a series of box office failures in “Turning Red” and “Lightyear” in 2022, and “Elemental” in 2023, all of which contain overtly progressive messaging. Late night comedy shows such as “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” have seen viewership plummet as their programming becomes more politically driven and left-leaning. Many commentators, particularly those with conservative values, attribute the entertainment industry’s financial hardship to their embrace of progressive ideology; regardless, American audiences have shown little interest in engaging with the partisan and, at times, unpopular positions held by legacy entertainment sources.
To recap, the scientists and entertainers of America are not held in high regard by the people as of late; a notion that seems counterintuitive given our history. But is this a symptom or a cause of our general national despair? Perhaps a bit of both. I think, in any case, the decline of who used to be considered our best and brightest has led us to our present moment of electoral candidates. Let’s begin with Donald Trump.
Elected to the presidency in 2016, Donald John Trump had lived a lifetime of fame prior to his time as Commander in Chief. He ran one of the most recognizable real estate brands in the nation, becoming the archetypal rich businessman over the decades. In 2004, he starred in a reality series called “The Apprentice”, in which he would teach entrepreneurial up-and-comers the ropes of business.
Trump entered politics in 2015, announcing a bid for the republican candidacy on a platform of right-wing populism, with the infamous pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border. He won the election of 2016 by 77 electoral votes, defeating Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a massive political upset.
Throughout the first three years of his presidency, Trump’s policy actions were surprisingly un-terrible, despite what the media would have you believe. He introduced the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, slashing taxes for broad swaths of the American people. ISIS was defeated under his administration, and the Middle East experienced a time of relative peace. Hokey as it may sound, Space Force was an important addition to the United States military as nations like China and North Korea develop their weapon capabilities beyond the edges of our atmosphere.
As many have pointed out however, Donald Trump has a personality problem. His rough-and-tumble approach to politics is why so many Americans love him, but why an equal or greater number are put off by him. Uncouth and boisterous, Trump made use of social media in a way no president had in the past, speaking directly to millions of people across the globe primarily on Twitter. His rhetoric has been called inflammatory, crude, dishonest, and simply disrespectful.
Trump also failed catastrophically in his leadership throughout the pandemic. His messaging was inconsistent, his administration delivered no cohesive strategy, and his claim to fiscal accountability was tarnished due to a nearly $2.5 trillion increase in spending. For all the publicity about their supposed feud, Trump let Anthony Fauci, who actively misled the public, remain in control of Center for Disease Control throughout the pandemic.
Additionally, Donald Trump’s post-presidency has been fraught with legal troubles, which have been criticized as a personal persecution by leftist entities of their chief opposition. Trump was first indicted in April, 2023, in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records with regard to hush payments during the 2016 election season. Later, in August, prosecutors in Georgia arraigned Trump and 18 others on racketeering charges relating to the 2020 election.
Jack Smith, a federal special counsel prosecutor, has levered two cases against Donald Trump, one in the District of Columbia and the other in Florida. The D.C. case is in reference to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, and accuses the former president of insurrectionist activity before, on, and after the day of the incident. Smith has also charged Trump with 37 felonies in the state of Florida relating to classified documents held at the Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach County.
Lastly, Donald Trump is amidst two civil cases, both in the state of New York. The first involves a woman named E. Jean Carroll, who alleges the former president sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman’s in 1996. Trump denies the allegations categorically. The republican frontrunner is also embroiled in a civil fraud case brought by New York attorney general Letitia James, which aims to remove Trump and his family from their real estate empire in the state.
In the other corner of the 2024 election, propped up by his chief of staff, Jeff Zients, Joe Biden has a long history of presidential aspirations. He joined the Senate in 1973, and said, in 1974, “You’re being phony to say you’re not interested in being president if you really want to change things.”
Throughout his lengthy career as a Senator, Biden supported a very wide variety of legal issues and political movements. In the 70’s, the future president was an avid and vocal opponent of desegregating schools by way of busing, remarking, in reference to his pro-busing colleagues, “What they are saying is that your black, curly-haired son has to be in class with my white, straight-haired one before he can get a decent education.”
During the 80’s and 90’s, Joe Biden focused primarily on criminal justice. In 1984, he supported the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which overhauled the U.S. criminal code, and in 1986, he advocated for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which penalized crack users more harshly than users of powder cocaine. A highly flouted political accomplishment, Biden helped pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a comprehensive tough-on-crime piece of federal legislation.
The Delaware politician’s first candidacy for the Oval Office was in 1987, when he ran in the Democratic primaries but dropped out early due to plagiarism controversies. He ran again in the leadup to the 2008 presidential election, but left the race after finishing fifth in the Iowa caucus a year after his announcement as candidate.
Joe Biden served as vice president under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017, and took an active role in the administration as a retail politician. Tensions rose, however, as Biden’s chummy manner of politics clashed with Obama’s posh demeanor. “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” Obama said in reference to Biden’s 2020 presidential bid.
The current commander in chief has proven his ideological predecessor wrong in some ways and right in others. He defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, garnering the votes of 81 million Americans; the most of any candidate in U.S. history.
However, Obama’s words ring true with reference to the Biden Administration’s leadership in a post-pandemic world. The American economy was already in strong recovery after the worldwide standstill of global trade in 2020, but inflation has soared to forty year highs as a result of rampant spending in Washington, championed by Biden. The southern border has experienced an unprecedented migrant crisis as millions of foreign nationals enter the U.S. illegally, urged on by Biden’s pro-immigration messaging.
Abroad, Joe Biden has diminished America’s reputation as the strongest world superpower and the international peacekeeper. Afghanistan was retaken by the Taliban on Biden’s watch in 2021, early in his administration. Less than a year later, Russia launched an invasion of their former satellite state, Ukraine, in an ongoing war that has threatened the balance of power in Europe. China, America’s chief global adversary, has engaged in the geopolitics of many regions throughout the world, including the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Central America.
Most recently, horrific scenes have emerged from Israel, as Palestinian terrorists invaded the largely Jewish nation in the most brutal assault since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Hamas, the ruling authority in the Gaza Strip from whence the assault was staged, slaughtered countless Israeli civilians, indiscriminately targeting women and children in their bloodthirsty attack. Joe Biden has come under fire amidst the conflict for recently releasing $6 billion to the Iranians, who were named by Hamas as benefactors to the brutal onslaught.
Like Trump, Biden’s candidacy is underscored by legal troubles. Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, has been indicted on gun charges, and an ongoing investigation into his business dealings with oligarchs in Ukraine and China hint at corruption within the First Family. The White House insists no business collusion occurred between the president and his son, but republican lawmakers remain unconvinced. Federal prosecutors are also in the process of investigating Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents in a case similar to Trump’s; awkward optics for Biden’s reelection bid.
The present political landscape makes 2024 an interesting and consequential election, regardless of the potential candidates. Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the very men who led our nation to this tumultuous moment, only up the ante.
There are still other candidates in the race at this point, and it would be unwise to write them off entirely. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is reportedly running a third party campaign, and the Republican primaries have yet to occur, though Donald Trump maintains a commanding lead in polls. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley have emerged as two candidates with the potential steam to close the gap between them and the republican frontrunner.
Whether a republican, a democrat, or a third party candidate, however unlikely, takes the Oval Office in 2025, our next commander in chief will have a difficult task set before him. The people of the U.S. desire stability and increasingly feel as if the very foundations of our great nation are being shaken. Our next president must rise to the occasion, demonstrating strength, resilience, innovation, and a wholehearted commitment to the betterment of the nation.
Anthony Bringaze 