Is Biden still a better choice than Trump?

President Joe Biden is dropping in the polls as his responses to a number of foreign and domestic issues have enraged many of his most ardent political supporters. However, is the presumptive Republican choice a better option?

At this point in the GOP Primary, it appears as if Donald Trump is going to easily win the Republican nomination to run for his party in the 2024 election, a situation which will set voters up to choose between two unpopular candidates. 

Both Biden and Trump are bygone relics of a former generation that seems unable to let go of political power in the United States. But one of these men will be a whole lot worse for the country than the other according to Rex Huppke. 

A journalist with USA Today, Huppke reviewed the major differences between Biden and Trump, coming to the conclusion that Democrats needed to get their act together so that Biden’s team could get to work on beating Trump in 2024. 

Each man has one glaring issue that tends to stand out in the public’s perception. First, the President appears to be too old to fill the role for another four years, and there is a lot of truth to the worries that Biden isn’t aging very gracefully. 

Biden turned 81 in November and polling from Reuters and Ipsos in September found as many as seventy-seven percent of respondents believed Biden was too old to be in the Oval Office, including sixty-five percent of Democrats polled. 

However, Biden’s perceived age issue pales in comparison to Trump’s problem, which is mostly that the former president is facing 91 state and federal charges for everything from mishandling documents to trying to overturn an election. 

Despite Trump’s legal problems, voters seem to still love the former president and that comes through clear in the latest polling. Recent polling has put Trump ahead of Biden in seven crucial swing states according to Bloomberg News. 

The reason for Biden’s fall from grace seems to be waning support from the country’s Black voters, who Bloomberg’s Nancy Cook pointed out haven’t been impressed by the president’s moves on student loans and the conflict in the Middle East. 

“Trump could absolutely win the 2024 election,” Huppke wrote. “He has a sizable swath of the voting public so thoroughly brainwashed they’d follow him into an active volcano.” But Trump really shouldn’t have a chance according to Huppke. 

A lot of things are going right under President Biden’s stewardship of the country at the moment. The economy is doing well, which was exemplified by the Dow Jones hitting its all-time high on December 17th.

Employment also reached its 54-year-low between January and April, and the economic accomplishments under Biden have been compounded by the policies he has passed to help the country on an economic and social level. 

“While painted by the right as doddering and inept, Biden has enacted wide-ranging legislation, from a $1 trillion infrastructure bill to the Inflation Reduction Act,” Huppke explained about Biden’s biggest policy accomplishments. 

“He appointed the first Black woman to ever sit in the U.S. Supreme Court. He signed the Respect for Marriage Act protecting same-sex and interracial marriages. He united NATO over the war in Ukraine,” Huppke added. 

We can never know for sure what the former president would do if given a second term, but we can look at his statements on the campaign trail and the reporting around him and his possible policies to predict what might happen. 

Trump has stated he would immediately reinstate the ban on Muslim travel and reporting from the Washington Post in November found that the former president and his allies in Project 2025 were working on plans to punish his critics. 

“Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term,” wrote the Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett. 

Trump has a ready list of officials that he “wants to investigate or prosecute” and his associates were working on plans “to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”

The former president was also the politician most responsible for bringing about the end of abortion in America, was found guilty of assaulting and defaming E. Jean Carroll, and was also found guilty of fraud by a Judge Arthur Engoron. 

Add in the former president’s concerning comments on December 16th about people who immigrated to the United States “poisoning the blood of our country” and it's not hard to see why some voters might think Biden is the better choice. 

“As the race of the presidency ramps up next year, Americans will be reminded – via constant coverage – of who Trump is and the daily fear and frustration he brought to his first term as president,” Happuke explained.