One thing we can say about President Donald Trump is that he is authentic. With him, what you see is what you get, like it or not. He was brash, impulsive, erratic and egocentric as a candidate, and he turned out to be exactly the same once elected. We got exactly what the pre-election packaged promised. That delighted some people and horrified others, but it should have surprised nobody.
There is no reason to believe, if Trump is re-elected, that he will be any different in the next four years (if he lives that long) than he has been in the last four years. He will continue to pour out endless eccentric Twitter comments (actually, a clever way to bypass the media filter and talk directly to his base). He will continue what is basically a fairly standard Republican program - smaller government, less regulation, pro business, strong on national defense, strong on law-and-order. He will continue to dominate the media (with their connivence, since it drives readership) and take the oxygen out of the room for his opponents. He will continue his pressure on China and Iran, and continue the disengagement of the US from the world order started by Clinton and Bush. There are unlikely to be any policy surprises.
What about Joe Biden? It’s pretty hard to tell what we are getting. We certainly know the old political pro Joe Biden of the past four decades, but is the current candidate Joe Biden the same guy? Hard to tell, since his handlers won’t let him face reporters, or answer unscripted questions. Except for a couple of pre-scripted interviews with softball questions for which he already had prepared notes, we haven’t seen much of the current Joe Biden, and what we did see of him in the early primaries in unscripted situations wasn’t particularly comforting – he looked like an old man who is losing it. Nancy Pelosi has suggested that he need not debate Trump. Is that because she fears what would be revealed in such an unscripted situation in which he had to think fast on his feet?
This is an important issue. If we are really electing Kamila Harris to be effectively the next president, we need to know that and make our voting decision on that basis. If an elected President Biden is just going to be a figurehead whose policies are going to be shaped by his “handlers” we need to know that now (and which part of the Democratic party will control him – the moderates or the far left? Am I getting Nancy Pelosi or AOC?), and make our voting decision based on that information.
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