Will Trump Become Joe Biden?

Young people cannot get work. Wars in Europe and the Middle East are draining the aging President’s attention, energy, and political capital. The most important and ambitious programs find failure in the highly partisan judicial system, prompting cries to ignore the judges. Inflation, which the administration is not taking seriously, viewing it only as a political tool, is draining Americans’ wallets. Despite some minor reforms, no major action is being taken on housing policy, student loans, or any of the other generational crises that are driving young voters to radicalism.

Inside the White House, yes-men and timid staffers often refrain from telling the President the truth: their poll numbers are slipping, the economy is struggling, and their landmark bill has, for some reason, not made life better or more beautiful for regular Americans. Competent leaders, often identifying with newcomer factions within the party, are in a constant struggle against the Old Guard, which appears to be dedicated to niche foreign policy issues and is unmovable on critical issues. So, the triumphant President struggles on, unaware of the depth of their failure and incapable of understanding how he could fail when he has done so much, and given so much, to this damn country.

The American economy is fundamentally broken. Graduates leave school to find themselves in a country without opportunity, while the more fortunate ones often find themselves overeducated and underemployed, stuck halfway between full adulthood and permanent childhood, unable to buy a house, afford a child, pay down their debt, and yet slowly growing older. So, they become politically radical. In response to the terrible corruption revealed during a childhood financial crisis, others, frustrated by the distance between their ambitions and their opportunities, move far to the left. Some simply hate the world and its beauty in all its forms. Others, tracking the Total Fertility Rate like meteorologists track the weather, panic. Yet even more, those who never thought about the fertility rate once in their life see the H-1B program pushing them out, move right, and demand net negative immigration: remigration. Although deeply divided on where to go and what to do, they are united by the common fact that they cannot live the lives their parents did. They never hear a baby cry. They never hold a child. They still dress up for Halloween, and not for their children’s amusement. Some have somehow etched new life and families into the world, and they make it, though they cannot quite explain how, and they don’t exactly know how long their luck will last. Things feel as if they are kept together by rotting rope, nearly hollow now on the inside.

A period of cultural left hegemony preceded the aging President, and as this hegemony dies, few know what comes next. There is no American movie scene, bar one or two directors, because most films are now made for the Chinese market. There is no literary scene because all the bestsellers are those books whose authors are best connected. There are podcasts for everything, and about five are good, with only three or so really mattering. There is more culture than ever, more being written than ever, and yet we are more incapable of action than ever. Though bright spots of culture emerge, here and there, they appear like passing embers in the wind. They are beautiful in the darkness. Maybe even more beautiful than the inferno that spawned them. But they die, and usually it’s a paranoid boot stamping them out, “To make sure nothing ’round here sets alight.” Everything is dry, this time of year, after all.

Political violence erupts occasionally. The odd leftist shooter has replaced the white nationalist killer. Some have decided the nation should not exist, others have decided they will kill to ensure it does. Somehow, there are Blackfoot warriors and white cowboys again fighting on the high Montana plains. But the cowboys now wear ICE uniforms, and the Blackfoot are actually Guatemalan peasants summoned to the country by the beckoning hand of a greedy, aging businessman who would rather pay a peasant half that he’d have to pay a white man who dares to dream of vacations, wife, and child. Some young men yearn for horse and pistol, and the Blackfoot yearn for bow. Once the aging President and his aging voters are gone, some may get straight to the business of politics by other means.

“A republic, if you can keep it,” and these are the years of keeping it: of keeping it to a people that founded it, made almost impossible by the notion that the republic has no “people” and is of all peoples, everywhere, forever. This, of course, is never fully addressed by the aging President, who vacillates between an increasingly strained, thin multiculturalism and an old-fashioned East Coast nationalism that only his generation can still understand. One wonders what he would say if he were provided a full account of the crisis, were in his prime, and were sure no media would distort his words. What might the young man see? What might he say? What might he want to do, were he in the other shoes, wearing faux-leather slips or plastic sneakers made in China?

If you visit the city where the aging President was born, it is unrecognizable. The streets are strange, and the people are strangers. There is no community but for the new ones that have just arrived and keep their old country in their pockets, which prevents them from becoming part of the new one, which they hate anyway, blaming it for their displacement, and yearning to take from it what they have convinced themselves was taken from them. And what does the aging President do? He hosts a Diwali celebration at the White House and instructs his staff to publicize his achievements.

The aging President is angry. The voters are ungrateful. “Don’t they know all that I’ve done?” he thinks, so often to himself. The aging President has a choice: to escalate or not. To be extreme or not. History will no longer tolerate a vacation from her work’s demanding schedule. She has decreed, after so many years of meek men, that some must rise to the occasion. And the occasion has come.

Nothing seems to work. Everything seems to be getting worse. To say there are two visions of the future of the nation is wholly inaccurate. If only things were so simple. There really is no vision. Everyone is looking backwards, blinded by the brilliant lights in the rear-view mirror.

The aging President could realize that halfway adults are also halfway children, and so are immature and dangerous. They have nothing much to live for but the rare love and rarer child. Their demands are extreme. They will not become less extreme. The aging President sometimes indicates he knows this. But will he listen?

The aging generation that catapulted the aging President to victory is itself torn asunder. Some listen with kind ears, right and left, and offer hopeful winks to young and pleading eyes. But most no longer listen to anything. If they do, it’s Netflix and YouTube, and Facebook too. Never their children. But can we blame them? Most children have nothing interesting to say. They watch YouTube, too.

The aging President, for the sake of his pride, a failing common to all men, convinces himself that he is doing a wonderful job. The staff agrees. Of course they do. The cabinet as well. The order goes out: “We are doing great, it’s the voters who aren’t.” The Emperor has clothes. It’s the rest of us that are naked.

And so they fix the bad voters by informing them of all the accomplishments. Tallying up fact sheets, counting GDP and border crossing numbers, healthcare wins, and the Big Beautiful-sorry-Build Back Better bill achievements. Like an obsessed collector, White House staff arrange and rearrange their precious numbers on Canva, thinking that behind some infographic they put out on X lies the secret of victory in the next election, which all agree might be the last.

Perhaps if they spoke back to themselves, their policy wins —“Expanding Overtime Gaurantees for families,” and “No Taxes on Tips” — they may realize that these policies, in their own lives, would not bring them one day closer to a husband, wife, house, or children. They might even ask themselves, “Who even has overtime anymore?”

The aging President struggles to control his own party, which is splitting at the seams over questions of Israel, migration, and, most divisive of all, economic policy, where the vicious remnants of the 1990s consensus are taking potshots at the more interventionist guerrillas. As internal and external crises mount, driven by pride, he doubles down on using advertising, rather than his power, as a means to control the country. He loses the House halfway through his term and becomes a lame duck, too old to run again, too weak to control his increasingly fractured party and movement. His failure is not doing too much, but doing too little; governing as if it were 1996, and not some late and hopeless hour. Perhaps this is because he fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem as a malady of the soul or a temporary derangement of the woke, rather than a historic crisis of a people of a nation who, in hubris, decided they no longer were either.

And yet, there have been two aging Presidents. And the second can learn from the first: that action, not words, makes a nation, and inaction can unmake a President as well.