Alan Zendell, January 6, 2024

Both President Biden and his likely November opponent, Donald Trump, have clearly laid out their overall plans for governing if they win the 2024 election. There’s no need for input from talking media heads or so-called pundits. Both men’s statements require neither analysis nor interpretation.

Donald Trump explicitly said that Americans can expect him to begin his quest toward dictatorial rule on “day one” of his presidency. For those that claim Trump loves making outrageous statements he doesn’t really mean, we can point to dozens of instances in which he has acted and spoken as if normal rules and even laws don’t apply to him. When there’s that much smoke, responsible people know something’s on fire.

Joe Biden made his position equally clear, yesterday, at a Community College in Pennsylvania. Biden declared that the 2024 election is about whether democracy can survive repeated attacks by Trump and others in his MAGA movement.

There’s not much there to argue about. Both positions are clear enough that even intellectually lazy Americans who get their news from corrupted social media or nurse exclusively at the nipples of far-right cable news channels can plainly see them. Emotions and political bias aside, everything Donald Trump has said and done in the past eight years points to a consistent pattern. He respects, and seemingly adores all of the world’s favorite despots and wannabe autocrats. He kowtows to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and swoons over North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. His most dedicated supporters revere Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan. The only exception is Iran, because even Trump can’t distort the truth enough to reconcile praising the Ayotollahs with the Islamophobia he fosters.

Extremist MAGA representatives in Congress and media personalities like Tucker Carlson have repeatedly stated that Orban’s Christian Democracy should replace the United States Constitution. But Orban’s politics is neither Christian nor democratic. Rather, it is based on xenophobia, religious prejudice, sexism, and racism. Orban would limit immigration to only those people who support his model, he believes in state-controlled media, and he considers leaders like himself to be exempt from judicial scrutiny. Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to destroy media outlets like the New York Times and CNN for criticizing him, is totally on board with the Orban playbook – which, incidentally, reads very much like the Fascist manifestos that brought us World War 2.

That is the existential threat President Biden has fought since he decided to oppose Trump in 2020. He has been consistent, never wavering from this message. Every piece of legislation Biden has fought for in three years has really been a struggle between what benefits the wealthy elite and what is best for every other American.

Trump has begun using Ronald Reagan’s old tag line: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Let’s see. Is your job more secure with unemployment consistently under four percent during 2023? Have you noticed the massive construction projects repairing roads and bridges in your state? Do you have Internet access you never had before? Did you benefit from Trump’s tax cuts? Would your small business have survived COVID if not for the government payments that kept you and your employees solvent when the world was locked down? Have recent state laws limiting women’s rights to control and have access to adequate health care made your life better? Do you feel safe knowing that Trump’s party refuses to take any action to keep military-style weapons out of the hands of mass killers? Has starving the budgets of public schools improved your family’s life? And finally, there’s inflation, for which neither Trump nor Biden is to blame. It hurts everyone, but under the Biden administration, America’s economy has thrived, growing jobs and wages, more than any other industrialized nation’s.

If you’d like a peek into the crystal ball of America’s future, look at the priorities of the MAGA extremists today. They understand that immigration is a volatile issue, and that Trump will benefit if they can convince Americans that Biden is to blame for our broken system, yet they have refused to approve any of the funding Biden requested to fortify our border and the men and women who police it. They are willing to bring our government to a halt even if it means abandoning NATO’s attempts to fend off Russian aggression and weakening Israel in its war against Hamas terrorism, and by proxy, Iran. All this in the name of power-grabbing.

If that’s the kind of America you want, Trump’s your man. But if you believe in the principles of the country you grew up in, remember that he’s the one trying to destroy it, while Biden is fully committed to saving it.