Of Trump and Biden, and a statesman and his mother

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/05/2024 (872 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.” — George Washington

On this May 11, just one day ahead of Mother’s Day, let it be said that the first president of the United States had more respect for mothers than the one who left the Oval Office three years and three months ago, in the city named after Mary Ball Washington’s son.

I don’t have to get into the ham and eggs of the Trump hush-money trial in New York to make the case that Donald Trump isn’t in trouble because he stayed faithful to his third wife who was pregnant, when Mr. Trump was being spanked by Stormy Daniels 18 years ago.

I don’t have to go into all of the other things Trump has said and done that make it difficult to believe he has much respect for women in general.

That has to include the special category honoured by George Washington’s eloquence. The father of the U.S.A. has no power over who gets to sit in the office he once held.

If only he did.

But George Washington didn’t get a vote in 2016, or 2020. He won’t get one in November of 2024. All three of these U.S. presidential elections I am referring to, are overwhelmed by all things Trump. A very small part of me used to think Trump could not be returned to office in the next election cycle, because too many people were either bored or exhausted by the 77-year-old criminal defendant.

The part of me that wanted to take that theory to market was overpowered by the news analyst function the Free Press hired me to perform. I won’t allow myself to sit in front of a desktop in the pre-dawn hours of a Friday morning typing a Saturday column filled with wishful thinking.

I wish I could.

There would be far more inspiration if I could indulge the readers with 750 words of fiction. I might discuss how artificial intelligence will someday create a president with the best qualities of George Washington, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

And wouldn’t that be a president most American mothers could be proud of?

Since my contractual duty isn’t to produce fiction or fantasy, I feel the need to remind readers that regardless of this week’s testimony by an adult film actor, the person on trial is still the favourite to win the race for the White House.

Every few days my analyst eyes look at the cold hard facts of life from seven states that are the battlegrounds which determine who wins and who loses in November. Those seven states are Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. The incumbent, President Joe Biden, is behind in all seven. In four of them, he is losing by more than three points.

Sometimes when scanning the news, you hear about how in some national horse-race polls, Biden is edging ahead of Trump with likely voters. Stories like that get eyeballs, but not much reflection from serious observers.

The national horse-race story fails, because it always introduces a fiction that needs to discarded.

There is no such thing as a national horse race. If presidents were elected by national horse races, Hillary Clinton would be the former president of the U.S. In the national horse race that wasn’t, she beat Trump by nearly 2.9 million votes in 2016. There is no national contest every four Novembers. There are 50 state contests.

That is why Joe Biden must figure out a way to make the battleground states turn around for him. If he can’t win nearly every one of them, history may view him as the mother of all political losers. It will be said that he lost an election to someone whose record included scores of criminal indictments, not to mention a civil judgment where he was found liable for sexual assault.

Political historians will declare that Trump won the 2024 election because the Democratic Party nominated an incumbent president, whom voters felt was too old be re-elected, three weeks shy of his 82nd birthday. For the record, Catherine Eugenia Biden gave birth to Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. on Nov. 20, 1942.

Here’s wishing every mom in Manitoba a happy Mother’s Day.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com