The Incidental Politician- Joe Biden vs The First Real American President

There is nothing incidental about Donald Trump, a man who was more American than any president in recent history.  Bush I was a patrician New Englander, a member of America's storied elite with ancestral roots in the Revolution and the reign of Charles I.  His son was half-breed, half his father's WASP genes, half adopted, brush-clearing, cowboy on his own time.

Clinton was an Arkansas hillbilly, Johnson a hill country Texan, Nixon a hardscrabble Californian, Reagan a Hollywood B-movie second, and Biden a coattail Democrat from a small state. They all were incidental to the heartland, the rank-and-file. 

Donald Trump was the first real American president - a man of glitz, arm candy, and bourgeois glamour; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the streets of New York.  A brawler, a snake oil salesman, a vaudevillian.  In other words, one of us. 

He was the first president to understand and embody our deliberately illogical preferences, our passionate anti-intellectual populism, and our anti-establishment rectitude. Issues never mattered for either him or his supporters.  No logic, issues, or moderation.  The way forward was visceral and absolute.  There was no on the one hand, on the other dispassionate consideration.  The circus is the message.

Few Americans can trace their heritage to the Mayflower.  Few are members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of the Cincinnati.  Most are sons and daughters of Italians, Irish, Jews, African slaves, and border-bound Salvadorans.  Yet they, like Trump, are more American than the Camelot Kennedys or the Hyde Park Roosevelts.  They love mansions, yachts, diamonds, and private planes.

We are not a patrician country despite Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square, and Park Avenue. We are decidedly bourgeois in taste and aspiration, a nation of Walmart greeters, supermarket checkers, road house dancers.  We dress in faux diamonds.  We trick out our sedans. We still smoke.  We are bass fishermen, teachers, mechanics, and collectors. 

There is nothing American about Joe Biden, a bewildered man, a trained bear, a politician without a single creative thought, neither leader or follower but an empty suit, a front man. He is neither old school nor new school, neither traditionalist nor radical, neither populist nor democratic. 

The Left is doing what it can to discredit Trump, but unless they get rid of their stumbling, foundering President, Trump will win.  Histrionics, cutting corners, hedging on taxes, the check is in the mail, arm candy and machismo, living by wits and hot air are American.  No one in the country except for the tired, old news, progressive establishment of Gompers and Lafollette doubts it; and only they want a dour, humorless country. 

Progressives hate Trump's America for all its lowbrow instincts. They hate every sequin, every strand of tinsel, every waft of cheap perfume, every high-bosomed line dancer, ever bit of glitter.  They do not hate Trump because of his alleged and presumed crimes and misdemeanors, but because of who he is.  

He has had all they ever wanted - wealth, women, yachts, and la dolce vita.  They, squirreled away in their carrels, on marches, in conferences, and in confessionals, have had none of it and can only dream of such abandon.  A life of good causes is dire, gloomy, and dark. 

America has never seen a politician like Donald Trump, his own man, tied neither to Boston Brahmins, Chicago ward heelers, Wall Street money, or little widows. A man who made it on his own unapologetically, a man sorry for nothing, looking out for the next buck, not the last man down.  

The nodding support for Joe Biden is tepid, unenthusiastic, reticent compared to that for Trump.  It isn't simply a matter of one man, Trump, who is the real, familiar, legitimate American; for who among us does not want his yachts, model wife, arm candy, and Mar-el-Lago?  Who prefers the dowdy, basement Catechism of Biden to the glorious, long legged, sequined starlit groupies of the former President?

Trump is an American president whose populism reaches out to the pig farmers, cowherders, and housewives of America who want what they can't have - a bourgeois, cotton candy St. Tropez crowd who could care less about January 6th, secret documents, or payoffs to call girls. 

Poor Joe Biden who is unravelling in public, making no sense at all, handled and managed by his shills and sycophants, pointed in the right direction but always veering off message and off route, is in a world of his own, insulated from popular opinion and popular appeal.  Who in America really and truly wants Biden's version of diversity, an accumulated, unattractive lot?

The right thing, the good thing, the expected thing - the doxology of the Left - is sung only in Northwest Washington.  'God, The Gay, And Celestial Meaning', was preached to a desultory crowd by the Reverend Channing Phillips at the United Methodist Church Of Christ.  An irrelevancy at best, a sewn-on political thread to neo-Protestant cant. 

Meanwhile Donald Trump, presumed jailbird and MAGA criminal, packs them in from arena to arena.  A man on a mission, a vaudevillian on the boards, and a man no one can ignore.

There will be no presidential debates - no one in the Biden camp wants to see their man out-sparred, outclassed, and beaten to a pulp - but everyone can imagine the contest, a sideshow, a bear-bating circus act.  

"Stay away from him", his seconds will implore at ringside of a match that will never happen.  Poor Joe needs a laxative and a fixer-upper before a normal day's work, but this?

And so the real American President will win again, and Joe Biden will go back to Delaware to feed the pigeons in the park; and no one will even notice.