Can Joe Biden and Donald Trump just go away?

Like many Americans, I’m in political purgatory.

I don’t care for Donald Trump, but I also don’t like Joe Biden. The best thing about each of them is that they’re not the other.

Donald Trump vowed to Make America Great, while Joe Biden babbled about unity and a return to normalcy.

How’d that go?

It turns out, a lot of Americans are sick of Biden and Trump, too.

According to a recent survey conducted by YouGov for Yahoo! News, 55% of Americans don’t think Donald Trump should run for president again in 2024, while 64% think the same of President Biden.

Last month, Rasmussen Reports found that just 49% of Democrats think Biden should run again.

This is supposed to be America, the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. These two are really the best America can come up with?

America has a lot of problems and these two fossils aren’t the ones to solve them.

Here, I will review the awfulness of Biden and Trump and at the end suggest someone who would be better.

Joe Biden’s eternal awfulness

The topline argument against Joe Biden is that he’s old. You know it, I know it. Trump is old, too, but Biden comes across as every bit of a 79-year-old man who was first sworn in as U.S. senator in 1973.

One of the positive things about getting older is that you can end up wiser and have more perspective than younger people. But Joe Biden has been terrible for decades, and he’s only ever moved up in politics.

I’ll elaborate.

He was never ahead of his time on anything and he was very often wrong.

He’s the guy who complained in the 1970s that integrating schools through busing would result in his kids being trapped in a “racial jungle.”

He’s the guy who, throughout his career, especially in the 1980s and ‘90s, championed the drug war and mass incarceration.

He’s the guy who, in the early 2000s, supported the war in Iraq and the civil liberties-destroying Patriot Act.

Now he’s president. How’s that going?

Remember that time he said, in October 2020, that “anyone who is responsible for” 220,000 COVID deaths “should not remain as president of the United States of America”?

Well, by his logic, he should’ve resigned a long time ago.

Remember when he blabbed on and on about unity? Joe Biden has obviously failed at doing any uniting, except against him, hence his remarkably low approval ratings.

His administration has been characterized by the disregarding of bipartisanship.

He rammed through a bloated COVID spending bill without Republican support. It took Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to bring some sanity on the federal spending sprees desired by Joe Biden. It took Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to derail efforts to dismantle the filibuster in the Senate, a tool which encourages bipartisan cooperation.

No one in their right mind can honestly think the country is in good hands with Joe Biden as president. Personally, I can only credit him for one thing, and that’s withdrawing from the pointless forever war in Afghanistan. But obviously, that ended chaotically (it was always going to) and didn’t help him much politically.

But outside of that, he’s just dropping the ball on everything, from inflation to immigration. He’s been slow to repeal Trump’s backwards tariffs, he’s kept Trump-era migration restriction policies in place much too long, he’s championed a nationalization of California’s idiotic Assembly Bill 5. He’s terrible.

But, again, the main reason for him to go is that he’s just … old.

Donald Trump is a toxic force

Donald Trump, elected with Republican control of both the House and Senate, left America more deeply divided than ever and invited a backlash that completely flipped control of the federal government.

On the way out, he whipped millions of Americans and almost all Republicans into insanity about a “stolen election,” pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find the votes” to swing the election in Georgia and did nothing as his supporters stormed the Capitol.

If a Democrat did any of this, Republicans would be infuriated and denounce them as a threat to our constitutional republic. And they’d be right.

Policywise, Trump wasn’t too great, either.

Sure, he cut taxes (like any Republican president with control of Congress would) and sure, he went along with Supreme Court picks. But he also didn’t care, really, about limited government, or constitutional constraints or fiscal responsibility.

On his watch, long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government was on track to post $1.5 trillion annual deficits for the foreseeable future. He explicitly didn’t care about that. He mostly only ever used his veto powers in defense of aiding Saudi Arabia’s barbaric war in Yemen. He whined about FISA all the time, but routinely opposed legislation that would actually put limits on the surveillance state.

For all his bluster on border security and immigration, he was mainly only concerned with building a border wall and curtailing even legal immigration, policies that are out of step with most Americans want and what a realistic, practical long-term solution is (which would entail a combination of amnesty and expanded legal immigration).

So, politically and policywise, Trump is just a dumpster fire.

Who would be better, then?

My guess is it’s more likely that Trump will be on the ballot in 2024 and someone other than Old Joe will represent the Democrats.

I have trouble imagining Democrats would rally behind a Kamala Harris presidential bid. One, because they totally didn’t want to when she actually ran a few years ago. And two, she’s only validated the skepticism of her as vice president.

I can easily imagine a Gavin Newsom running for president. I also have trouble imagining he wouldn’t fold under national pressure. It’s one thing to move up the ranks in the Democratic bubble of California; it’s another to be able to appeal to a more moderate national audience. When your state is best known these days for wildfires, homelessness and having the highest poverty rate in the nation, eh. Maybe run for Senate.

Personally, I would be more interested in someone like Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.

As a member of Congress, he promoted school choice, stood against the Obama administration’s indefinite detention policies, and opposed America’s endless wars. As a governor, he’s supported eliminating his state’s income tax, canceled his state’s COVID state of emergency last year and supported occupational licensing reform (signing a bipartisan law to allow greater portability and vetoing proposals for creating new licensing requirements for certain occupations).

Polis is more forward-thinking, less-wedded to the idea that government needs to be everywhere, doing everything, and less boringly predictable than most Democratic politicians. He’s certainly still very much a progressive, but he’s not an insane person (Trump), not way too old (Biden) and he can actually appeal across a more politically diverse audience (unlike Newsom).

With all the problems facing the country, America needs better than a chaotic right-wing populist and an old guy with no ability to solve anything. Here’s to hoping neither Trump nor Biden are on the 2024 ballot.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com