Donald Trump and Joe Biden enter Thursday's presidential debate as deeply familiar figures defined by their shared unpopularity and competing weaknesses. But their most significant flaws — for the incumbent, a track record on aging and inflation; for the challenger, an unfitness distilled and confirmed by the events of January 6 — are so well known that they probably aren't worth discussing any further until we see what happens onstage.
Perhaps Biden’s entire campaign would collapse if he were to answer a question about inflation with a long-winded answer reminiscent of Grandpa Simpson about the price of frozen custard in Rehoboth Beach in 1968.
Perhaps Trump will morph into Colonel Jessep during Jake Tapper's questioning and claim full responsibility for the 2021 Capitol riots.
But before they meet that or any other fate, it's worth saying a few words about their significant secondary weaknesses, ways in which they could undermine each candidate's support among “double-hate” voters who believe that each candidate's primary weakness cancels out the other's.
For Biden, that weakness is foreign policy and the state of world order, which has worsened since he was sworn in. There is an ongoing debate about whether voters' nostalgia for the Trump-era economy is justified or whether it absolves Trump of responsibility for the 2020 coronavirus-induced economic crisis.
But nostalgia for the geopolitical landscape of the Trump era seems entirely reasonable: Before Trump's defeat, there was no Russian invasion of Ukraine, no brutal fighting in the Holy Land, and no weakening of anti-American coalitions, let alone closer unity between rivals in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and even Pyongyang.
The Biden administration will obviously deny responsibility for this deterioration and claim to have managed a series of extremely difficult situations better than dictator-sympathetic Trump. And as someone who defended the Afghanistan withdrawal despite its disastrous implementation and partially defends our attempts to balance risks and evils in Ukraine, I have some sympathy for the White House's self-justification.
But I also think that liberals’ investment in the idea that Biden is the great defender of the liberal international order against isolationism and reaction has made it difficult for Democrats to calculate how much stability the US-led order enjoys under Trump’s crude, transactional Mahatma politics.
This contrast means that any positive case for Biden's foreign policy needs to go beyond routine warnings that Trump would dismantle NATO and allow his enemies to run wild, enemies that appear to have become much more aggressive under Biden than before.
On the other hand, Trump's second crucial weakness is not his achievements but his campaign promises, specifically, his pledge to impose a 10% tariff on all imports as the flagship economic policy of his second term.
Trump's protectionism was part of a general shift away from the Tea Party liberalism and austerity policies of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan when he first ran for president in 2016. At the time, the United States had more fiscal space and could make all kinds of sweet promises to offset the costs of trade wars.
But in the current climate, Trump's promise not to cut Medicare and Social Security feels like old news as an expectation from his supporters, and with inflation still relatively high, there isn't much room for credible promises of other perks, whether new tax cuts or new spending.
This brings into particular sharp focus the direct costs of a 10 percent tariff that could fall heavily on an inflation-weary middle class. Some of those costs could potentially be offset, especially if tariff policy’s more enthusiastic supporters were designing it. But that’s a complex debate, and complex policy debates are not Trump’s forte. Thus, the tariff pledge presents a political goal very similar to John McCain’s 2008 promise to eliminate the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance, which Barack Obama nicely portrayed as a tax hike on the middle class.
Especially when combined with the 10% tariff and Trump's pledge to maintain or even strengthen the massive corporate tax cuts he enacted in his first year in office, higher prices for the middle class and lower corporate tax rates provide ideal fodder for Democrats' most effective campaign in years against Republicans: portraying them as taking money from the middle class for the benefit of plutocrats.
Can Biden make that case convincingly, beyond reminding voters of his inflationary policies? I doubt. But one might also doubt whether Trump could counter Biden's efforts to contain America's authoritarian enemies without reminding voters of his own authoritarian impulses.
And those two questions, those two doubts, bring us back to the primary weakness of each candidate, in the shadow of which Thursday night and every second debate will inevitably take place.
