Fergus Finlay: Biden has a massive battle ahead, but I back him to beat Trump
Former President Donald Trump, left, and President Joe Biden. Biden has to win the election — because a second Trump presidency would do untold damage to the world. Picture: Patrick Semansky
Already it seems like a long time ago, but it was actually only a couple of months. A man called Robert Hur was appointed to conduct an enquiry into whether Joe Biden had done anything potentially criminal with state papers, anything he should be prosecuted for. In due course he issued a report finding that as it happened, the President had done nothing wrong.
It was a long report — 350 pages, several appendices — so no one could accuse your man of not being thorough. It dealt a lot with notebooks that Joe Biden had written and kept over many years, just like Ronal Reagan and others had done before him with no questions ever being asked. It acknowledged several times that Joe Biden and his people had been entirely cooperative and honest, and that everything the government wanted back they got, without a single demur.
But on page 6 of the Executive summary — it read like it was written deliberately to be picked up, even by dummies — Mr Hur announced that one of the reasons they didn’t recommend prosecution, apart from the fact that Joe Biden had committed no reason to prosecute, was that Biden came across to them (and therefore might to a jury) as a “sympathetic well-meaning old man with a poor memory”. He had committed no crime, but even if he had he was too sympathetic to put on trial.
It was a classic political hit-job and it changed the Presidential election completely. Suddenly reams of articles were written — maybe half a million words in a week — about a President in obvious decline. Within days he had been written off by his own as well as by his enemies. The situation looked grim.
 Tell me about it. This morning I needed something from my bedside table for some back pain I’ve been having, and since my missus was in the bedroom I asked her to bring it up. “What is it?”, she asked. After a moment of deep thought, I said I needed one of the little round tablets in the green box. The name, the brand, even the generic (ibuprofen) wouldn’t come to me in that instant. It happens. To all of us. All the time.
But that didn’t stop the doubters and the haters piling on. There was a period in the immediate aftermath of the report, where there were intense rumours that senior Democrats were trying to figure out how to dump Biden (and Kamala Harris with him) and find a new ticket.
So I wrote a sort of open letter to Joe Biden (sadly, I haven’t a shred of evidence he’s ever read it!) telling him he had a choice. Prove them wrong — I reckoned he had until the middle of March — or find a way to bow out gracefully.
Well, I say he’s never read it. But my goodness has he been doing it. Fighting back I mean. Starting with his State of the Union address, he seems to have been on the stump nearly every day. Like a youngster. The harder he goes, the more energy he seems to get from it. I don’t know if you saw his speech at the national correspondents’ dinner the other night, but it was a million miles away from the doddery old man the critics like to paint. When he was funny he was very funny, when he was serious he was moving.
And he took Trump on — humorously but directly. Yes, age is an issue in this campaign, he said. I’m a grown man. Running against a 6-year old. There’s no doubt in my mind now that, barring accidents, Joe Biden will give a good account of himself in this campaign.
That’s not the same as saying he’s going to win, although I do believe the odds against him are narrowing. He still has a number of problems to overcome.
First, there are many on his own side who believe he has let them down over Gaza. He has to find a way to address that — not just for electoral reasons, but for moral reasons.
American planes are dropping hundreds of tons of aid from the sky. Americans are building a temporary port to get more aid in. And still, America is supplying the planes and the bombs that are killing Palestinian people. This insane and cruel dichotomy has to be stopped.
The second thing he has to overcome is the person he is fighting against. The 6-year old who, day after day, manages to dominate the news cycle by sitting in a dingy courtroom where he has been charged with sleazy crimes. It almost doesn’t matter whether he’s convicted or not — with an endless appeals process there is no possibility of him going to jail this side of an election.
He’s the leader of a movement who, according to a long piece in the last weekend, wants to see the system completely overthrown. US Constitution? Who cares. Founding fathers? They no longer matter. Basic principles of democracy? To hell with that. We want retribution, revenge. We want to get rid of the deep state (even though most of us don’t know what it is). And Donald Trump is our leader, our saviour, our champion.
It's really hard to get a grip on how that has happened, other than by reference to historical analogies like the rise of fascism. There is no doubt that a corrupted approach to news reporting and the growth of a rapidly unregulated and itself corrupted social media has had and is having profound influences.
Anton Savage, who among other things has a remarkably deep understanding of American politics and the reasons Trump hangs on to an adoring following, wrote a brilliant piece at the weekend saying, amongst other things, that “the exponential growth in the sophistication of AI, combined with the accelerating descent of moral oversight within the tech giants, is rapidly bringing us to a point where truth will no longer be an objective reality but rather a consensus crowd-sourced from those who are loudest, most vile and most hateful.”
Truth as a crowd-sourced commodity — that’s what Joseph Goebbels tried to invent in his day. It’s what Trump is after now. Truth is whatever I say it is. And the core values of a democratic country would crumble under that.
That’s what Joe Biden is up against. And it’s why he has to win — because a second Trump presidency would do untold damage to the world. And Biden has to do it the hard way. Old-fashioned campaigning, standing on a soapbox when he has to, fighting for every single vote.
The thing is, that’s exactly the kind of campaigning Joe Biden loves. A few months ago I wondered if he was able for it anymore. I’ve no doubts now. He’ll bring the fight to Trump. And he’ll beat him.
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