As we round the corner and head into the home stretch of the Biden presidency, I’ve taken pause by all of the staggering blows the last few years have dealt our American experiment, and marveled at how well, for the most part, she has held up.

Whether it’s the COVID pandemic – lockdowns, school closures, social distancing, masking, vaccine mandates, or whether it’s inflation this country hasn’t seen in over a generation, riots, unrest in the streets, resurgent anti-Semitism wherever you look, homelessness, drug overdoses, rising crime and lawlessness in many of the nation’s largest cities, attacks on the nuclear family by the radical alphabet lobby, there’s an entire smorgasbord of crises that would cause you to believe that we really are in the last days of the most successful democratically-elected republic in the history of mankind.

Yet if you talk to people on a granular level, you get a sense that while everyone is very concerned with the direction the country is headed, personally, they’re just trying to make a decent living, get their kids through school, and trying to ensure everyone in their family and within their sphere of influence become better humans. People still go to church. Maybe not in as large numbers of people as they used to, but they do. People still shop. They still work hard. They vote. They still attempt to instill values into their kids. They believe in many of the same tenets of individual freedom that birthed this country. And that has survived every four-year cycle of our two political parties throwing rhetorical hammers at each other, threatening that this next election is the most important election of our lifetime.

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Ronald Reagan, at 70, and then again at 74, was way too old to be trusted with the presidency. Bill Clinton stained the office, literally and figuratively, with character flaws that oozed from, well, you get the point. George W. Bush had the White House handed to him by his daddy’s Supreme Court justices. Barack Obama was a foreigner and a Marxist. Donald Trump was a carnival barker and a fraud that only won because the Russians interfered. And Joe Biden was the toxic combination of too old, too dumb, and being wrong on every foreign policy decision in the last 40 years. And those are the ones who actually won. Mitt Romney was accused of murder. Hillary Clinton was accused of that and a whole lot more corruption, personal and professional. Heated political rhetoric during a presidential cycle is nothing new. This year, it already feels different. And that’s what troubles me about the future.

Regardless of who won the presidency, there was at least the pretense of trying to unite the country once the attack ads stopped playing. Ronald Reagan’s A Time For Choosing was one of the best Inaugural speeches ever given. George W. Bush, despite Al Gore’s rejection of the outcome of the 2000 Election, was full of hope and optimism for the future, and the country finally galvanized with him after the 9/11 attacks, albeit for too short a period of time before Democrats went back into campaign mode for 2004. Barack Obama put a lot of stock in his ability to keep the seas from rising. He offered soaring, yet empty rhetoric, on uniting. He governed in an entirely different direction. Donald Trump’s idea of uniting in 2017 was calling for everyone to join him in his vision of patriotism for the country. Joe Biden offered a return to normalcy as his unifying message, but governed further to the left than President Obama had ever dared to dream was possible. That was then. Here’s where things are different now.

We are entering the fourth year of the right track/wrong track approval number being below 20%. It’s been below that level several times – the recession in 1992 leading to Bill Clinton’s ascendancy, the ’08 recession leading to Barack Obama, and in the summer of 2020 during the low points of the pandemic. But at all of those points in time, the right track/wrong track number rebounded after a year or so. It has not rebounded since Joe Biden took office. It’s been steadily declining, and you can point to any number of the problems our society faces I indicated earlier as a reason why.

We don’t even have the nominees chosen officially by either political party as of yet. Neither Iowa, the first state in the nation to caucus, nor New Hampshire, which will vote nine days later, have begun to count ballots in early voting. And yet, the conventional wisdom, buttressed by almost universal polling, shows that the rematch in 2024 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is almost a dead lock certainty. Therefore, the political and campaign rhetoric is well-advanced into superheated mode a lot earlier than it otherwise would be by this point in the electoral cycle.

The American political left, and by this, I include almost all of national media, academia, career staffers in government, see half the country as rabid cult of Trump personality acolytes, Christian nationalists, J6 crazies who cannot be reasoned with. The left sees half the country as an entity that they simply cannot begin to comprehend why they think and believe the way they do. They view anyone who is considering voting for Donald Trump again in 2024 as a threat to democracy, because the guy to which they’re declaring allegiance is the ultimate threat to democracy.

And you don’t even have to be on the left to believe Trump is the only true existential threat this country faces. There are countless numbers of former Republicans who have created a cottage industry out of Trump Derangement Syndrome and gladly made temporary alliances with people on the left who still hate them on a whole host of policy issues, but tolerate them so long as they only talk about how much they hate Trump. Like former Trump staffer Miles Taylor.

I’m just curious where that switch to turn off the internet is. Maybe it’s secretly located in The Football that follows the President around with the nuclear launch codes. The bottom line is there’s roughly 81-million voters in this country, at least who were counted in 2020 as voters, who believe that it doesn’t matter if Joe Biden is old. It makes no difference if the country is broke and screwed up. They don’t care that the border is broken, or universities are giving girls’ volleyball scholarships out to high school boys that are on puberty blockers. They don’t care if Joe Biden is the biggest grifter ever to occupy the White House, which is no small feat. A second Trump term is a prospect far worse, so Biden gets a pass on everything. The left wants their liberal utopia, they think they’re this close to destroying the Republican Party once and for all, and they’re going to be in your face about it because this is a fight for the soul of America to the death. Harvard President Claudia Gay gets a pass. School board members take their oath of office with their left hand on a stack of “banned” gay erotica being passed off as educational materials suitable for young kids in libraries.

If the polling is to be believed, Donald Trump has a lead in the Republican primary that we simply haven’t seen in the modern era with this many alternative viable candidates in the race. Trump is certainly a flawed entity, by any measure, and yet the legal show trials trying to take him off the playing field are having a galvanizing effect on Republican voters unlike anything I’ve ever seen. To half the country, Trump is a symbol of the left’s attempt to destroy the Republican Party, and this is their way of fighting back by jamming down someone on the Deep State who will go scorched earth on them when they put him back in office. No amount of criminal or civil wrongdoing, no cringy rhetoric about NFT’s and torn pieces of arraignment suits offered as premiums, no coarse statements or ad hominem attacks are enough to knock Trump off of the top of the heap. Half the country seems to want to put Trump back in place to let the left simply choke on it as payment for what they’ve tried to do to the country. They believe Trump is the best fighter, and they expect him to lay waste to the D.C. establishment that’s currently out to get him.

Here’s the problem with all of this. If the election is between Trump and Biden, with both of them being known quantities for how they’d govern as president for four years, what happens after the election? If Biden wins going away, something I believe to be the most likely outcome due to women voters having abandoned Trump in 2020 and unlikely to ever return, will Trump accept the outcome? He really hasn’t accepted 2020. If polling shows he’s up over Biden, which is what is conventional wisdom right now, and Biden polling so dismally, to half the country, the fix will be in. Most will conclude we’re never going to have a fair election again, and prepare for the coming dystopia to follow. That’s really dangerous stuff for half the country to believe to be true. Nations all over the world have fallen with that level of lack of confidence in the underlying system of governance. The right will not just lick their chops, admit defeat, and go back to the drawing board. They will think the left has stolen the country out from under them, and I’ll leave it to your imagination down what dark road that can potentially lead.

If Joe Biden loses to Donald Trump, especially after every apparatus available to the left – the Department of Justice, media, unions organizing a massive voter turnout, throwing the kitchen sink at Trump – indicting, prosecuting, attempting to convict, silence, incarcerate, disqualify him from state ballots, do you think they’ll just sit by and say oh well, Trump won, he got the best of us this time, and we’ll have to regroup with someone about 40 years younger next time? Of course, not. The swamp, at Hillary Clinton’s direction, began to undermine Trump’s presidency the night after Election Day. The Russia hoax, the lawsuits, the investigations, the smears and leaks from career staffers at agencies, blocking appointments, all of it will look like child’s play this time. Ask yourself this question. If Donald Trump truly is an existential threat to democracy as so many on the left want you to believe, what won’t they resort to in order to make sure Trump never sees the Oval Office again, even if he wins?

My goal here is not to become a fearmonger. I’m mostly optimistic about the future. I’m, *checks notes*,  with James Carville on this one.

I still believe that by the time we get to the conventions, life will have intervened enough that neither Trump nor Biden will be the nominees, and we’ll actually have an honest election where the rhetorical temperature will be dialed down to overheated from its current setting of thermonuclear.

But if I’m wrong, and we get Trump-Biden II: Beltway Boogaloo, how do we recover as a nation from that kind of a campaign with that level of rhetoric? What words can either man say at an inaugural speech, knowing full well that neither would ever offer such words, nor be believable in delivering them, that would be remotely conciliatory?

Keep in mind, I’m not a non-combatant in all this. I’m strongly on the right side of the aisle here. I think the left will get us all killed if we don’t knock down this Marxism and resurging anti-Semitism  like a Gazan “hospital”. I’m not trying to stay neutral and say both sides are at fault here. I’m a partisan. But I believe we are headed for a spot out on the end of the plank for this coming swordfight that will be hard for either side to find their way back, regardless of who wins the battle.

For all her flaws, I still like this country a whole lot. I think she still has her best days in front of her. I’d just as soon have an election with candidates who reflect the next generation, are more forward looking, and don’t elevate the animosity half the country has with the other half to fever pitch. I hope James Carville is right. And saying that in print, along with admitting that John Fetterman has been the best-spoken Senator on important issues over the last two months, makes me look skyward to see if there are four horsemen, or a meteor tail, headed this way.