Donald Trump and Joe Biden both want to run again

AMERICA IS ABOUT to witness an exciting new political era—or a bludgeoning grudge match almost nobody wants. Whoever ends up dispatching Donald Trump, at long last, will determine that future. Will it be a primary opponent? Or, in the general election of 2024, will it be President Joe Biden, or a Democrat representing a new direction for the party?

In the near term Mr Trump’s narcissism will remain the black hole around which American politics will revolve. For motives that are at least as much legal and psychological as they are political, Mr Trump feels he has no choice but to run for president again. Not doing so would leave him more vulnerable to the many criminal and civil cases being built against him—and, even worse from his perspective, would doom him to creeping irrelevance, helpless to prevent first the spotlight, then his donors and perhaps even his hard-core supporters from drifting away.

But the results of the midterm elections showed Mr Trump, once again, to be a loser, as many of the candidates he endorsed were rejected by voters. Meanwhile a potential primary opponent, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, emerged as a new Republican powerhouse. Republican donors and officeholders, many of whom were yearning to be free of Mr Trump, will turn to Mr DeSantis.

Others will look to Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, who offers a kinder, gentler version of the Republican cultural and social crusade than Florida’s governor. And still others will turn to Mike Pence, who served as Mr Trump’s vice-president but, thanks to his refusal to accede to that president’s demands that he corrupt the 2020 election, can present himself to the Republicans’ evangelical voters as actually having integrity. It will be interesting to learn how much that matters.

Possibly not much, because it is impossible to count Mr Trump out. He understands leverage, and that has long allowed him to play weak hands to devastating effect. He has often wielded his militant supporters as a club to intimidate potential opponents and critics, with particularly destructive effect on January 6th 2021. From his perspective, the more opponents who split the anti-Trump vote in a primary, the better.

Donald Trump feels he has no choice but to run for president again in 2024

Yet Mr Trump’s approach will also continue to limit him in a general election. His famous assertion about his backers’ loyalty—that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing their support—is only half the story. He has, in return, also found it necessary endlessly to prove his loyalty to them. He cannot even safely boast about his success in securing vaccines for covid-19; when he said at a rally that he had received a booster shot, he was booed. This obsession with cultivating his fanatics explains why Mr Trump has never had majority support, and has no hope of it now. Most Americans are heartily sick of his whole act.

In the Democratic camp, meanwhile, President Joe Biden will come under pressure not to run for another term because of his age and his low approval ratings. Once another Democrat—Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, or Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado—announces that they are running, other Democrats will pile in. History has not been kind to presidents who faced serious primary challenges, but Mr Biden may soldier on. If so, Americans may be confronted with a choice between two elderly antagonists that they overwhelmingly say they do not want.

Should Mr Biden have the wisdom to step back, Kamala Harris will point to her role as vice-president and her identity as a black woman as reasons Democrats should rally to her. Some will. But other members of the administration, including Pete Buttigieg, the transport secretary, and Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary and a favourite of centrists, will compete, and a vigorous debate over the direction of the Democrats will ensue.

Americans have been fearful about the health of their democracy. But as a new generation of leaders jockey for position in both the Republican and Democratic parties, they may well be in for an inspiring demonstration of it.■