The 2020 Election Offers Low Spirits and High Comedy

Anyone not already committed to a political hard line can’t get excited about either candidate.

How is it that in what has been called the most important presidential election in our nation’s recent history, I find myself viewing the candidates as essentially comic characters? The one man with his baroque hairdo, the other with his sad hair plugs; the one who speaks before he thinks, the other who doesn’t seem able to think very well while he is speaking—these two men, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, seem like nothing so much as puppets. They are two Punches with no Judy, each beating the other with his brickbat, which one assumes they will continue to do right up to Nov. 3.

My guess is that most people tend to vote, as I have through much of my life, for lesser-evil choices. Sometimes, true, it seems that you need the political equivalent of a Geiger counter to tell. In 2020 instead of a lesser evil, a lesser-comic choice is on offer, in which one of the reigning questions is: Which of the two candidates is less preposterous?

People with TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, tend to view Mr. Trump as our Mussolini, a figure of genuine evil, who could scarcely be more dangerous, as they like to add, “to our democracy.” Mr. Biden has no syndrome in his name, but there is clearly something we might call BA, Biden Apathy: a condition in which it is impossible to get up any enthusiasm for a man who has been in government for 50 years without achieving anything notable. Mr. Trump tells us that the salvation of America depends on his election; Mr. Biden that his deceased son, Beau, wanted him to rescue the country by running for president. Ross Perot, where are you now that we need you?

“It’s Donald Trump’s America” is the new mantra of Democratic Party strategists who wish to counter Mr. Trump’s laying the blame for recent violence and looting on Democratic governors and mayors. Mr. Biden meanwhile, in what today passes for a courageous stand, has finally come out against violence and looting. Mr. Trump tells us that the election of Mr. Biden will result in a socialist America; Mr. Biden that the president’s re-election will mean the end of the country as we know it.