A Republic of Clowns: Trump, Biden, and the Two-Party Pantomime
It is the tragicomic fate of the American republic that it continues to lurch from the doddering to the demagogic, from the vacuously polite to the vulgarian grotesque, as though it were trapped in a slapstick routine without a punchline. Were this not the world’s most powerful nation, it might simply elicit pity. Instead, it commands a mix of horror and schadenfreude from those outside its borders and outright despair from those within.
The second coming of Mr Trump, a walking conflagration of vanity and resentment, has been greeted with hosannas by the faithful and groans by those still capable of sober thought. His self-declared mission to make America great again now feels like a Möbius strip of rhetoric, endlessly looping back on itself without resolving into anything resembling greatness—unless greatness is measured by the metric of how thoroughly one man can conflate personal grievance with national purpose.
Contrast him, if you will, with Mr Biden, the erstwhile custodian of the status quo, whose presidency was less a chapter in history than a footnote in inertia. Biden governed as if he were attending a wake—polite, mournful, and perpetually reassuring that everything would be alright, even as the republic's foundations groaned beneath him. His reliance on bromides about healing the soul of the nation rang as hollow as a sermon delivered to an empty pew.
If Trump embodies the brash id of the American experiment—unapologetically selfish, gleefully ignorant, and always on the make—Biden represents its staid superego, equally blind to the nation’s moral decay but draped in the comforting garb of decency. They are not opposites; they are two sides of the same debased memecoin, minted in a political system that rewards mediocrity and punishes originality.
Trump's theatrical boorishness is often derided as an aberration, yet it is quintessentially American: he is the distilled essence of a reality-television culture that confuses fame with merit and outrage with substance. His rallies are carnivals of grievance, his governance a manic exercise in tearing down what others have built. But what, pray, has he built other than a cult of grievance, a tower of lies, and a reputation gilded in hubris and fast food wrappers.
Biden, for his part, is the perfect avatar of the Democratic Party’s moribund centrism, a figure so wedded to compromise that he would negotiate with a guillotine. He presided over a Washington more polarized than ever, his mild demeanor doing little to stem the tide of resentment that has hollowed out the political middle. Biden’s greatest achievement may well have been his ability to disappear into the wallpaper of his own administration, leaving his aides to flail at crises he barely seemed to comprehend.
For all their apparent differences, Trump and Biden share more than their supporters might care to admit. Both are men of the establishment, despite Trump’s crude pantomime of populism. Biden embodies its genteel rot, while Trump rages at it only because it failed to bow sufficiently low before his gilded throne. Both have presided over administrations that served the interests of the powerful, albeit with differing rhetoric.
Where Biden mouthed platitudes about unity while advancing policies that perpetuated inequality, Trump dispensed with such pretenses entirely, governing as a king dispensing favors to his courtiers. Both left the American working class bereft, their wages stagnant, their futures uncertain, their faith in institutions eroded.
And here lies the bitterest truth: neither Trump nor Biden is the disease. They are merely the symptoms of a system that is itself sick unto death. The two-party duopoly that strangles American politics is a grotesque carnival of power, where policy is dictated not by reason or need but by the craven demands of donors, lobbyists, and the perpetually outraged bases that keep the coffers full.
The Republican Party, long since hijacked by fanatics and opportunists, now resembles a cult more than a political organization. Its ethos is one of nihilism—government is the problem, but only when the other side governs. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party staggers on as a zombie of its former self, incapable of articulating a coherent vision beyond we’re not them. Its fixation on identity politics as a panacea for systemic inequality is as shallow as it is performative.
If the republic is to be saved it will not be through the ascendancy of one party or the other. The rot runs too deep. It is a problem of structure, not personality; of a system that incentivizes division, mediocrity, and short-term thinking. The perpetual oscillation between figures like Trump and Biden is not a pendulum but a wrecking ball, swinging wildly from one side to the other as it pulverizes what remains of the American experiment.
Perhaps it is time for Americans to consider what they have long dismissed as unthinkable: the abolition of their sclerotic duopoly and the birth of a genuinely pluralistic democracy. Until then, the republic will remain a stage for clowns, each act more farcical than the last.