I have asked this before and I guess I’ll ask it a million times again. How the fuck are these guys your best candidates? Your authoritarian candidate is not even good at being authoritarian. Both candidates have zero charisma, can’t even stick coherent sentences together and yet here we are. Absolutely blows my mind. Rahul Gandhi has more charisma than either of these two and he has the charisma of a wet chicken. If Nigel Farage was on a debate with these two, he’d win by a landslide. Seriously, what the fuck Murica.
It's a great question and it gets to the root of dysfunction.
People will argue these points, but Trump has become a lightning rod for grievance politics today. Yes, you could easily argue there's grievance politics for Blacks (see: George Floyd) and other minorities. But (mostly) white grievance is a different kind of thing, partly rooted in feeling like the last unprotected class (while, male, Christian, hetero, etc.). Trump is very, very good at speaking to it in a caricature that resonates with them. Think Hulk Hogan doing his best President Camacho the other day. So I think you've got that wrong: with the right audience, Trump has a ton of charisma... bordering on religious redemption.
His in-party competition seems mostly too establishment to resonate as effectively. There is a lot in this group that feels there's a Deep State with cards stacked against them. It's best analog may be more Silvio Berlusconi in how Italians felt in their era: "Well if all politicians are crooks, better to have a rich crook with less need to steal."
And you're right that as an authoritarian, Putin would run circles around him. I still feel his biggest mistake in his first term was not siding up enough with the military. Political power without coercive force only gets you so far. My worry is the stacked courts and systemic failures of checks and balances we've seen to date are laying a playbook for a craftier, more Machiavellian successor in the future who won't stumble over his own ego the way Trump has.
Biden is a lifelong servant but hardly the politician that makes national and world leaders swoon to earn his favor. Normally I say the world is mostly driven by reactions to the thing rather than the thing itself. For example, Fauci is hated by the right partly by who he is and what he's done, but mostly because he's so adored by a voting opposition they despise. Biden is none of that. An enthusiastic Biden supporter is kind of a myth, really. (It's probably a healthier relationship between voters and their officials, to be honest.)
Biden is a boring career guy, elected only by the Democrats during Covid because none of the younger generation could get its act together to thwart Trump's follow-up term. Biden was experienced and competent enough to pull that off with a broader base, but more "a trusted, lesser bad" than an enthusiastic good.
The puzzler is how two politicians where age is making their wheels come off is the best the nation has to offer. I attribute that to risk-aversion, over-familiarity, and a party system where the parties serve as more of a Deep State than any government administration has. I mean, look at what happened to Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary Clinton before the 2016 DNC. We're seeing the Democratic Party doing that now with Biden, except this time I honestly think it's warranted.
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