Donald Trump is actually the moderate in this race.

From The Dirty Little Secret of the 2024 Campaign by Ben Shapiro.  He makes a point interesting from two different perspectives.  

We all know what's going wrong for Biden: He's widely perceived as too old to be running again; Americans remain unhappy with the economy, deeply enraged over border policy and alarmed by the brush fires around the world. Biden came into office promising normalcy, and he has instead delivered chaos.

But there's something else going on, too.

Joe Biden is losing to Donald Trump because of a dirty little secret: Donald Trump is actually the moderate in this race.

On nearly every issue, Trump is closer to the median voter than Biden. Biden won the Democratic primaries over Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 because voters thought he would tack toward the center, away from the insanity of The Squad in Congress -- borderline psychotics like Reps. Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Instead, he entered office believing that he had a mandate for transformation, that he could become our age's FDR or LBJ.

And so Biden abandoned the middle.

It is a short column and Shapiro touches lightly on the data that supports the argument that Trump is closer to the median voter (often much closer) than is Biden on issues such as abortion, illegal immigration, the economy, inflation, foreign wars and foreign entanglements, etc.  I think there is a much more robust case to be made but it would take many more column inches than Shapiro apparently has.

I accept that there is a strong case to be made that Trump is the policy moderate.  That's not how the legacy mainstream media portrays him, but, well,  . . . the legacy mainstream media.  

It is a sharp insight and I think goes with a different argument that can be made and is already accepted in some corners.  Sometimes quite explicitly.  

There is an argument to be made that Obama was divisive and much of that divisiveness was due to his hard left ideology and policies.  While personally popular, Obama's policies were not, leading to two sets of off-cycle catastrophic losses to the Democratic Party, nearly wiping out their bench of rising young stars.  

Among Obama advocates, there has long been a desire that he should have had a third administration to bring some of those policies to fruition and many regard the Biden administration as indeed that third term.  An argument bolstered by the prevalence of Obama administration personnel in the Biden White House and throughout the administration.  It is far easier to identify explicit Obama people than it is to find anyone who is clearly and solely a Biden acolyte.

While Trump's administration was portrayed, sometimes with merit, as shambolic and chaotic, it was actually pretty astonishingly effective for a single term.  Peace in the Middle East (Abraham Accords), no new wars and withdrawal from several that were going on when he arrived in office, low inflation, low unemployment, low crime, low interest rates, falling illegal immigration.  Law and Order, Economic growth, National Security tend to dominate Gallup's Most Important Problem surveys year in and year out and on all three, Trump was doing better than expected and better than Obama had done.  

And better than Biden has done.  The Obama/Biden radical policies which carry a lot of ideological weight, carry almost no weight in terms of what the public considers most important:  DEI, ESG, Affirmative Action, Student Debt Forgiveness, Rapprochement with Iran, Inflation, High Interest Rates, Increasing number of wars, Abortion on demand, Open borders and sanctuary cities, Income inequality, Defunding the police, Arresting journalists and political opponents, suppressing free speech, etc.  All issues near and dear to the Biden Administration and either irrelevant or opposed by the great center of the electorate.  

Is Trump the moderate?  More explicitly, are Trump policies closer to those issues of importance to the median voter than are Biden's?  I suspect that Shapiro is correct.

There is a second and tangential point that I had not thought of but that Shapiro indirectly raises.  

Biden won the Democratic primaries over Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 because voters thought he would tack toward the center, away from the insanity of The Squad in Congress -- borderline psychotics like Reps. Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.

I often reference Salena Zito's observation made about Trump and the media during the 2016 campaign.

It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

I think her observation has remained true for eight years.  The legacy mainstream media has always chosen to play word games and take Trump's rhetoric literally and are befuddled when the listening public perfectly understand what he is actually saying.  He is a clever and entertaining speaker, he works a crowd, he uses words to amuse and goad.  The crowd understand exactly what he is saying and doing and don't mind the rhetorical exuberance.  

It is a staple of 2016, 2020, and probably again in 2024.  Trump does many loud, raucous, entertaining rallies everywhere, all the time.  He engages with the public and his supporters.  They have a good time.  Biden does not do any of this.  No rallies.  No engagement.  No entertainment.  

I had not considered that Zito's observation about Trump was also, in a fashion, relevant to Biden in 2020.  Certainly the legacy mainstream media was all in support of Biden and there was none of the issue of manufactured outrage over rhetorical excess that they lobbed at Trump.  But politically, Shapiro is correct.  Everyone discussed and knew that Biden had to campaign during the primaries to the left of Sanders in order to win over the party ideologues and everyone knew he would tack back to the center during the election.  

Everyone took him seriously and not literally.  They knew the positions during the primary races were not serious, they were a necessary sop to the fanatics but that Biden was seriously a man of the center.  His words and actions were not to be taken literally.  

The public was treating both Trump and Biden the same - they distinguished necessary rhetoric from actual policy positions.  It was only the legacy mainstream media who were holding the two candidates to different standards.  

I had not quite made that connection that both Trump and Biden had rhetorical positions deviant from what everyone understood their positions to be.  I focused only on the media's clear willful misrepresentation of Trump.  But their choice of willful misrepresentation was against Trump and it was for Biden.  The two candidates were using the same tactics but the legacy mainstream media responded inversely.  

A fruitful, if abbreviated column

Trump is the policy moderate in the 2024 race as demonstrated by his past actions and achievements and his current policies and that is in diametric contrast to those of Biden.

The public apply the same filter to both candidates, taking them both seriously not literally.  They discount words and actions based on circumstance and context.