Paul Kengor: The Great Dumpster Fire 2 — the rematch?

It sure looks like Hillary Clinton is running for president again.

Clinton is expected to speak at the New York State Democratic Party Convention in Times Square later this month, prompting further speculation that she’s running. Indicators continue to mount.

It also sure looks like Donald Trump is running again.

The whole mess is looking like 2016 all over again — what Sen. Ben Sasse immortally christened for the ages: the Great Dumpster Fire Election of 2016.

In fact, it’s so looking like 2016 that Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in a D.C. federal court alleging that Hillary Clinton’s political allies paid a contractor to spy on Donald Trump in 2016 as a presidential candidate and again while Trump was president. The details of the Durham report are shocking.

The brass knuckles are out again.

It’s shaping up like a 2024 rematch, given that few people, including evidently perhaps Hillary Clinton, expect Joe Biden to run for reelection.

An old Cold War colleague of mine invokes communist China. He jokes that the lineup for 2024 is looking like the Chinese Communist Party Politburo, with three octogenarians vying for the next leadership post (Biden, Clinton and Trump would all be in their 80s in the next presidential term).

Of course, I have nothing against octogenarians. My dad is one. I would have voted for Ronald Reagan for a third term. He would have governed America as an octogenarian.

But that was Reagan. He won 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984, reelected with an Electoral College victory of 525 to 13. That was a politician the nation united around. And that’s precisely the point for 2024. Biden, Clinton and Trump are not unifiers.

In 2016, we faced the surreal spectacle of a choice between Democratic and Republican presidential nominees who were the two least-liked politicians of our generation. That hasn’t changed.

Republicans are making much of the fact that Biden had the worst one-year approval numbers of almost any president. They neglect who the other is — Donald Trump. Presidential historian Gary Scott Smith notes that Biden’s approval after one year was only 42%, the second lowest since pollsters began measuring in the 1930s. Who was the lowest? Donald Trump.

I doubt Clinton is higher. Both she and Trump seem permanently loathed by over 50% of the electorate — not just disliked but detested. She was so reviled that she lost to Donald Trump in 2016.

Could Trump beat Clinton again, in 2024? Yes.

In 2016, Hillary got close to 66 million votes and Trump roughly 63 million (46.1%). Impressively, Trump far surpassed that total in 2020, getting 74 million votes (but only 46.9%). You can’t blame Trump supporters for being dubious about losing. The incumbent had a spectacular gain in votes, and still lost.

Could Biden beat Trump again? It may be a moot question. That’s what Clinton seems to be counting on.

In the end, it adds up to a dire prospect for 2024: a rematch of the Great Dumpster Fire Election of 2016.

To be sure, I’d love to see Clinton and Trump square off in oh, say, a steel-cage match. But a presidential rematch? Count me out.

Can’t we as a people do better than this?