If I told you the leader of the free world was sowing division and insulting reporters, you’d think I was talking about Donald Trump – but Joe Biden is in charge (technically), and last week, the 200-year-old president, who appears to have had so much Botox he can no longer smile and open his eyes at the same time, called a journalist who asked him about inflation a “stupid son of a b—-”. If Trump said that, it would be grounds for impeachment. In this case, the journalist laughed it off. “Nobody has fact-checked him yet and said it’s not true,” he joked.

We’re one year into Biden having the nuclear codes (I’m not sure what’s more surprising: that he’s still alive or we are) and by almost every metric that he was supposed to be better than Trump, Sleepy Joe is making The Donald look the superior president. World leadership: Afghanistan, lost; Russia threatens Ukraine; and North Korea, which is so hungry that even Kim Jong-un has lost weight, has conducted perhaps its biggest missile test since 2017. The pandemic: 425,000 died under Trump without a vaccine, and it looks like Biden has surpassed that number with a vaccine. The economy: booming post-pandemic, true, but the recovery isn’t as strong as it could have been and prices are rising.

Then there’s the easiest job Biden had to do, one almost anyone could do, which was to not be Donald Trump. Yet whether he’s mangling his words or being deeply unpleasant, Biden has provided a Left-wing variant of Trumpism. Trump said the electoral process was riddled with fraud. This was a vast exaggeration, justifying state-wide efforts by Republicans to make voting “secure” that Biden says are an attempt to suppress turnout. Maybe he’s right. But Biden has pushed his case too far, crying racism, which is insulting, and hinting that the outcome of the midterm elections could, if the Republicans get their way, be suspicious. Midterms that polls indicate he is going to lose.

To fix the fix, Biden has floated reforms that were undermined by a Democratic senator from West Virginia, prompting the actress Bette Midler to denounce his state as “poor, illiterate and strung out” (she apologised). In response, the governor of that proud land took his English bulldog into the statehouse, lifted its bottom up to the cameras and said Ms Midler could “kiss her hiney”. The audience, which included a high school girls’ basketball team, erupted in applause.

America’s divisions are too ingrained for any president to rise above them. The gamble that Democrats took in 2020 that Biden could do so – largely because he was very old – was foolish, not least because he is signed up to the radical positions, dipped in snobbery, that have torn the country apart. Liberals think the culture war is a conservative invention. It rarely occurs to them that not only is it real and unavoidable, but they started it.

Meanwhile (whisper this), some of Trump’s decision-making is starting to look prescient. He was right to push ahead with the vaccine. He made a curiously correct choice of head of the Federal Reserve in Jerome Powell: Democrats typically pick hard money advocates to placate the markets, but Trump, being in real estate, favoured soft money, and Powell helped keep the American economy going by flooding it with cash. At the border, Trump turbocharged Obama’s hard-line approach, resulting in a drop in apprehensions in 2020.

Biden, who signalled that his administration would be more compassionate, oversaw a two-decade-high spike in illegal crossings – necessitating, now, a Trumpite reaction. After 14,000 Haitians entered the country, the administration, desperate to appear capable of doing something, sent about 8,000 home. The cultural battle is moving to conservative territory. Last Friday, several thousand cops lined the streets of New York to pay respects to an officer murdered in the line of duty. At St Patrick’s Cathedral, his widow criticised the Manhattan district attorney for a liberal agenda that includes – this is hard to believe, but true – reducing prosecutions for resisting arrest.

This is what happens when the far-Left calls the shots under a lame administration. Realising that it ain’t popular, New York Democrats are turning rapidly anti-crime – and even the mayor of San Francisco has announced a crackdown on drugs, criticising white liberals who don’t care about violence because they don’t live with it. Hence the next Democratic presidential nominee will probably sound more like Trump on some issues.

As for the Republicans, Trump is comfortably ahead in polls for presidential nominee, though there’s still time and room for, say, Florida governor Ron DeSantis to catch him. His chief problem might be not how he ran the White House, but how he left it, which is why the Democrats bring up the Capitol Hill riots at every opportunity. In the meantime, Trump is trying to turn the midterms into a launchpad for his revival by endorsing friendly candidates and sidelining his critics – a gamble, because if the midterms aren’t a historic landslide, the Republicans will see this as sabotage and likely resent him for it.
If, however, his picks do well and the Democrats take a hammering, I see no reason why he shouldn’t run, get the nomination and even win in 2024 – giving Donald Trump a chance to try to Make America Great Again, Again.