Four more years?

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a gift to Donald Trump on February 28. In agreeing to hear his appeal of a unanimous District of Columbia Circuit Court ruling that rejected Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution, the Court abetted Trump’s strategy of delaying his trial until after the November 2024 election.

Most legal experts who aren’t currently on Trump’s payroll think the D.C. Circuit’s ruling is airtight and that Trump’s “immunity” claims are bogus. The Supreme Court could have simply decided to let the D.C. Circuit ruling stand and refuse to hear the case. Instead, it decided to weigh in—and to postpone hearing the case until the end of April.

The sloth with which the Court decided to move contrasted sharply with its decision to hear Trump’s challenge to Colorado’s decision to bar him from that state’s primary ballot for violating the U.S. Constitution’s 14^th amendment’s clause barring “insurrectionists” from public office. The Court moved to hear the case only weeks after Trump appealed Colorado’s December 2023 action. Unlike all the criminal cases that Trump is trying to delay, Trump demanded—and the Court granted—a speedy resolution to the ballot issue. After all, the 2024 primary season is in full swing!

Assuming that most justices rule against Trump—although, given this reactionary partisan court, maybe that’s not a safe assumption—the D.C. criminal case against Trump for his role in attempting to overturn his 2020 loss wouldn’t proceed for months. And it’s very likely that it wouldn’t happen at all until sometime in 2025.

And if the November 2024 election puts Trump back in the White House, the trial wouldn’t happen at all. A Trumpified Justice Department would simply drop the case against him.

The latest Supreme Court action is another reminder—if we needed one—that Trump’s legal jeopardy overhangs the 2024 presidential election. It’s another piece of evidence that the 2024 presidential election is unfolding under extraordinary circumstances, and that there are many twists and turns yet to come.

If this story had been written one day earlier, it might have focused on the meaning of the protest vote against incumbent President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary in Michigan, where more than 100,000 voters—outraged at his support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza—chose “uncommitted” on the Democratic ballot line. Instead, the Court’s decision sidelined that news.

Like it or not, the 2024 election is going to be a rematch between Trump and Biden. One octogenarian and an almost-octogenarian. One the most unpopular incumbent presidents since George W. Bush or even Harry Truman. The other is facing 91 felony charges in addition to civil judgments in which he will be forced to post more than half a billion dollars. No wonder six in 10 voters say they are “unenthusiastic” about the Trump-Biden choice.

Get ready for an ugly and interminable election season. As of right now, polls showed that Biden and Trump are essential tied with support in the low-to-mid 40s nationally. But because of the ridiculous and undemocratic Electoral College, the election will come down to how each fare in a small number of “swing states,” where the electorate is more closely divided between the candidates and their parties. Of the swing states that Biden won in 2020 (that is, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Nevada), opinion polls show that Biden is ahead in some, and Trump is ahead in others.

Neither of the main candidates starts off in a strong position. Despite the mainstream media’s and liberal elites’ assumption that Trump has some sort of magical power, he is, by many standards, a weak challenger to Biden. It’s worth remembering that he lost the popular vote to a dreadful Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 and never commanded majority support during his administration. Since he left office after his 2021 coup attempt failed, he has narrowed his appeal to a smaller (but still substantial) base of far-right evangelical Christian nationalists.

And this is not to mention his many other liabilities, from his criminal entanglements to his embrace of wildly unpopular positions, like when he asserted that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”

Trump’s campaign is more professionally run than was the ramshackle operation in 2016. But he is also not raising as much money as Biden is—or that he raised in 2019-2020—and has spent somewhere close to $60 million of the contributions made to him in 2022-2023 on his legal bills. The Republican National Committee last year had its worst fundraising year in inflation-adjusted terms since 1993. Trump’s rallies are regularly held in smaller venues than they were in 2016.

Republican billionaires who wanted to see their party nominate someone without Trump’s baggage supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the primaries. But DeSantis turned flamed out, and while Haley drew support from what seemed like a consistent 20-30 percent of Republican primary voters against Trump in the early primaries. But Haley was swept aside in the early March “Super Tuesday” primaries where Trump won hundreds of delegates.

But Trump has one advantage going for him: his opponent is Biden.

For reasons that many Democratic Party operatives still can’t figure out, Biden remains the most unpopular incumbent president seeking reelection since the 1940s. Concerns about his age and his ability to beat Trump in November have led many prominent Democratic Party supporters to call for Biden to step down. While this possibility is remote, the chatter around it shrouds Biden’s campaign.

It appears that the major reason for Biden’s unpopularity is his tepid support from what are considered Democratic “base” voters: young people, Latinos, low-income voters. Young people and Arab and Muslim Americans were the core of the Michigan “uncommitted” vote. Biden and the Democratic Party aligned GOTV (“get out the vote”) interest groups expect that the prospect of a Trump presidency will be enough to scare these voters back to the Democratic fold by November.

But whether that can happen turns on the health of those groups. And, compared to four years ago, those groups have atrophied. Fair Fight, the Georgia-based voting rights group; Justice Democrats, the incubator for progressive Democratic challengers; Sunrise Movement, the climate activist electoral group; and MoveOn.org, the long-standing liberal Democratic lobby; have all faced financial problems that have forced them to lay off staff.

For these groups, the story is the same. They are receiving far fewer donations than they did when Trump was in office. And rich Democrats, who still hold the party’s purse strings, are more interested in supporting “moderates,” “centrists” and incumbents than liberal activists. And with the Democrats running the Congress and the White House for the first two years of Biden’s term, much of this liberal Democratic “ecosystem” morphed from an anti-Trump “resistance” into a “loyal opposition” that proved itself to be more “loyal” to Biden than “oppositional.” The transformation of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from an (overhyped) “insurgent” into a virtual Biden surrogate is emblematic of that shift.

At the beginning of 2024, the Democrats have some advantages. They have been on a bit of a winning streak of late. Even though more people voted for Republicans than Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats staved off the predicted “red wave”. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned the federal right to abortion, Democrats have successfully channeled opposition to Republican “extremism” into consistent “overperformance” in elections. Abortion-related referenda on state ballots in 2024 should increase Democratic-friendly turnout. And Biden has more money on hand than Trump does.

And Biden has another advantage: his opponent is Trump.

The fact that both major political parties are running extraordinarily unpopular candidates and hoping that they can gain an edge with “double haters”—people who don’t want to vote for either candidate, but who “hate” one just less vehemently than the other—is a real indictment on the U.S. political system.

There are many other factors, from the impacts of third party efforts to Trump’s trials to “dark money” spending, that will play into the outcome as the country hurtles to November. Future articles will cover these. But for socialists, the choice between the lesser of two evils—what the Nation writer Katha Pollitt once described as an example of “liberals in hell organizing votes for Satan because Beelzebub would be even worse”—is no choice at all.