President Joe Biden has a 2024 problem: He is massively unpopular. Biden’s approval ratings have sunk throughout his term in office, like a lead balloon on Jupiter. Current polling suggests that if the 2024 presidential election ends up being a Biden-Trump redux, enough voters might hold their noses to re-elect Trump.

There are a number of reasons for Biden’s growing unpopularity. First and foremost is his abandonment of multiple commitments during his 2020 campaign against Trump to govern from the middle. Biden has, at almost every fork in the road, chosen to appease those on the far left of the Democratic Party. The people he’s alienated over this — those who held their noses and voted for “not Trump” — are not going to easily forget.

Crime, immigration, green energy, Title IX — you name it, Biden throws junk pitches from the left side of the plate. Anyone who has the temerity to disagree, regardless on what grounds, is labeled with the epithet MAGA Republican. Further, Biden is no man of his word. No wonder centrist Sens. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Krysten Sinema (I-Arizona) are torpedoing large parts of Biden’s agenda in the Senate, with glee.

There’s the growing evidence of corruption in the Biden family. At the very least, the Biden family has been involved in business dealings that push the boundaries of legal and ethical decorum. On this account I’m going to withhold judgment until the multiple ongoing investigations are completed. But it sure doesn’t look good.

Then there is Biden himself. Right up until Biden became president, I actually kind of liked him. I bought the middle-class sensibility, “Scranton Joe,” shtick. He’d always seemed to be mostly just a goofy, gaff-prone politician with a good heart who was sincere in his desire to work across the aisle in the Senate.

Unfortunately, the real Joe Biden may be one of the most plainly arrogant politicians to ever spend a lot of time in and around the White House. His word isn’t any good either. When it comes to dishonesty and brazen influence peddling in the service of political power, he makes LBJ look like a bit of a piker.

But Biden is merely a symptom of a greater problem on the left. In a time where Republicans, who are saddled with Trump, ought to be easy to defeat in elections, they are not. It’s because of the stain of Trump that many Republicans lost close races in the last cycle. But that’s changing. Much of the country is at least equally disaffected with the progressive democratic movement, whose titular leader just happens to be Joe Biden.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Biden is actually a leader in the progressive movement; I think that he’s just latched onto that particularly meaty plank in today’s political flotsam. I’d actually respect Biden more if I thought that he actually believed some of the silly stuff that he pushes. But hardly anyone who’s been around is actually that much of a chucklehead.

Morally, I see little difference between Biden and Trump. My stomach churns whenever I hear either speak. These two are far from the best that our country has to offer and are all the evidence anyone needs in favor of the proposition that our political system needs a new set of overhead cams.

I don’t see Trump emerging as the 2024 Republican candidate. Though he may be very popular with a segment of the right, his behavior has alienated a lot of Republicans who actually liked and supported Trump’s policies. I see Florida governor Ron DeSantis emerging as the ‘24 Republican candidate.

If it comes down to DeSantis-Biden in 2024, I think that DeSantis wins. The left will have, once again, done it to themselves. I think that the two principal reasons for this rebuke will be Biden’s handling of the economy and his promotion of woke, virtue-signaling, leftist priorities to the detriment of everyone beyond his progressive base.

What most of the country sees that those who live in progressive bubbles do not see is that the far left and their representatives in the White House and Congress don’t much care about most of us as fellow citizens or human beings; they care about us as symbols that may be used to either promote or oppose their priorities.

Progressives in NYC, for instance, had over 40 opportunities to demonstrate their compassion and willingness to help Jordan Neely, a mentally ill man who recently died after he threatened people on a subway train in NYC and was put into restraint by a passenger, Daniel Perry, and others.

Neely, a habitual criminal and drug abuser, had recently assaulted a 67-year-old woman, leaving her with serious injuries. He’d pleaded guilty to child endangerment for dragging a 7-year-old girl down the street. Yet to progressives, his usefulness is not as a human being who needed help; it is as a Michael Jackson impersonator who needlessly died at the hands of a former U.S. Marine who acted out of racism rather than just trying to thwart an assault from an obviously crazy person.

The list of progressive overreach goes on: illegal immigration, crime, homelessness, assaults on free speech, DEI — all things which are supported by virtually no one outside of progressive bubbles. One area in which I think that we’ve reached peak woke is with regard to the “gender identity” brouhaha. Allowing males to compete in women’s sports is an idea popular with absolutely no one outside of those in a few far-left bubbles.

Idaho is among many states that have recently passed laws dealing with gender-affirming care for minors. For the record, I am mostly against these laws. Families should have the right to determine what’s best for their children. It’s the medical profession, rather than the government, that should be dealing with this. It’s on account of the fact that the medical profession has largely punted that this issue is being taken up in state legislatures. Someone has to address it. If it’s not going to be those who should, you’re going to get the “B” team.

One of the things that intrigues me about those vocal in condemning these laws, specifically a pair of local doctors who specialize in gender transition and a liberal former Idaho Supreme Court justice, is their willful ignorance concerning the lack of scientific data explaining the surge in gender identity crises in children — something that was virtually unknown a decade ago.

According to the pair of doctors and the good judge, those who have concerns about irreversible gender transitions for minors, including many scientists and physicians, are bigoted, uneducated, and unenlightened fanatics. I suspect that this is more about feeling superior to those they are predisposed to dislike than an abundance of well-considered care for mentally fragile kids.

The judge is entitled to his ill-informed opinion. The doctors are less so. Just give this madness about five more years. At that time, we can probably all sit back and watch physicians who used off-label drugs and surgery to address what are most likely mental health issues in children be sued for malpractice when their victims figure out that the adults in the room were actually not.