Schmidt is a syndicated columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The dislike for the candidates at the top of both parties’ tickets is so unpalatable, “Literally Anybody Else” might be coming to a ballot near you. While the dissatisfaction with the race is palpable, the basis for the disappointment in the candidates could not be more different.
Dustin Ebey, a 35-year-old U.S. Army veteran and seventh grade math teacher in the Dallas suburbs, legally changed his name to Literally Anybody Else and is running for president of the United States to prove this point.
The Texas man says he believes anybody else should be president instead of the Democratic and GOP frontrunners. "America should not be stuck choosing between the 'King of Debt' (his self-declaration) and an 81-year old. Literally Anybody Else isn't a person, it's a rally cry," Else's campaign website stated before being updated, according to
Else told a Dallas news outlet that his campaign wasn't about sending him to the White House; rather, he said he wanted to give voters a chance to express their unhappiness with Trump's and Biden's candidacies. "People are voting for the lesser of two evils, not someone they actually believe in or support. People should have the option to vote for someone who resembles and represents them, not the lesser of two evils. I reject that,” he said.
Both candidates are disliked by a majority of Americans. A YouGov-University of Massachusetts Amherst poll conducted in January showed that 45 percent of Americans believe a Biden-Trump rematch is bad for the country.
In a ABC-Ipsos survey, 36 percent of Americans said they trust Trump to do a better job leading the country as president, while 33 percent trust Biden more – and 30 percent trust neither.
A New York Times-Siena College poll from March found that 19 percent of voters disapproved of both men, but Biden is slightly less hated, with a spread of 7 points between them (45 percent to 38 percent).
The voters reflected in these surveys have been labeled “double haters” and they make up as much as one-fifth of likely voters according to various polls. This group is likely to decide the 2024 election.
Judith Smith, from Moncks Corner, S.C., discussed the choice between Trump and Biden with The Guardian. “That’s like choosing between a hedgehog and a porcupine,” she said.
I disagree with Smith here and would suggest changing the analogy from animals to fruit. It is like choosing between an overripe, mealy apple and an orange that is completely rotten and you don’t really want to eat either.
Since we live in a hyper-partisan world, the percentage of the electorate who will not vote party line has been shrinking. Those voters who are up for grabs, including the “double haters,” should consider weighing both the character and policy proposals of each, while being mindful of the fallacy of moral equivalence. This fallacy occurs when one suggests that two morally different actions are equivalent, simply because they share some similarities. This is no easy task for responsible citizens as they consider the characteristics and qualifications of any candidate before Election Day.
While neither man is popular, it seems too easy to fall into the moral equivalency trap and to compare them as if they were the same.
Trump incited an insurrection and is an adjudicated rapist. He faces 91 felony counts after being indicted four times within the last year. He is accused in Georgia and Washington, D.C., of plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden. He is also accused in Florida of mishandling classified documents, and in Manhattan of falsifying business records stemming from hush money payments, made during his 2016 campaign, to a pornographic film actress.
Biden, on the other hand, is an octogenarian who many feel is not at the top of his game and has an even more unpopular running mate. He is trying to hold together a fragile coalition that stems from progressives to the left of him and soft Republicans to his right. He struggles to make any one faction in his alliance particularly happy. One has to look no further than Biden’s tightrope walk on foreign policy, specifically the Israel-Hamas war or securing our southern border.
Literally Nobody Else is not likely to gain ballot access, and therefore the double haters like him will need to go back and make the choice between not voting, voting for a third-party candidate, or judging Biden and Trump on their merits and which of the two “represents” them more.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.