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.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.