Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.
Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am
Stuck in the middle with you.
These are lyrics from the song “Stuck in the Middle With You,” co-written by Garry Rafferty and Joe Eagan and released by their band, Stealers Wheel, in 1972. The 43 percent of voters who are independent would agree that the line “stuck in the middle” speaks to them and our 2024 presidential election.
On March 12, Joe Biden and Donald Trump locked up their respective political party nominations, starting a 244-day campaign to Nov. 5. Research reveals the vast majority of registered Democrats are committed to vote for Biden despite his octogenarian age (though former special counsel Robert Hur told Congress that the president had “ photographic recall ”).
Likewise, research finds that MAGA Republicans will vote for Trump, regardless of past legal issues (e.g., $83.3 million E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse finding, New York’s $453.5 million Trump Organization litigation, 2005-2021 Trump Organization criminal tax fraud, etc.) and pending cases (2020 federal election interference, Georgia’s RICO case over 2020 election interference, stolen classified documents, 2016 porn star hush-money election interference and 34 counts of falsifying business records).
Research also shows that due to Democratic and Republican polarization, independents will determine – on Nov. 5 – who will be America’s president in 2025.
A number of Democratic and Republican loyalists are turning against their respective party’s designated candidate. Let’s explore that issue.
Joe Biden
Back in the summer of 2022, Politico reported that RootsAction – a left-wing activist group that supported Biden’s 2020 election, tried to persuade him not to run in 2024. Se leve.
There’s sufficient rumbling that some Black, Latino and young voters are suspicious of supporting Biden again in 2024. However, 15 millennials and members of Generation Z recently endorsed Biden and joined the Students for Biden-Harris coalition in arguing that his achievements supersede his age.
Gallup’s annual governance poll reveals 63 percent of voters want a third-party choice. American Bridge, Third Way, MoveOn and Save our Republic PAC – all left-of-center groups – worry the centrist group No Labels and political activists Robert F. Kennedy, Cornel West and Jill Stein will take votes away from Biden.
Third-party candidates are Biden’s biggest re-election threat.
Donald Trump
Turmoil in Trump’s world is more troubling than in the Biden camp. Business Insider reports 40 of Trump’s 44 former cabinet members (91 percent) are not endorsing his 2024 candidacy. Wikipedia’s “List of Republicans who oppose the Donald Trump presidential campaign” features 128 individuals, from party leaders to judges to members of Congress to a former president.
Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr testified before Congress that Trump is “a troubled man” who must face justice. Former Vice President Mike Pence announced on Fox News that his ex-boss has strayed too far from conservative philosophy. Both are not endorsing Trump’s campaign.
A GOP group calling itself Republican Voters Against Trump launched a $50 million ad campaign featuring first-person video testimonials of more than 100 former Trump voters.
The Guardian notes Fox News on-air personalities’ relationship with Trump started eroding with the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt and ensuing $1.6 billion lawsuit by Dominion against the network.
On Jan. 25, the Wall Street Journal (like Fox, controlled by the Murdoch family) criticized Trump for meddling in congressional talks on border security and his blatant threat to permanently bar Republicans from the MAGA camp who supported Nikki Haley’s campaign. The Journal called his actions “a high act of self-sabotage” and “it would be a good reason to vote for someone else.”
The WSJ-Trump romance has been eroding for years as witnessed by the editorial board’s leading op-ed on Nov. 9, 2022, titled “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”
Biden and Trump
Turnover of employees is a standard measure of business stability (or chaos). Trump had a 35 percent first-year turnover of senior executives while Biden only had an 8 percent first-year turnover. By Trump’s last day of office, 60 of the 65 senior executives (92 percent) had left his administration. Currently, Biden’s turnover rate is 71 percent.
Between now and Nov. 5, continue to do your independent homework, versus being a lemming and getting hoodwinked by the political parties’ disinformation, misinformation and propaganda.
Let’s admit it. We have clowns to the left, jokers to the right and here I am – like 43 percent of voters – stuck in the middle with you.
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.