Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.
This is part one of a two-part series to help voters compare and contrast Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Part one is a meta compare and contrast analysis of five major issues in hopes the review may assist voters come Nov. 5. The second part will address 13 additional topics.
An early-April poll focused on adults’ perspective as to how Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s respective presidencies have hurt America. Two issues surrounding Biden’s term are of concern: the cost of living and immigration. Five issues about Trump’s presidency are still perplexing to voters: election security, voting rights, relations with foreign countries, abortion laws and climate change.
The 2024 choice for presidency — and issues of concern — couldn’t be more different.
The opinions of two prominent and revered writers for the conservative-oriented Wall Street Journal are referenced below. First is Alan Blinder, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. The other is William Galston, who writes the WSJ’s weekly “Politics and Issues” column. He is an expert on domestic policy, political campaigns and elections.
Immigration: On March 27, Blinder wrote: “Mr. Trump directed his followers in Congress to scuttle a `compromise’ bill to bolster the southern border — a bill Mr. Biden and many Democrats had already accepted, partially so that they could move on to other pressing matters regarding Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the budget. Mr. Trump, by contrast, preferred to let the border crisis fester so that he could use it as a campaign issue.”
Trump’s zero-tolerance policy separated thousands of migrant children from their parents, an action opposed by two-thirds of Americans. Biden ended that policy on the 13th day of his presidency. It’s ironic Trump believes immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country, while he and 97.1 percent of Americans are here due to immigration.
Abortion: Biden, a devout Catholic who has supported women’s rights for decades, has vowed he’ll restore the 1973 Roe v. Wade landmark decision if Democrats get control of Congress. Trump, a former pro-choice advocate, proudly boasts he was “able to terminate Roe v. Wade” and “honored” to do so by appointing three conservatives to the Supreme Court.
Trump’s most recent pronouncement that state legislatures and courts should control reproductive rights means – according to Republican Voters Against Trump – “33,360,789 women now live in a state where abortion is banned without exceptions for rape or incest.” A Gallup survey found American support of legal abortion access remains strong; 61 percent say overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing.”
North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Seventy-eight percent of Americans remain committed to the NATO alliance. Galston wrote: “Donald Trump has made clear that he has no intention of honoring the commitment the U.S. made when it signed the NATO charter (April 4, 1949), including the defense of other members who come under attack. For Mr. Biden, NATO is a solemn compact based on common interest and shared values. For Mr. Trump, it’s a financial transaction.”
Ukraine: Seventy-four percent of Americans view the war between Russia and Ukraine as important to U.S. national interests. Galston made his thoughts on the conflict quite clear: “The U.S. has worked for three quarters of a century under presidents of both parties to help Europe remain safe and free. Now one ignorant, amoral demagogue has persuaded a majority of one party that this effort is a mistake. A great tragedy is in the making unless leaders in both parties can find a way to thwart him.”
Israel-Hamas war: According to an April 5 PBS report, “Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza has become a major U.S. election issue. Both President Biden and former President Trump have expressed concern with the humanitarian situation and Israel’s international standing after an airstrike killed seven aid workers.” Biden, Trump, the Democratic Party and the GOP are miffed as to what to do since, according to the Pew Research Center, “Americans’ views about the Israel-Hamas war differ widely by age, as do their perceptions about discrimination against Jewish, Muslim and Arab people in the United States.”
Part two will focus on 13 topics including education, economy, trade policy, tax policy, Jan. 6 insurrectionists, infrastructure, democracy-authoritarianism and climate change.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.