Opinion: Trump is president again and Democrats can blame Biden's ego

Donald Trump, despite who he is, has won the 2024 presidential election and will retake the White House for a second term.

Trump's win became official early Wednesday morning after media outlets called Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, giving him enough Electoral College votes for the White House.

Republicans made every mistake they could along the way in nominating Trump again, but Democrats threw them a lifeline in mismanaging Joe Biden's exit from the race and making Kamala Harris campaign from behind most of the way. Instead of persuading Americans to vote for Harris, they spent their efforts persuading them to vote against Trump, and that was not enough for Americans.

In the end, Biden took the presidency from Trump and gave it right back to him.

Joe Biden's ego lost Democrats the presidency

Trump required a special level of incompetence from the Democrats to win, and boy, did he get exactly that.

Democrats did their best in their pivot from Biden, but it was too little too late. In their 2020 quest to beat Trump at all costs, they boxed themselves into a corner by propping up a mentally unfit octogenarian purely for the sake of winning that election, then didn't realize it was time to change candidates early if they wanted to win this one.

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Biden had every opportunity to take the dignified way out and not seek reelection. In the face of poll numbers stacked against him and extremely apparent mental decline, any reasonable person could have seen the odds were too far stacked against them.

Instead, Biden’s ego got in the way and put Democrats in the awful situation of a last-minute switch to Harris.

Democrats had every opportunity to come clean to the American public long before Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Still, they thought the best option was to lie to Americans until everyone saw the truth.

Sure, it would have been bad for them to, at any point during Biden’s presidency, admit their lies about his fitness. However, had they done it further out of an election, they could have recovered more handily with a better candidate.

The way it played out, they had no opportunity for a true primary election and were stuck with Harris, a relatively weak option compared with many of the other prospects Democrats have in their ranks.

Now, as it turns out, Democrats’ propping up of Biden in 2020 delayed the inevitable return of Trump to the White House, rather than prevent it.

If Biden wanted to put his country first, he should have never sought reelection. Democrats should have come clean far earlier in the cycle and created a true presidential primary. Instead, they showed cowardice in backing Biden, even after it was clear he could not serve another term.

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Harris wasn't necessarily a bad choice, but a primary could have built momentum behind her or a different, stronger candidate.

She had too short a runway to truly rally Americans behind her, and thus, once again, had to be a generic Democrat running against Trump.

Biden's legacy will be a failure at his only job

The argument for Biden was always that he could defeat Trump. Even if he wasn’t objectively the best guy to do so, Democrats saw him as a contender who could take down their archenemy.

With a little help from COVID-19, he was able to do just that. Since then, he presided over historically high inflation and an overwhelming border crisis and did little to heal an extremely divided country.

Despite all of that, Democrats could be grateful to him for making sure Trump did not retake the presidency. Now, due largely to Biden’s hubris, even that legacy is tarnished.

For all the talk of how significant of a threat Trump was, Biden’s vanity blinded him to the fact that he was not the man to take him on a second time. As a result, Biden was the single biggest detriment to Democrats’ chances of preventing their nightmare scenario of a second Trump term.

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While Biden tanked his party's chances of regaining the White House, Trump was busy coalescing his own party around himself and has now been handed back the reigns of the most powerful elected office in the world. If Biden truly thought Trump was the threat he claimed he was, he certainly didn't act like it.

Biden’s legacy now, in all likelihood, will be one of an elderly politician clinging on to power to the detriment of the country he led. He had the opportunity to walk away, but his ego got in the way of a positive remembrance. Now we have President Trump again.

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Trump wins PA and 2024 election. Democrats can blame Biden