Kübler-Ross 2024: The Trump vs. Biden Stages of Grief

The 2024 presidential election has voters passing through the famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I’m currently somewhere between anger and bargaining. I hope never to arrive at No. 5. The sequence unfolds as follows:

• Denial. Out of 332 million people in the most powerful country in the world, we are forced to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden? Impossible!

• Anger. Blood pressure rises. Curses. Gnashing of teeth. My mother used to say that if Richard Nixon was elected, she’d move to Canada. But if we all moved to Canada, we’d have Justin Trudeau, who is hardly an improvement.

• Bargaining. There must be a way, we tell ourselves. The mind succumbs to magical thinking. I imagine a joint press conference in which Messrs. Trump and Biden announce to an astonished world: “The good of the country—and our personal honor—demand that we both step aside, so that American politics and government may refresh themselves. As of today, each party will be free to bring forth a field of younger candidates to compete for its nomination. It’s what the American people want, and what sanity demands.”

A grateful world praises them as “statesmen.”

Of course, Messrs. Trump and Biden won’t do it. Power and Vanity are the game, not Honor. Honor departed from American public life about the same time that Shame took a hike. Pride remains—we recently had a month of it. But Honor is a threadbare American antique.

We know that Messrs. Trump and Biden won’t—God bless them—slip away to some Elba or St. Helena, some mid-ocean spa for world-historical discards.

What to do? This is getting to be an emergency. Is there any way to force the two of them to make themselves scarce? There seems no orderly, conventional path. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department does what it can to disable Mr. Trump with indictments, but the law has a lumbering, Br’er Bear metabolism. It grinds along in low gear. There’s every chance the world will find itself watching—horrified, fascinated—as Mr. Trump proceeds from victory to victory in the primaries, heading toward nomination for the nation’s highest office while simultaneously his opponent’s Justice Department schemes, like Wile E. Coyote, to put him in prison. Both outcomes are possible: Mr. Trump in the White House or Mr. Trump in the jailhouse. Hunter Biden’s squalors, meantime, work in some obscurely Oedipal way to undermine his old man.

How to get this done? Think outside the box. One concocts modest proposals in the manner of Jonathan Swift.

Donald Trump, the Buffalo Bill or Gorgeous George

No? How about something less violent but more corrupt? What if the American people were to bribe Messrs. Trump and Biden to retire from public life? The federal government spent $6.2 trillion in fiscal 2022. A few billion bestowed equally on Messrs. Trump and Biden—a brace of golden parachutes—might seem a bargain to the American electorate. Or let Congress pass an Act of Oblivion granting both men amnesty for any crimes, past, present or future, that they may have committed.

The Constitution requires that a candidate for president be at least 35. It doesn’t address the age question at the other end. The Founders worried about someone being too young but not about his being too old. All over Washington, one sees powerful arguments—Sen. Dianne Feinstein (90), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (81), former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (83)—for a mandatory retirement age of 75.

But Mr. Biden, 80, and Mr. Trump, 77, are grandfathered in. Democracy has outsmarted itself. The mighty apparatus of American politics seems, in this pair, to have made the case for letting artificial intelligence choose our future presidents. The job is too important, and the stakes are too high, for the task to be left to a process that has such bad judgment.

• Depression. I always knew the 21st century would pull something like this.

• Acceptance. What’s wrong with bowing to the truth that democracy—the worst political system except for all the others, as Winston Churchill said—sometimes produces stupid results? Maybe Trump vs. Biden is the price we pay for the childish messes that we the people like to be free to get ourselves into from time to time.

I’m still hoping that American voters, or Americans’ traditional dumb luck, will find a way to avoid stage five. Sometimes these things work themselves out in unexpected ways. My mother never moved to Canada. But Nixon left the White House and returned to California earlier than he’d planned.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism.”