VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Biden reelection strategy

President Joe Biden polls at or below 40 percent approval. Historically, such unpopularity has made it almost impossible for a president to be re-elected.

Biden is not so much an octogenarian as an unhealthy and prematurely aging 80-year-old. It is America’s irony that he is fit for almost no other job in the country other than the presidency, which apparently allows for a three-day-a-week ceremonial role while others in the shadows run the country.

So how does Biden become renominated and re-elected, as polls show he is behind in almost every critical swing state on nearly every issue?

Answer: not by campaigning, not by championing his record and especially not by doubling down on his neo-socialist and now unpopular agendas.

Instead, his campaign is focused on four other strategies to beat former President Donald Trump.

First, left-wing local, state and federal prosecutors are tying Trump up in court on crimes that have never been seen before and will never be again after the election. All the cases are politically motivated, with many coordinated with the White House.

Even if Trump is not convicted by blue-state prosecutors, in blue-state courtrooms, in front of blue-state juries, he will lose critical campaigning time.

Trump may end up paying out $1 billion in legal fees and fines. At 77, the monotonous days in court are designed to destroy him financially, physically and mentally.

Biden and his operatives know that, in the long term, they may have fatally damaged the American legal system with such judicial sabotage. But short-term, they hope to destroy Trump before the ballots are cast.

Second, in his fourth year, Biden is suddenly selling government favors to special-interest voting blocs, or hoping to bring short-term relief to voters at the expense of long-term damage to the nation.

For elite college students and graduates, there are now billions of dollars in student-loan cancellations, despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring such targeted contractual amnesties illegal.

For consumers, before the election, Biden will likely drain the last drops from the critical Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices — now sky-high due to his previous disastrous green policies.

If that is not enough, Biden has ordered Ukraine not to hit Russian oil facilities to avoid panic in the global petroleum markets before early and mail-in balloting begins.

Biden will quietly jawbone the Federal Reserve Bank to lower interest rates and reinflate the economy, despite his own creation of hyperinflation that caused interest rates to rise in the first place.

He will pander to Arab-American voters in swing-state Michigan by cutting arms deliveries to Israel, even as it seeks to destroy the killers of Oct. 7.

And if that mollification is not sufficient to win Michigan, he will suddenly slap higher tariffs on imported Chinese electrical vehicles to win back apostate union auto workers.

Three, the left learned after 2016 that the only way to beat Trump is to change the way Americans vote.

So under the cover of the COVID-19 lockdown, the left sued in critical states to reduce Election Day to a mere construct, while 70 percent of voters mailed in their ballots or voted by early, rolling balloting over many weeks.

The key was the inability to fully authenticate votes, given the old practice of showing up on Election Day and presenting an ID was declared “racist.”

Four, Biden, as he did in 2020, will outsource his campaign to the media, 95 percent of which is left-wing. Talking televised heads will claim Biden is “sharp as a knife” while focusing on Trump’s tweets, Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen and lurid but irrelevant testimonies that permeate Trump’s court appearances.

Trump will continue to hold weekend-long, massive 100,000-person rallies, even in blue states. Meanwhile, Biden’s fixers in the media, administrative state and legal community will counter that even with no crowds and no campaigning, Biden can win through 24/7 nonstop “October Surprises” — all summer long.

So expect more false “Russian collusion,” “laptop disinformation” and “Jan. 6 insurrection” hoaxes and their new replacements designed to smother the airwaves with salacious scandals nonstop.

Biden’s fading tenure is similar to the last sad months of Woodrow Wilson’s second term, when in 1919-20, the country was assured that a bedridden president was somehow hard at work, even as his wife, doctors and handlers kept everyone else away.

Biden’s keepers do not seem to care about the president’s own failing health or his dismal polls. They discount his rare, anemic and disastrous public appearances. They laugh off the huge Trump rallies.

And they certainly could not care less about the bad optics of pandering to special interests at the expense of the country or the damage done to the American legal and balloting systems.

Instead, Bidenites believe they can re-elect an unhealthy, unpopular and unsuccessful president by any means necessary.

And they may be right.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a classicist and historian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Contact him at authorvdh@gmail.com.