With Biden and Trump in 2024, News Audiences Have Seen It All Before

Midway through rewatching an 18-year-old episode of The Office, I had an epiphany. Suddenly, the contours of the 2024 presidential election started to make sense. The series, which ran 2005–2013, is a time capsule: Look, these employees all show up in person and slack off without Slack! There are no “hot desks,” just plain desks. And in the universe of The Office, Donald Trump is just a flamboyant reality star who likes to declare “You’re fired!” The time in which the show is frozen is, I suppose, why I love to rewatch it.

I first got hooked on The Office by watching illicit copies of episodes shared through torrent sites, back when Netflix shipped DVDs and Hulu sounded like it pertained to hoops. I liked the characters enough to become a faithful broadcast viewer, though, tuning in to NBC for appointment viewing, right at the point in media history where time and day were starting not to matter.

Reliving the old episodes made me keenly aware of context—a character’s quip about Trump’s The Apprentice, innocuous and synergistic then, feels obnoxious now—but mostly it made me conscious about memory. Not only had I forgotten some regular characters, but I had memory-holed entire arcs. Plot twists and cliffhangers and recurring punch lines—everything unfurled almost like I was a first-time viewer, a newcomer to the world of The Office, when in fact I was such a dedicated fan that I once took an Office tour of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the show’s imagined hub. How could I remember so little? Why didn’t I recall more from my last binge? As I worried about the weaknesses of my own recollections, the looming rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden registered differently.

While polls have consistently shown that most Americans do not want to replay the 2020 election, we seem bound to anyway. Reruns can be surprisingly seductive, especially if the details are fuzzed over, a little or a lot. Familiar characters and settings can be comforting.

He said what? He defamed whom? And voters reacted how? Where is the next rally? What will they say next? Shh, the commercials are over.

Is this how I remembered it?

The United States is a gerontocracy and most people know it’s a problem, even though the political system isn’t providing solutions. One poll in mid-2022 found that only 3 in 10 Americans wanted Biden to run again, and barely 4 in 10 wanted Trump to run. But both men are, so they are the main actors in a show that we’ll be watching (or avoiding) for another year plus.

With Trump turning 77 and Biden approaching 81, age may be a frame for the entire election. And if this season is, not to belabor the metaphor, a rerun, then “Biden is too old” is likely to become one of the only storylines. Substitute “age” with “emails” and Biden with Hillary Clinton, and you’ll see what I mean. Democrats are pre-fuming about it. When I have talked with Biden family members and allies, they don’t deny age is a factor, they just express frustration that it gets turned into the only factor. This is in large part due to the incessant repetition of the right-wing media machine, which has redefined Biden as so aged that he cannot possibly lead. And this is the ultimate repeat.

There are some new faces this time around, however. Virtually all of the country’s top newsrooms have changed leaders in the past couple of years, which might mean less Trump-era barrage but also a loss of muscle memory. Millennials have been tasked with covering politicians more than twice their age: CNN has elevated Kaitlan Collins, 31, to its long-vacant 9 p.m. time slot; NBC has a campaign trail star in Dasha Burns, also 31; and CBS has Robert Costa, 37. They exist in one realm of media—reportorial, meant to appeal to all, massively distrusted by MAGA warriors—while conservative commentators like the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens, 34, and Fox’s Kayleigh McEnany, 35, exist in another. This split is a relatively new phenomenon—Tucker Carlson, 54, was on MSNBC lo 15 years ago—but it’s critical to see it for what it is. The former tries to inform viewers while the latter seeks to activate voters. And when there’s a crossover episode between the realms, there’s a collision.

Part of why Trump’s recent town hall on CNN was so controversial was because it was, for all intents and purposes, a repeat. In the spirit of this column, I rewatched Anderson Cooper’s March 2016 town hall with Trump. The similarities were uncanny, right down to the white CNN-logo mugs onstage. The main difference was that in 2016, Trump was still a political novelty. “Fact-checking” was barely a buzzword back then. Cooper did plenty of it, though, while expressing disbelief at some of Trump’s boasts—“You’re the only one who can solve terror problems in Pakistan?”—and channeling the audience’s exasperation with Trump’s childish conduct. “After saying that you were going to spill the beans about Heidi Cruz, you retweeted an unflattering picture of her next to a picture of your wife,” Cooper said. “Come on.”

Trump: “I thought it was fine. She’s a pretty woman.”

Cooper: “You’re running for president of the United States.”

Trump: “Excuse me, I didn’t start it. I didn’t start it.”

Cooper: “But, sir, with all due respect, that’s the argument of a five-year-old.”

“No, it’s not,” Trump said, adopting another schoolyard approach.

Everything about the Trump era was foreshadowed at that earlier town hall: his lies, his deflections, his denialism, and his demagoguery. Cooper caught Trump in multiple contradictions, but Trump’s answers weren’t the point: the projection of power was. On Jeb Bush: “I beat these people badly.” On Scott Walker: “I hit him very hard.” On Rand Paul: “I drove Rand Paul out of the race.”

I learned a lot about Trump when it originally aired. But now, is there anything truly new to learn about the man? Repeats can be as distressing as they are enticing.

“I had so many flashbacks to 2016” while watching the recent redux, said Amanda Carpenter, Ted Cruz’s former communications director turned Never Trump crusader. Carpenter was a paid CNN commentator back when I anchored the network’s Reliable Sources program. She told me she thought CNN organized the town hall as “a sweetener, an entrée to Donald Trump, to say, ‘Please let us be part of the 2024 political process.’ ”

At what cost? While some critics credited Collins for fact-checking, the smartest takes on the night argued that “checking” Trump doesn’t have that effect. “The conflict, and his bullying of the journalist, is the essence of the performance,” Washington Post opinion writer Paul Waldman tweeted afterward. “It says, ‘We will create our own reality. You have no power over us. And the more frustrated you get, the more we win.’ ” That’s what was happening when Collins, having interjected truth into yet another Trump yelp, said, “The election was not rigged, Mr. President. You can’t keep saying that all night long. You cannot keep saying the election was rigged.” But Trump could keep saying it, and he did.