It’s admittedly hard to say when the 2024 presidential campaign began – the Republican party’s fealty to Donald Trump has been so steadfast, and the nomination of the Democratic incumbent so inevitable, that a rematch of the 2020 election has already played out, on a simmer, for years.
Late-night television, the shrinking arena for self-soothing liberal political comedy, has braced for it with its usual preoccupation on all things Trump; the former president still consumes the bulk of most monologues, even during Joe Biden’s term. Biden as the competent foil to Trump’s raving, idiotic, increasingly ominous threat to democracy has, for over half a decade, been the form’s logic de rigueur.
