Just over three weeks ago, Joe Biden and Donald Trump met for a debate. The most devastating moment was when Biden said, “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the … the … the … total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.” Trump responded, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he knows either.” The general impression, even for many erstwhile Biden loyalists, was that if this man were a private citizen, his children would be having a difficult conversation about moving him to an assisted living facility.

Today, he finally threw in the towel. We’ve already heard a lot of pablum about how this was an act of extraordinary patriotism — that Biden sacrificed his personal ambitions for the sake of saving the country from Trump. The reality is that he stubbornly clung to the nomination for weeks after it was abundantly clear to all but his most fanatical loyalists that he was incapable of winning. We’ve also heard a lot of tributes to his presidency that leave out his shameful decision to provide diplomatic cover and material assistance to Israel in its genocidal rampage in Gaza that has displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s population and killed more children than had been killed in all the war zones in the world in recent years.

But you don’t have to give Joe Biden praise that he absolutely does not deserve to recognize that it’s good that he dropped out of the 2024 race. A Trump victory would be a disaster. At the debate on June 27, Trump outflanked Biden from the right on Palestine, bizarrely saying that Biden had become a Palestinian — “a bad Palestinian.” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is rooting for a Trump victory, knowing that the former president would give Israel an enthusiastic green light for far worse slaughter than we’ve seen in the past ten months. And all indications suggest that Trump’s return to the White House would unleash a wave of domestic cruelty.

At the very least, we can expect Trump do what he did last time. He cut taxes for rich people, he shredded workplace safety regulations, and he filled the National Labor Relations Board with strike-breakers. And the worst could get much worse.

At the Republican National Convention (RNC), delegates were given signs to wave that demanded “Mass Deportations Now.” Speaker after speaker falsely blamed undocumented immigrants for fentanyl entering the country and thus for the epidemic of Americans dying of fentanyl overdoses.

There are, at a conservative estimate, eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States. As Radley Balko points out, if Trump actually follows through on “Mass Deportations Now,” making a serious attempt to round up and deport  all eleven million, there’s no possible scenario that doesn’t look like an authoritarian nightmare. In fact, it’s plausible that Trump would put Stephen Miller — the only senior staffer who made it through all four years of his first term who isn’t a Trump family member — in charge of the operation. And Miller has spelled out exactly what he wants to do in interviews.

As Balko writes:

Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants. He plans to house the millions of immigrants he wants to expel in tent camps along the border, then use military planes to transport them back to their countries of origin.

Put that together with Trump’s constant fearmongering about immigrants allegedly being sent straight from prisons and insane asylums to the US border, and how some of them are “not people,” and this could be a nightmare.

Anyone who would rather not find out should be happy that Biden has dropped out. He almost certainly would have lost. But that doesn’t mean that Vice President Kamala Harris — or whoever else might replace him — will win the election. The ability to complete sentences is a good first step. But the content of those sentences still matters quite a bit.

Even before the extent of Biden’s cognitive difficulties became apparent, he may have torched his reelection prospects by backing Netanyahu’s grotesque assault on the population of Gaza. No matter how he’d performed on the debate stage, it would have been very hard to imagine, for example, Biden winning my home state of Michigan — which is both a crucial swing state and home to the largest concentration of Arab American voters in the country. A different nominee who is not as closely associated with that horror might make a difference, especially if he or she made a clear break from Biden’s policy, although it’s also possible that the damage is done at this point.

On the domestic front, Biden was desperate enough to start making some tentative steps in a positive direction in the final weeks of his candidacy. He talked about ending medical debt, for example, and finally moving toward desperately needed reforms to the Supreme Court — an issue that had been raised by the “Squad” of left-wing members of Congress. He unveiled a plan to effectively cap rent increases at 5 percent, making major landlords’ tax breaks contingent on their adhering to this limit — although, in a telling moment, he fumbled the delivery of this announcement, telling the NAACP Convention that he was going to limit rent increases to fifty-five dollars.

These moves were not only the right thing to do in themselves but evidence that some Democratic Party power brokers correctly understand that a constituency that desperately wants reforms like these could be crucial to winning the election. A candidate less likely than Biden to say “$55” when they mean “5 percent” might be able to blunt the appeal of Trump and running mate J. D. Vance’s cynical reactionary populism.

Kamala Harris is now the front-runner for the nomination. As hard as this is to remember, she once claimed to support Medicare for All. Over the course of the 2020 presidential campaign, she moved away from this in fumbling efforts at triangulation, but she could take the idea up again.

Trump and Vance are leaning hard into populist rhetoric this year. Vance’s RNC speech covered the pain of communities devastated by deindustrialization, the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, and more. Lines like “jobs were sent overseas, and our children were sent to war,” hit home. When it comes to supporting policies that would do anything about these problems, it’s all hot air. Trump was a ferociously anti-labor president, and Vance’s legislative scorecard from the AFL-CIO sits at 0 percent.

But the fake populism taps into very real pain, and that appeal can’t be countered by insisting that everything is basically fine and all we need are competent liberal technocrats to sensibly steer the ship of state.

Even if Harris or some other nominee did embrace a substantively populist policy agenda, they might well go down to defeat. Too many voters might dismiss it as empty election-season rhetoric. Harris in particular might not be a believable messenger. And with barely more than a hundred days until Election Day, there just might not be enough time to effectively reframe the election.

But fake populism being countered with policies that would actually help ordinary workers could give America — and the world — a chance to avoid whatever’s lurking on the other side of a Trump victory this November.