Joe Biden is Donald Trump's best friend

Donald Trump doesn't look, at the moment, like he needs any help winning the Republican nomination, but he's getting an assist from President Joe Biden.

The incumbent president -- rather than being the indispensable political antidote to Trump that Democrat imagine him as -- may well prove the key to his predecessor's return to the White House.

Biden is an asset to Trump's primary campaign and could, through his weakness and ineptitude, end up electing him in 2024.

Biden is indicting Trump; he's making Republicans pine for the days when Trump was president; and he's lackluster in prospective head-to-head polling matchups.

All of which is boosting his adversary's prospects. The indictments, of course, create a rally-around-the flag effect among Republicans. It was the shoddy indictment from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that launched Trump onto a new, higher trajectory in the primary race. But the federal indictments from Special Counsel Jack Smith have reinforced the effect.

That the indictments come with a split screen of the Biden Justice Department coddling Hunter Biden only makes Trump's argument that there's a two-tier system of justice that's been weaponized against him more potent.

Meanwhile, Biden's poor record in office drives GOP nostalgia for the Trump presidency, a significant benefit to the former president looking for a restoration.

Finally, Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans want to argue that Trump isn't electable, but Biden's dismal political standing vitiates this case. Every time there's a poll showing Trump competitive with Biden, it's harder to portray him as a sure loser. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Biden leading Trump by less than a point, and a recent Marquette University poll had the two tied 50-50.

Democrats may figure that all this is good -- Trump is so toxic that he's the weakest of the plausible Republican candidates, no matter what polls more than a year before the election might say. Biden beat him once before, right?

Yes, but it's not as though he trounced Trump the first time around. Biden's Electoral College victory was built on a series of razor-thin victories in places like Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. Who's to say that in the right circumstances for Trump they couldn't tip the other way? Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020, so why is another narrow victory supposed to be out of the question?

It's often said that Trump hasn't done anything to win one swing voter back to his side since 2020. True enough, but Biden, who hasn't been the norm-honoring moderate as advertised, has certainly done things to shed voters.

Democrats act as if Biden is a once-in-a-generation political talent when he's an 80-year-old man whose foremost political achievement is beating an unpopular incumbent in the midst of a pandemic with a basement campaign. In his 10th quarter in office, Gallup has his approval rating at 40%, the lowest rating for post-World War II presidents at that point with the exception of Jimmy Carter.

As the 2016 election demonstrated, running two candidates who are deeply unpopular is a recipe for volatility. And Trump-Biden would make Trump-Hillary look like the halcyon days of widely admired, consensus political leaders. A CNN poll from June found that 36% of respondents didn't view either Trump or Biden favorably, and only about a third had a favorable view of each of them.

Indeed, the 2016 vibe is strong. Back then, Democrats hoped to run against Trump and put up their own incredibly weak candidate with barely a serious internal fight (Bernie Sanders was never going to win the nomination) or second thought. One of Clinton's serious vulnerabilities, the email scandal, was ruled off-limits, just as Biden's age and his family's influence-peddling scandal are verboten topics among Democrats now.

How did that turn out?

If Trump would have lots of baggage heading into 2024, he'd also presumably have a beatable incumbent standing between him and a second term.