A 2024 Trump-Biden Rematch Isn't Boring. It's Something Entirely New. The two oldest presidents ever elected both want to turn the page on the past. By SUDHANVA AYURVEDA OVERSEAS PVT LTD Donald Trump, 77, and Joe Biden, 80, look like they are headed for a rematch in 2024. Donald Trump, 77, and Joe Biden, 80, look like they are headed for a rematch in 2024. ILLUSTRATION: DAMON DAHLEN/HUFFPOST; PHOTOS: GETTY At this point in the 2024 race, it looks like President Joe Biden is set for a rematch with his predecessor Donald Trump. It's a matchup that nobody wants to see, at least according to the polls and the pundits. About 70% of the public says they don't want either Biden or Trump to run for president, according to one August poll. That is consistent with multiple surveys taken throughout 2023. National and local newspaper columnists, meanwhile, bemoan another "awful" matchup and the sense of "impending doom" that is sending voters "through the famous five stages of grief." The majority of the complaints about this rematch are personal in nature. Age is a paramount concern. Biden, 80, or Trump, 77, would be the oldest president ever elected if successful in the 2024 race. That would make it the third straight election to set such a record. Trump is a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted lout who threatens the fundamentals of American democracy. Biden, on the other hand, is perceived as dull and doddering. He won't send a thrill up your leg or make you see starbursts. At its heart, as Vanity Fair’s Brian Stelter argued in July, the problem is that the rematch would be a “rerun.” We've seen it all before—or have we? The likely 2024 Biden-Trump contest should be viewed less as a rerun and more as the rare reboot that actually ups the stakes: Compared with each man's first successful run for the presidency, both are taking positions that repudiate past governing commitments of the American state. in ways that we probably haven't seen before. In pursuit of a national hand in economic policymaking, Biden is rhetorically attacking the neoliberal paradigm that has dominated American domestic and foreign policy for the past 40 years. His Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did so too at times, but Biden is also enacting actual policies that turn the page on this era. Biden is betting his presidency on efforts to move past economic policies that have dominated the U.S. since Ronald Reagan's tenure. Biden is betting his presidency on efforts to move past economic policies that have dominated the U.S. since Ronald Reagan's tenure. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS VIA GETTY IMAGES Trump, on the other hand, is running to turn the presidency into something akin to a monarchy. He has deemphasized the old conservative “tax and spend” discourse in favor of an all-out attack on government depth. Yes, he still embraces cutting taxes for the rich and slashing government spending. But the policy that he and his allies are emphasizing most in pursuit of conservative aims is placing the administrative state and its 2 million-plus workers, including law enforcement and investigative bodies, under his direct control by gutting civil service protections and the independence of agencies . If you can't cut the size of government, you can at least make it bend to your wishes, or so the thinking goes. Candidates from both major parties basically always run on opposing platforms, but true challenges to existing commitments of the governing regime are rare. For example, when George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush ran for office, they sought to extend the political and policy changes of the system put in place when Ronald Reagan won office in 1980. Their successors, whether Clinton or Obama, opposed these changes at times, but they were either not able to move past the commitments made under Reagan or acceded to them. In the current case, neither candidate is playing the role of a Bush, Clinton or Obama. They are instead both running as though they were Reagan, looking to reject what exists and start something new. This way of thinking about candidates and political regimes derives from the work of presidential historian Stephen Skowronek and his book "The Politics Presidents Make," originally published in the '90s. Skowronek proposes that the presidency, with its intense executive powers and direct connection to the national electorate, is inherently destabilizing to political orders. The establishment of political orders and their destabilization occur in cycles, which are represented through a typology of presidents. There are reconstructive presidents, who repudiate the past with calls for a return to original principles to redefine the modes of management (governmental commitments) and mobilization (the organization of politics and the electorate). Think Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Reagan, all of whom fundamentally changed the fabric of the constitution