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It's legacy, that's what they want, at that level. No one wants to be a one term president that handed over a massive mess. No one wants to be the next Jimmy Carter.
Neither Trump or Biden has secured a positive legacy. Trump wants to be remembered at least like a Reagan, a president at least half the US remember fondly, not a one term president impeached twice. Biden's legacy if he doesn't win is that he's the guy who people elected to replace the Big Bad Trump but was such a failure that the people prefered re-electing Trump over him.
If Trump wins, and the Democrats get the House, I predict he'll be impeached at least three times (one additional one), with the NY felony conviction being the stated reason. That's gotta be some kind of accomplishment.
As for Biden, he started out looking like Carter (high inflation and a disastrous military operation) and still does.
If Democrats had allowed some sort of positive legacy to survive from the Trump presidency and hadn't made it so personal with the lawsuits, maybe he wouldn't be so incentivized to run again. But they went and reversed everything and even deny him the objective foreign policy wins that aren't partisan politics. Likewise, for Biden, if he wasn't running against Trump the election wouldn't feel to him like a direct referendum on whether he ended up being worse than the guy he was supposed to fix the messes of; if he was facing anyone else, or was polling above Trump, he could ride into the sunset with the satisfaction of having done his job.
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