Trump triumphant as Biden descends into a deepening crisis

Milwaukee
CNN
 — 

Donald Trump will pull off his greatest feat yet as Joe Biden confronts his darkest hour.

The ex-president, 78, will accept the Republican nomination Thursday, advancing one of the most stunning comebacks in political history after his bid to steal the 2020 election, an unprecedented criminal conviction and an assassination attempt.

Biden, 81, is meanwhile being rocked by a Democratic rebellion. Concerns about whether he can again defeat his 2020 opponent have boiled back up amid lawmakers’ concerns about his health and cognitive state and despair over his chances of blocking the extreme possibilities of a second Trump term. Sources told CNN Wednesday that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently told the president that polls show he can’t beat Trump and could crush Democratic hopes of winning the House if he stays in the race.

A White House race that slumbered for months has suddenly erupted over a momentous three weeks bookended by Biden’s cataclysmic debate performance and the attempted assassination of Trump – a whiplash of events unseen in half a century.

The 45th president’s comeback will only be fully realized if he becomes the second one-term president to win a return to the White House in November. But his rebound to this point may be even more unlikely than his unexpected win in the 2016 election. His return to the top of the GOP ticket means it is now clear that Trump was not simply an aberration, but is becoming a historic political force who has utterly transformed his party and could do the same for the nation, for better or worse, if he comes back to White House on January 20, 2025.

In a race Trump has cast as a contrast between strength and weakness, the optics are better than the Republican can have dared hope less than four months before Election Day.

Republicans are lionizing a nominee who escaped a would-be assassin’s bullet and rose, bloodied, to raise his fist with a vow to “fight.” Biden, by comparison, retreated from the campaign trail Wednesday to his Delaware home with a case of Covid-19.

Trump just choreographed one of the most remarkable shows of dominance in any political party of the modern age, requiring his vanquished primary foes to pledge fealty in front of a primetime television audience at the convention on Tuesday. Biden is, meanwhile, losing control of his party, clashing heatedly with lawmakers who warn he’ll cost them the White House, Senate and the House and as party grandees — like California Rep. Adam Schiff — publicly say he should step aside.

The electoral map reflects the diverging fortunes of the two candidates. Trump leads most national polls and has the advantage in battleground states. And while the…