This Saturday, South Carolina can help force the parties to dump Trump and retire Biden 

As it was in 2020, a South Carolina primary in 2024 can be the decisive contest that changes the course of the presidential election.  

Four years ago, the state’s Democratic voters singlehandedly halted the momentum of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a candidate favored by a zealous ultra-progressive minority, and created new political life for Joe Biden, taking him all the way to the White House. 

This year, South Carolina has the unique power to stop the inexorable march to their parties’ nominations of the two oldest, most flawed and most unpopular men ever to compete for a return to the presidency. 

In a sad commentary on the condition of the world’s leading democracy, the competition between Biden and Donald Trump has become a political race to the bottom. Each man justifies his own candidacy by exploiting the obvious personal deficiencies of the other, as a matter of moral and patriotic duty to defeat. 

Biden said as much in 2020 when he first announced his decision to make a third run at the presidency. Referring to the 2017 Charlottesville riot, he said Trump “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.” 

Framing the 2020 race as a “battle for the soul of this nation,” he went on: “The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake. That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.” 

Last December, he repeated the theme that he was saving the nation and the world from Trump. “We’ve got to get it done, not because of me. If Trump wasn’t running I’m not sure I’d be running. We cannot let him win.”  

Though Biden sets himself as the only person able to stop him, because he did it once before (despite that he was four years younger and four years less diminished in mental acuity), polls suggest a “generic Democrat” would do much better against Trump.  

Similarly, Trump has called Biden “a threat to democracy” and claims the exclusive ability to “make America great again.” He’s said, when accepting his nomination in 2016 and several times subsequently, “I alone can fix it.” The self-focus begs the question: If he sees unfinished business that he believes only he can complete, would he again defy the Constitution and refuse to relinquish power, as he did in 2020?  

The octogenarian and the near-octogenarian share a self-adulation and sense of personal destiny that clearly exceeds their actual merits. If they get their way, America is doomed to another cycle of bitter Biden-Trump acrimony. As Mrs. Robinson lamented in “The Graduate,” “Every way you look at it, you lose.”  

But on Feb. 24 South Carolina’s voters — Republicans, Democrats and independents — have a historic opportunity to make a difference.  

The power to answer an urgent national call and bring about dramatic political change is well within their grasp. Only 4 percent of eligible voters participated in the Feb. 3 Democratic primary; under South Carolina law, the other 96 percent of registered voters, no matter their party affiliation, are perfectly eligible to vote in the Feb. 24 primary.  

The only remaining obstacle to the “inevitable” Trump nomination is Nikki Haley, former two-term South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations. Highly competent, broadly experienced in domestic and foreign policy and deeply patriotic as the spouse of a deployed combat soldier, she is a refreshingly normal human being. Her grittily cheerful candidacy offers her native state’s voters the opportunity to deliver a double political earthquake: They can halt Trump’s march to the nomination and simultaneously eliminate Biden’s professed reason for running.  

The reasons for voters to reject both men grow by the day.  

Trump seems to seek out ways to outrage Americans and people around the world who look to America for stable leadership in increasingly perilous times. Last week he told a story that almost certainly never happened but did reveal his flawed thinking about America’s vital national security interests. He said the leader of a NATO country that had not yet met its financial obligations asked if the United States would continue to defend it against Russian aggression. He responded, “I would tell them (the Russians) to do whatever the hell they wanted” against the slow-paying NATO nation, 

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine helps make the case for a strong NATO, but Trump’s heart is not in opposing the man he greatly admires. Instead, he seems in sympathy with Putin’s distorted rendition of European history and his ambition to recreate “Greater Russia.” His fawning rapport with Putin and their mutual disdain for NATO suggest that the MAGA movement might better go by the name MARGA — Make Russia Great Again.  

As Haley put more delicately, the first of the two parties that breaks America out of this stale political trap will win the election. She aims to ensure that her party does it first, but Democrats might yet see the light and persuade Biden to step aside gracefully. America will get a fresh start with both parties if South Carolinians terminate two old birds with one decisive vote for Haley this Saturday. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.