Maybe it’s due to my Christian condition, but I’m a sucker for lost causes. Twenty centuries ago, our leader was crucified, his friends were tortured, and many of his early followers were eaten alive by lions while the Romans clapped and laughed. It is not, let us say, a story of victors, even if it does have a happy ending. Usually, winners bore me. The people I idolized when I was young were the sort that got the sack, suffered media censorship, were abandoned by their girlfriends, and often died in wretched circumstances, like trying to find a way out of a shopping mall or waiting in line for a urine test. My all-time favorite soccer player used to miss all the easy shots and would only score seemingly impossible goals. And as a writer, I faithfully follow in the footsteps of Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote the greatest work in universal literature and died in abject poverty. I follow his footsteps meticulously: for the moment I have managed to ruin myself.

Trump is always a kind of lost cause. His presidential victory in 2016 was against everything and everyone. If he wins in 2020 it will also be against everything and everyone, but even more so because the first time hardly anyone actually considered him a serious electoral threat and that played to his advantage. Now there is not a single one of his enemies who is not devoting all his efforts to trying to ruin his image. If you want to achieve something important in the world of journalism — or in European politics, which is the same thing — you have to start by insulting Trump. If you don’t know what to call him, try “fascist.” That will get you at least an internship at any European newspaper.

On the other hand, Trump is not an easy guy to defend. He doesn’t try very hard to make friends. His discourse is the antithesis of Obama, the famous wolf in sheep’s clothing whose legacy boils down to this: not a bad word, not a good deed. But even so, Trump is probably the only thing that can make the right stand firm in the culture war against the Left. And there is no battle more important. The Left hates it when a president talks about God almost as much as a gremlin hates the morning shower.

The alternative to Trump is one of those low-profile, exquisitely educated conservative candidates — technical economists who don’t get involved in ideological issues — and they are exactly who the Democrats would like to win, even if they’re in the opposition. I am referring of course to the battle of cultural Marxism, which is to say, the imposition of feminism, secularism, multiculturalism, and all that ideological narcotic that cancels out freedom of thought and, above all, individual freedom, and turns us all into collectives, which is to say, flocks herded by progressive shepherds.

The fact that the polls leave Trump for dead is good news for his followers. It makes it easier for Americans to realize that they could soon have Biden as president. Imagine a girl-smelling president moving for total lockdown without regard for the economy, squandering your tax dollars on green policies in the midst of a crisis, and making China and Cuba your new strategic allies. Imagine a U.S. president arriving at the White House already knee-deep in dirt. The mouths of all the tyrants in the world are watering just from thinking about it.

The Left told us that putting Trump in the White House would get us a nuclear war. They told us that it was the end of democracy. They told us it was the end of liberty. None of that happened. Just a coronavirus pandemic that was not the work of Trump but of the Chinese communists that Biden is eager to partner with. Otherwise, the only war Trump has fought with real missiles has been on Twitter. Reminder: Obama, the most overrated president in recent history, bombed Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. And then he received the Nobel Peace Prize, which is the prize awarded by the Swedish academy to any leftist personality who has not bombed Sweden.

There is no group in the world that receives more insults than Trump’s followers. They are treated as if they were illiterate, troglodytes, and extremists. So say the people whose greatest contribution to the political debate of 2020 is to declare war on a few stone statues and a can of beans.

As a journalist, however, I love the “everyone against Trump” theme because it has a good counterbalance. Our mission is supposed to be to scrutinize the political power morning, noon and night. The advantage of having Trump in the White House is that there are so many journalists looking for his faults all over the planet that the rest of us can happily devote ourselves to life’s pleasures: resting, eating good food, drinking expensive spirits, and contemplating the universe and beautiful girls — including Ivanka Trump. I have not worked since 2016 thanks to Trump, and I do not intend to do so now. In that respect I’m a lot like Biden.

The truth of the pre-pandemic economy and unemployment figures are a testament to how much more there is to Trump than the eccentric, bumbling caricature of a president that the progressive press makes him out to be. But if we’re talking cartoon characters, right now Biden is the annoying know-it-all Tweety Pie, and Trump is grumpy old Sylvester the cat. You decide whose side you’re on at this dark moment in Looney Tunes history. Chinese communists would love to eat Sylvester raw. Good people like fried chicken. Sometimes with Goya beans.

Itxu Díaz is a Spanish journalist, political satirist, and author. He has written nine books on topics as diverse as politics, music, and smart appliances. He is a contributor to the Daily Beast, the Daily Caller, National Review, the American Conservative, The American Spectator, and Diario Las Américas in the United States, and columnist for several Spanish magazines and newspapers. He was also an advisor to the Ministry for Education, Culture and Sports in Spain. Follow him on Twitter at @itxudiaz or visit his website www.itxudiaz.com.

Translated by Joel Dalmau

Illustration by Iñigo Navarro Dávila