In June 2016 I began doubting the inevitable triumph of a Hillary Clinton campaign strategy of “Ha, ha, you’re stuck with me because Trump is awful.” Here we go again.

Mr. Biden couldn’t have been clearer, declaring for the benefit of every Democratic officeholder in the country that he wanted Mr. Trump as his 2024 opponent. The risk, though, is that in piling up the criminal charges, which has caused Republicans to rally around Mr. Trump even as it presumably sullies him for the general election, the overkill might eventually stick in the public’s craw. It might begin to seem emblematic of Mr. Biden’s own neediness.

His need is great, after all. In Mr. Trump, he finds the one candidate he could afford not to debate, and even to minimize his active campaigning, saying it would be unseemly to dignify such a challenger. By next year, such an excuse to hide Mr. Biden’s growing frailty from voters might be more than a convenience. It might be his only hope of victory.

Authoritarians and the Harlem Globetrotters have one practice in common. They seek to arrange patsy opponents they know they can best. Hillary Clinton can be criticized for losing to Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden is bidding to be a Democrat antihero of a whole different order if he helps to select Mr. Trump as his opponent and then loses to him anyway.

For, as some number of voters will understand, the law being used to pummel Mr. Trump is not an impersonal mechanism. The New York City case related to Stormy Daniels is universally understood to be a reach. Jan. 6 charges will be a reach given that irresponsible claims of a stolen election are not a crime and Democrats have indulged in them many times. Though Mr. Trump created all kinds of liability for himself in his handling of official documents, if Mr. Biden wanted it dealt with as a civil matter, it would have been dealt with as a civil matter.

But Hunter Biden really blows up any aura of all this being the objective unfolding of the law. The public is faced with persuasive testimony from two IRS whistleblowers and a former FBI supervisory agent that the Biden Justice Department deliberately foot-dragged to spare the younger Mr. Biden serious charges related to the inflammatory matter of his alleged Ukraine buckraking while his father was vice president.

Hunter is a potential black hole opening up under the Biden campaign. He is 53 and yet has nothing better to do but make himself available for every White House event and presidential trip. Why? Because Mr. Biden can’t get enough of his son’s company? Or because reinforcing Hunter’s first-family privileged status is the campaign’s Hail Mary hope of ensuring his DOJ-granted and media-granted immunity lasts at least through Election Day?

That Washington purveyor Axios recently exposed the supposedly open secret of Joe Biden’s rage fits, cursing subordinates. Some are even afraid to be alone with him. Yet this trait, in amply leaked private messages, never seems directed at his son. In public, Mr. Biden beams with satisfaction over Hunter’s short-lived romance with his brother’s widow, his battles with paternity, his guilty pleas on tax and gun charges. Is there a media apologist left who still pretends this smells of true-to-life parental love and forbearance?

A bag of cocaine is found in the White House. Nobody wants to know how it got there. All are happy to change the subject, oddly underlining the mood of implicit filial blackmail that nowadays seems to define the father-son relationship.

Amid overflowing evidence, it has stopped being plausible to pretend Joe hasn’t tacitly enabled his son’s reckless pursuit of millions from foreign influence seekers. Mr. Biden owns the consequences—including, in the chronology of events leading to the Ukraine war, the deliberate use by U.S. intelligence of a fake allegation about Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a smoke screen to protect the Biden campaign from the purely personal laptop revelations of his drug-abusing son.

Mr. Trump is still expected to guarantee Mr. Biden’s re-election next year, though it becomes easier and easier to imagine Mr. Biden being the reason some heartsick Americans feel the need to pull the lever for Mr. Trump.

In the absence of a wild card, America will have two major-party candidates who are running, in part, from a personal motive to control the Justice Department and, in extremis, to control the pardon pen.

We could join the mainstream press in lying to ourselves about many things, but that is not how adults choose to live.