By Dion Lefler

If there’s one thing you can generally count on with Republicans, it’s political efficiency.

This time, they may have been too efficient.

The news that Joe Biden is dropping his campaign to be reelected president is about the worst thing that could have happened for Donald Trump.

Let’s face it, this race has always been a contest between age-related forgetfulness and age-related anger and aggression.

Now, instead of running against a man who appears too old to keep his thoughts together, Trump will have to face off against a younger and more vital opponent — at exactly the time the American people have said in a loud, clear voice that they’re tired of the same old men and the same old rhetoric.

Trump, and his party, brought this on themselves. They turned their remarkably efficient attack machine on too early.

The debate last month pretty conclusively showed that Biden isn’t up to what Americans expect from their president anymore.

It’s not his fault. Biden has been a man of great accomplishments in the Senate, as vice president, and as president over a long and productive career.

But age catches up to everyone.

Four years ago, Biden was the bulwark against the continuation of Trumpism. That’s what Democrats want and what the country needs again in 2024.

The way for Republicans to ensure their victory would have been to go along with the Democrat-created illusion of “Joe’s fine,” until after the Democrats held their convention and it was too late to turn back and pick someone else.

In the first debate, Trump should have tried to channel Ronald Reagan, politely smiling and answering the questions that were put to him. He should have waited for the second debate to pounce on Biden’s infirmity.

It’s the difference between tactics and strategy.

Now, no matter whom the Democrats choose to run against Trump, he’ll have a much harder case to make for himself.

He’s going to have to defend a Republican Party that, as we saw at their convention, basically supports restoration of the Soviet Union and seems terrified of fruit-pickers and hotel maids at the border.

To keep his vital right-wing evangelical base, Trump’s going to have to embrace their demands to ban abortion by any means necessary, which Americans in states blue and red (even Kansas) have voted repeatedly not to do. Against a more agile opponent, he won’t get away with claiming Democrats support abortion up to the moment of birth, or after, as he did against Biden in their debate.

And to keep his billionaire mega-donors, he’ll have to defend the Heritage Foundation’s God-awful Project 2025, a blueprint for dismantling just about everything in the United States that makes it a decent place to live.

So now, let’s see if the Democrats can be more strategic than Republicans (which, admittedly, they seldom are).

While they have several candidates who could potentially beat Trump, the Democrats have only one sure thing: Michelle Obama.

Polls show that other possible contenders, including Vice President Kamala Harris — who Biden endorsed shortly after announcing that he was stepping down — run slightly behind Trump. They’d start out playing catch-up.

In those same polls, Michelle Obama crushes Trump by 11 points.

Since her husband left the White House, she’s been the good soldier, supporting others for the top job while always saying she’s not interested in it herself.

But she’s also said she’s “terrified” at the potential outcome of the November election. While she might not actively campaign for the nomination, I’d think she’d find it pretty hard to turn it down if delegates at the Democratic National Convention were to draft her next month.

Dawn Staley, women’s basketball legend, head coach at the University of South Carolina and a four-time Olympic gold medalist (three as a player, one as coach), called the right play in a recent appeal to former president Barack Obama on X:

“Now please let us borrow @MichelleObama for just 4 short years! First Gentleman is a good look for you.”

Nobody knows better than Staley that when you’re down by a couple of points late in the fourth quarter, you want to get the ball in the hands of your best player to take the final shot.