Joe Biden Plays His Trump Card

Yesterday, Joe Biden played his Trump card. 

In a speech that was wildly anticipated by those who have been demoralized by Biden’s performance in office, he took off the gloves and came out swinging. His supporters on the Washington Post opinion pages cheered from the peanut gallery, but still the speech was flat. It was too emotional, too hyperbolic and too desperate.

Joe Biden needs Donald Trump, because opposing Trump is all that he has left. In the absence of Trump the Democrats lost the governorship of Virginia. Their last remaining hope for 2022 is to run against Donald Trump.

While Trump did not take the bait and offer his own counterpunch, he did make a statement to show that he has just run out of gas. The Wall Street Journal editorial page was not too kind to Trump this morning:

Mr. Trump’s statement throws out a farrago of “questions” about the election intended to imply massive fraud that he could never prove in court, in Congress or in subsequent state audits. He asks how Mr. Biden could lose “27 out of 27 ‘toss up’ House races, but somehow miraculously receive the most votes in American history with no coattails?”

So, Trump is doing his best Stacey Abrams imitation, insisting that he could not possibly have lost, but not providing any real evidence to sustain his claim.

But, Joe Biden is president and, as president his job is to lead the nation, even to unite the nation, and to govern the nation. Picking schoolyard fights with a past president is beneath the dignity of his office. We have pointed out occasions when Trump’s behavior was beneath the dignity of the office, so we grant ourselves the right to point out the same when Joe Biden tries to match it.

As for yesterday’s speech, it was basically a failure. The political calculation was so obvious that even I could see it.

Faced with a failing presidency Joe Biden’s political strategists seem to have gotten together to cook up a new plan. They could not conjure a new president and could certainly not grow back his little gray cells, so they had to settle for-- more Botox.

Yes, indeed,  no one seems to have remarked it, but creepy Joe Biden looked even creepier than usual in his address to the nation yesterday. It was not just the “mummified” face that has survived God knows how many cosmetic procedures. But, it was the extra added Botox that numbed his face and made him seriously competitive with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, for having a face that looked surreally hideous.

This tells us that Biden’s handlers must have noticed that his face looks mummified. They have decided that the solution is more Botox, to make sure it never again moves. 

(My thanks, again, to the commenter who offered that Biden’s face looked mummified.)

Anyway, Biden’s presidency is failing. He is so bad that no one believes otherwise. Some will say that it is succeeding, but they are probably being paid to say it. One suspects that they know the truth and do not want to admit it to their boss.

Naturally, the question arises: does Joe Biden know that his presidency is failing? Does he know that his singular ineptitude is making his most inept predecessors look like leadership paragons? That we can reasonably ask the question tells us what we need to know about why the Biden presidency is failing.

Anyway, everyone knows by now that Biden cannot deal with the press. Everyone knows that he cannot do better than to show reporters his back, after having read prepared remarks. Biden’s staff lives in constant terror that he will slip up, whether by failing to control his tongue or by stumbling on stairs.

Fair enough, it is not quite as bad as the Kamala Harris staffers who are quitting the vice president in droves. All that is standing between Biden and resignation is Kamala. Were she not supremely incompetent, unable even to manage her staff, we would be hearing calls for Biden to resign. 

The left wing media should be saying something like this-- be merciful and let the man return to Delaware. With Kamala waiting in the wings, no one dares utter the words.

Was yesterday’s speech commemorating the protest of January 6 a rescue mission or a salvage mission? Either way, Joseph Robinette Biden showed his newly Botoxed face and came out swinging. Or was it flailing.

Everyone noticed the new Biden, ready to pick a fight with his predecessor. He played tough and strong. He seemed decisive. He was the brawler that we had seen in action in the Senate before his brain function started to deteriorate.

Yesterday’s Biden speech was the essence of machismo. No one seemed to notice that machismo is public posturing. It is fake, designed to cover up weakness,

Obviously, it was course correction. But then, the new macho tone was a stark admission that Biden’s administration had been too obviously girlified. 

Someone somewhere must have decided that the Biden thrust toward greater female empowerment has created the impression that he is weak. Surely, the Afghanistan debacle sustained this judgment. But, the slew of female appointees, placed in jobs they may or may not be qualified to perform, added to the impression.

Who can forget Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm bursting into schoolgirl giggles when asked about the administration’s plan to reduce gas prices. Think about it, you hire a slew of strong, empowered women and the world thinks you are a pussy. The sexist indignity of it all!

Biden was facing a challenge. He needed to overcome the sense that he is ineffectual and even effeminate. So he put on his macho pants and declared war on the opposition political party. Most especially you pick a fight with the notable brawler, Donald Trump. It felt like an invitation to a duel, of the order of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton at Weehawken.

It was a ploy, smacking  of desperation.

We can safely ignore Biden’s lip service to uniting the nation under the banner of patriotism. After all, Democratic precincts have long since taken leave of even the pretense of harboring patriotic sentiments and loyalty to the nation. 

Like a washed up pugilist, suffering from scrambled brains, Biden came out swinging. In truth, it seemed more like flailing. 

The images were especially violent. Donald Trump, Biden told us, with his deadpan Botoxed face, had “held a dagger to the throat of democracy.” 

Tough Joe Biden did not name Donald Trump specifically, but he was clearly trying to revive his dying presidency by declaring war against the man he accused of being a threat to democracy. And he was casting himself as the man who had saved democracy. And had saved it from the unimaginable evil that was Donald Trump. 

Of course, leaders of the Democratic Party, from Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden, for all their love of democratic norms, had proclaimed Donald Trump to be an illegitimate president.

One notes that Biden, and many members of his political party, have no use for the loyal opposition. They did not function as a loyal opposition during the Trump years. Why would they start now? They do not believe in differences of opinion or alternative policy proposals. 

They see the nation’s future in terms of a final combat between absolute good and absolute evil. Demonizing the opposition has become a staple in Democratic circles, and this means, to be very clear about it, that being a Democrat means never admitting that you failed.

Biden revived Trump in order to shield himself from judgment. He was preaching to the choir-- Don’t blame me for anything that has gone wrong since I became president.

Being a Democrat means never having to admit that you have failed.

So, the dutiful columnists at the Washington Post were cheering from their very own peanut gallery. They admired Biden’s strength and fortitude; they instantly claimed that Biden had set his presidency right.

In truth, they are more like political partisans than dispassionate objective commentators.

But, they heard the speech they wanted to hear. One Paul Waldman wrote this:

On the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Joe Biden gave what might wind up being the most important speech of his career. That’s not only because it took on the central problem of his presidency — the ongoing attack on American democracy and Donald Trump’s role in it — but also because Biden was more clear and emphatic on this subject than he has ever been before.

Former conservative Max Boot piled on:

In what may be the most powerful speech of his presidency so far, President Biden delivered a searing (and overdue) indictment on Thursday of his predecessor — never mentioned by name — for inciting a mob attack on the Capitol exactly a year ago. Biden identified the central truth of the insurrection: “The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election … because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”

And E. J. Dionne said this:

Marking the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the president ripped into Donald Trump’s subversion of democracy and the refusal of most Republicans to stand up to the former president’s lies. In what was by far the most passionate, forceful and effective speech of his presidency, he moved democracy to the center of the nation’s political debate.

It was wishful thinking all the way down. These commentators heard a speech delivered by someone other than Joe Biden. So fervent is their wish that Biden find his inner manly strength that they were willing to conjure it, out of thin air.