Simply put: to defeat Trump! That was the catalyst for my shift in thinking.
At that time, it was a simple choice of selecting the lesser of two evils. Rarely do I defend a career politician — I've always felt that when you spend your life in the seat of power, corruption is an inevitable consequence. Frankly, this is why I couldn't vote for Hillary in 2016. And my frustrations grow on a daily basis as we learn more and more about how the Biden family profited off of its proximity power.
I wish that our current political class was worthy of admiration for their service, but sadly, I admire very few of our elected officials.
I long for term limits and a better system that attracts high-quality people to seek public service.
😤 He might be an asshole
Charles C.W. Cooke is a senior editor for National Review who has been described by The Atlantic as "perhaps the most confident defender of conservatism younger than George Will" and "a principled conservative who is allergic to anything resembling groupthink." In "Joe Biden Is an Asshole" he muses:
He’s an asshole. Can we not all see it? For those who cannot conceive of truth without triangulation, I will freely stipulate that Donald Trump is an asshole, too — and that, in some ways, he’s an even worse one. But that does not let Biden off the hook. President or not, Biden is a decrepit, dishonest, unpleasant blowhard. He’s a nasty, corrupt, partisan fraud. He is, as Shakespeare had it, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Biden is twice as irritating as he believes himself to be, and half as intelligent into the bargain. From the moment he arrived on the scene — nearly 50 years ago, Lord help us — he has represented all that is wrong with our politics. A century hence, his name will be set into aspic and memorialized under “Hack.”
I'm not personally privy to any of this. But it's certainly not that far-fetched.
😵 Too old to be president
I have heard my friends say Biden is too feeble-minded to be president. Does Trump appear to be less “feeble” than Biden?
To me the real question should anchor itself in whether or not both Biden and Trump are too old to be electable. Not to be “ageist,” but in my opinion we are long-overdue to consider an age ceiling on candidates for public office.
Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, paused for a moment and said "I don't know" when asked in a 2019 CBS interview if he thought Biden would be a good president. “Face The Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked Gates if he stood by a statement about Biden from his memoir:
He's a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. … [Brennan asked if he thinks Biden is “right for this moment.”] I think I'm pretty busy and pretty active but I think — I think having a President who is somebody our age or older, in the case of Senator Sanders, is — I think it's problematic. I think that you don't have the kind of energy that I think is required to be President. I think — I'm not sure you have the intellectual acuity that you might have had in your sixties. So, I mean it's just a personal view. For me, the thought of taking on those responsibilities at this point in my life would be pretty daunting.
Is Biden’s age on display far too often in the form of gaffes and outright misstatements? Absolutely!
Sadly, we have a bunch of old politicians in our government, but no elder statesman.
Over in The Atlantic, 68-year-old Eliot Cohen argued that Biden is too old to serve another term. This isn’t that shocking; Mark Leibovich wrote something similar in The Atlantic about a year earlier. Biden isn’t listening, and apparently very few Democratic elected officials have the guts to publicly say they agree, although I expect plenty will say so off the record or on background.
And it's not just Biden — it's Congress as well! Here's a video from Tangle News.
According to YouGov, a vast majority of Americans, including 63% of Democrats and 74% of Republicans, believe we should set a maximum age limit for elected officials. It's just common sense after all!
As always, I try to present both sides of the story and I'm always open to being challenged. If we're going to find common sense solutions, we need to be able to hear opposing viewpoints. Well, here's one. Michael Moynihan, in the Free Press, interviewed Frank Foer, who isn't sure Biden is too old.
🤥 The lies! Although nothing is good or bad except by comparison!
Why do we accept that seemingly all politicians lie! Why?!?! I find it absurd that politicians can lie with impunity and hide behind the First Amendment. It's unconscionable and should be unconstitutional!
But, when it comes to lies, Biden is an amateur when compared to Trump. During Trump’s presidency, The Washington Post established a new category called the Bottomless Pinocchio to account for false or misleading statements repeated so often that they became a form of propaganda. By the end of the Trump presidency, 56 claims made by Trump had qualified as “Bottomless Pinocchios.” While Biden shows his age on far too many occasions, I have read dozens of articles that make the claim that he’s the worst president in history! I have yet to find one that isn’t partisan. From what I’ve researched, I don’t believe the facts support that conclusion. If you have a nonpartisan source, please share in the comments!
Neither of these men should be the major parties’ candidates for president, but Biden is the lesser of two evils at this juncture.
Biden is the ‘worst president in history’
When I hear friends tell me that Biden is the "worst president in history," I scratch my head. It's hyperbolic to me.
Polls and public opinion have not been favorable to Biden and some of it is justified. And while polls often offer an initial snapshot of performance, these tend to be volatile and influenced by current events, partisan biases and emotional sentiment. Ultimately, judging a president's performance is an ongoing process, and there's no single "right" time to do it. Different perspectives and interpretations will emerge over time, shaping the collective understanding of a president's legacy.
Like all his predecessors, Biden has made his share of mistakes. And he wasted too much time in search of common ground while the GOP has been determined to undermine him at every turn. True, the Afghanistan withdrawal started by Trump was managed incompetently by the Biden administration. But I’ve yet to have anyone make a nonpartisan, fact-based argument that supports the conclusion that Biden is the worst president in U.S. history.
To assess his performance, you must start by realizing that probably only Abraham Lincoln and possibly FDR entered their presidencies under more difficult circumstances. But, unlike Lincoln and Roosevelt (who took office at a time in which their parties enjoyed large congressional majorities), Biden entered the Oval Office with no such advantage.
Is he perfect? Hell no!
But can you name a recent president who has been?
Has he made mistakes and policy blunders? Hell yes!
Do I believe he did a horrible job developing common sense policies in connection with our border crisis, until it was too late? Yes! As I discussed in the section on immigration, his handling of the border crisis is a source of a lot of controversy and derision.
Am I frustrated with the fact that he has faltered in his handling of Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel? Absolutely! It keeps me up at night!
Do I believe that he's taken action to dismantle the "DEI bureaucracy" that in some cases may be teaching propaganda to our children? No!
One of my colleagues who considers himself a conservative recently confided in me that he has significant concerns for our country and he longs for a non-MAGA conservative to step up and lead. But he also feels:
The Biden administration is a five-alarm dumpster fire, a BLM protest, a never-ending microaggression and a total assault on the foundations of our culture as a nation.
To me, this point of view is fueled entirely by a biased-media narrative fed by Fox and other conservative media outlets. As I discuss in “The culture wars,” we have a massive issue that has been festering for decades under both the Democratic and Republican administrations. Is it time to take action? Absolutely. But taking action requires a functioning Congress capable of bipartisan cooperation.
Do I believe Biden is spending too much time pandering to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party instead of leading and anchoring it in the common sense middle? Yes.
Considering the huge political challenges under which he’s been forced to operate, Biden does have a track record of some accomplishments.
As I discussed in the section on the pandemic, Biden inherited a crisis that Trump and the GOP politicized. Their actions, or inactions, sent our country off the proverbial rails. Do I agree with the Biden administration's decision to take the vaccine and immediately roll it out without considering other alternatives? No!
In Biden’s first months in office, he signed off on $1.9 trillion in relief. But he got little love from voters for staving off a recession, as they fought with soaring energy and food bills while the Oomicron variant of the coronavirus surged across the country.
At the same time, Russia has sparked one of Biden’s worst foreign policy crises by invading Ukraine. The political infighting has left us mired in politics at a time when we need to project unity and strength on the world stage.
💩 He did get some shit done
Let’s look at what Biden has accomplished in office:
58% think the country has high unemployment (it does not); 44% think the country is in a recession (it is not); and 40% think inflation will be higher in six months (quite unlikely). The Democrats are hoping that voters will notice that the economy is doing better than they thought by election day. But Republicans keep talking about “Bidenomics” as a pejorative, suggesting that they doubt the topic will end up helping the president.
While the economy does appear strong, nothing is simple when it comes to assessing where we are as a nation. It is a complex economy and results are not consistent. For example, labor force participation remains essentially where it was in the last days of the Obama administration. Deaths of despair keep rising. The cost of living has risen sharply, and while the price of ordinary goods may finally be coming down, rents haven’t. It's unfair to pin that on the Biden administration. Real estate and hard asset inflation is a result of several factors (more than a decade of unsustainably low interest rates, the unrelenting printing of money and inadequate housing stock). This has led to only 36% of voters thinking the American dream still holds true, according to a 2023 survey, down from 48% in 2016.
Yet, post-pandemic, the economy has revived at a record pace and huge strides have been made in slashing poverty — especially child poverty. In Biden’s first year more than 6 million jobs were created. The unemployment rate dropped from 6.2% when Biden took office to 3.9%, the biggest single year drop in American history. The average number of Americans filing for unemployment has been near its lowest level since 1969. When Biden took office, over 18 million were receiving unemployment benefits; today only 2 million are — also the biggest single year drop in history.
Closing the book on the Fed’s landmark tightening campaign is emblematic of a growing belief in a soft landing for the US economy: Unemployment remains at half-century lows as inflation cools. Add to that the end of the pandemic and a suite of massive legislative programs unlike anything since the New Deal, and one could think the 2024 election was President Joe Biden’s to lose.
Why, then, do only 20 percent of voters rate the economy as “excellent” or “good,” versus 49 percent who call it “poor,” according to a New York Times/Siena poll? Why are Americans overwhelmingly pessimistic about the country’s future, according to the Pew Research Center? Why does Gallup find a significantly smaller percentage of Americans have confidence in the presidency today than they did in the last, disastrous year of Trump’s tenure? And why is Biden polling, at best, dead even with his predecessor in multiple surveys despite the former president’s 91 felony charges?
In short, with everything so great, why are people so down? That’s a question that, as the Times’ Reid Epstein wrote, stumps the White House and its political allies, who seem to think the problem is a failure to communicate all the good news.
But there’s another explanation: The news isn’t all that good. Americans are unsettled by things that are not always visible in headlines or statistics but are easy enough to see.
As I discuss in the section on capitalism and monetary policy, the general "feeling" that the GOP has done a better job managing the economy is just that — a "feeling." It's actually not backed up by the numbers. Moreover, since the 1980s and the implementation of Reagan's supply-side economics policies, the divide between rich and poor has been amplified and has led to a fracture in our country. The fact remains that America's economy has been broadly and relatively (when compared to the rest of the world) strong under Biden. Unemployment is historically low. The stock market has been reaching all-time highs in 2024 and "showing no signs of peaking." We all talk about inflation, but the U.S. inflation rate is now down close to 3% and is the lowest among the world's leading economies.
Since the end of 2019 … America’s economy has grown by about 8% in real terms. [Meanwhile], the euro area has expanded by only 3%, Japan a piddling 1% and Britain not at all. America is the only big economy that is back to its pre-pandemic growth trend.
[f]or the first time in forever, real wage gains are going to those who need them most.
Wages have gone up for all but the top 20% of Americans, whose wages have fallen, reducing inequality.
China
In my "Recommended reading list," I reference the book "The 100 Year Marathon" by one of the U.S. government's "leading China experts." It reveals the hidden strategy fueling that country's rise — and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us as the world's leading superpower. It's a fascinating book and highlights how the United States over the past 50 years has made a number of strategic mistakes.
But perhaps, the Biden administration is waking up to the strategic failures of prior administrations.
After four years of watching Donald Trump inflict flesh wounds on China with his ineffectual trade war, U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have found the jugular. The goal is the same, but this knife is sharper—and could set back China’s tech ambitions by as much as a decade.
And he has since stepped it up, adding dozens of Chinese companies to a trade blacklist.
To be sure, there is Russia’s war on Ukraine and inflation at home to preoccupy attention. But history is likely to record Biden’s move as the moment when the U.S.-China rivalry came out of the closet. America is now pledged to do everything short of fighting an actual war to stop China’s rise. It is not clear whether corporate America, or its foreign counterparts, have fully digested what is about to hit them. For decades, serious businesses have based their growth models on having a China strategy — whether it be by exporting to China, producing there or both. Unless a company’s product is, say, luxury goods or agricultural commodities, Biden’s technological decoupling will hit their bottom line. His escalation also marks a final break with decades of U.S. foreign policy that assumed China’s global integration would tame its rise as a great power.
Gay marriage
Finally, a brief word on gay marriage. On Dec. 15, 2022, Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, a bill that codifies national protections for same-sex and interracial couples. The House passed the bill by a 258-169 vote, with every Democrat and 39 Republicans voting in favor. It passed the Senate by a 61-36 vote, with 49 Democrats and 12 Republicans voting for it (Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock was absent for the vote, as were two Republicans). Here’s an article exploring all sides of this issue from Tangle.
Unfortunately, it may not have been enough because ...
Biden has demonstrated he is a weak leader
As Trump transformed the Republican Party and dragged it to the extreme right, Biden had the opportunity to lead the Democratic Party to the middle by expelling the extreme minority of progressives. Had he done so, he would have given those of us who have traditionally considered themselves centrists a home and he might have attracted tens of millions of Republicans in search of a party that shares their values.
Instead, Biden has shown himself to be a weak leader and frankly an ineffective politician. If he were a strong and effective leader of our country, he would have recognized that he had a unique moment in history to embrace the center and set the course of our country due north!
We have two issues that should be moving us to the middle. First, on the right, abortion. The GOP's extreme position on abortion and their assault on women's rights is pushing Republicans to the center. Second, on the left, the violent, antisemitic response to Hamas' terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7 — including the response on college campuses as a result of the indoctrination of "group think" caused by the DEI bureaucracy — is compelling some Democrats to the center.
Instead of embracing common sense centrist strategies that appeal to the vast majority of people in the middle, Biden has shown he lacks the ability to unite the majority of the American public. He had an opportunity to show leadership at the southern border and instead has allowed the narrative around immigration to undermine his credibility with the American people. While he came out strongly and unequivocally on the side of Israel in its war against Hamas, he has begun to succumb to the progressive wing of the party, pandering for the votes of an antisemitic minority angry over the war in Gaza. He has clearly lost the moral high ground on the issue.
Biden had (and I use past tense because it is likely too late to change course) a historic opportunity to unite America against Trump and he failed.
In 2020, he said he had no intention of seeking reelection in 2024. Now, here he is chasing a second term. I wish he had been a more effective leader capable of meeting this moment in history.
