Joe Biden let slip a telling boast after his latest Dark Brandon speech.
“I understand power,” he whispered into the microphone as the first lady wrangled him off stage to stop him impersonating a Roomba.
While ostensibly a self-deprecating cliché about wives’ control over men, “I understand power” also was a statement of unwavering confidence in his own mastery of today’s political landscape.
It’s hard to admit, given Biden’s manifest frailties and incompetence, but he’s right.
The president does know how to use power to transform the country.
By being willing to lie and cheat and break every political norm, by siccing his Department of Justice onto his main rival and ignoring cries of foul, by hysterically overhyping the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, by hatefully demonizing conservatives as domestic terrorists and white supremacists, by dividing the country when he promised to unite us, he achieves his political ends.
By dismantling border protections, for instance, he has allowed 8 million — and counting — illegal aliens to upend demographics and refresh Democratic voter rolls in the future. That is his legacy of change.
As well, his corrosive “equity” agenda has entrenched in the psyche of a growing number of Americans a gnawing racial grievance and entitlement that knows no end.
Corrupt, absolutely
What did Donald Trump achieve of any lasting value in the four years he had power? Clearly, he was a better president on every important measure: the economy, the border, foreign affairs, energy policy.
But every achievement of Trump’s was undone on day one by Biden, and many of his aspirations were foiled by Biden’s Deep State allies.
Power is all Biden has ever cared about. In his dismal first speech of the election season near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on Friday, Biden used the word 13 times. He said “insurrection” or “insurrectionists” 11 times, because that is how he intends to hang on to power, by fashioning his entire campaign pitch around Jan. 6 and Trump’s threat to “democracy.”
Biden’s dishonest depiction of the Capitol riot as something far worse than it really was is out of kilter with the way 73% of Americans in a weekend CBS poll see it, as a “protest that went too far.”
But it’s no coincidence that his speech coincided with strategic leaks from special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 probe, which cast Trump as inciter-in-chief, exactly the question that has been dumped in the lap of the Supreme Court by puerile Biden proxies in Colorado and Maine, as 32 other states similarly consider removing Trump from the ballot on “insurrectionist” grounds.
Yet not one person of the 1,200 charged over the Capitol riot has been charged with insurrection.
Trespass is the main crime, and Washington, DC, US Attorney Matthew Graves announced on Saturday that the DOJ is preparing to target Americans who were “outside the building” on Jan. 6, 2021, but never went inside.
It’s hard to see this witch hunt as anything but the transformation of the DOJ into an election-year political weapon.
Divider-in-chief
“Democracy” came up 30 times in Biden’s speech, too. Apparently it’s “on the ballot.”
“The alternative to democracy is dictatorship,” he thundered.
It’s a bizarre statement for the president of a nation that was founded deliberately, not as a democracy, but as a constitutional republic, precisely to avoid the “tyranny of the majority,” which James Madison warned about.
That’s why we have an Electoral College, and not a presidential election determined by popular vote, where New York would overrule Iowa.
Biden’s pursuit of power at any cost is behind his insidious new eulogies to “democracy.”
Similarly, he has dropped the word “unity,” which he invoked no fewer than 11 times in his inaugural address back in 2021.
The divider-in-chief has given up even pretending he meant it.
On Friday, he used the word “solidarity” in place of unity, which is a very different idea. The word “solidarity” has its roots in the utopian socialist movements of the 19th century and has become the rallying cry of progressives in opposition to the enemy. It was also used a lot by leftists in the United Nations and the World Economic Forum seeking to exploit the COVID crisis. The British Medical Journal even published a special report in 2021 titled, “Covid-19: The road to equity and solidarity.”
“Solidarity” means the opposite of unity when Biden uses it. It is about stoking fear and loathing of Trump supporters.
Yes, it’s tempting to mock Biden’s overblown rhetoric, his slurred words and inability to read a teleprompter, his robotic gait and ridiculous lies.
But his advantage is his fearlessness and lack of shame.
Don’t be ‘fooled’
His polls have stagnated at around 40%, a sore point he reportedly scolded his staff about last November. But the marvel is that they’re not worse.
In the past 50 years, Trump, both Bushes, Carter and Nixon have all suffered from lower approval ratings.
It’s too easy to dismiss him as a corrupt, decrepit old fool. He likes to be underestimated.
He plays the fool to that effect. But he became president despite the naysayers, and Democrats keep winning elections despite his record of ruin.
If Trump does end up as the Republican nominee, as the polls suggest and the pundits insist, the ferocity of the attacks will be unprecedented.
The 91 felony counts, the criminal trials, the efforts to throw him off the ballot, the media vilification, the doomsday rhetoric, all will accelerate.
They are softening him up, like picadors poking at the bull, to drive him mad and sap him of energy so that by the time the broken-down old matador enters the ring, he is already half-dead.
You may understand that the various legal prosecutions against Trump are bogus, and that Biden has weaponized the justice system in a deliberately explosive way.
But there are a lot of independents in the country who don’t keep up with the news and still believe that you don’t get indicted on 91 felonies, and you certainly don’t get convicted, unless you did something wrong. Some may even still believe in “Honest Joe.”
You may rail against their ignorance and naivete, but they will decide the election.
