If you were lucky enough to avoid Joe Biden’s Friday screed, allow me to summarize his 30-minute rant against Donald Trump: He’s all Hitler, all the time.
That’s it.
Everything else is detail, and not very interesting detail at that.
Still, there are omens to be divined by examining the speech’s entrails.
Chief among them is that the event, billed as Biden’s first campaign address, dashes the hopes of many Americans, especially young Democrats, that he wouldn’t seek re-election.
He’s 81, looks and acts older, and his presidency has been an absolute disaster, but Biden shows no sign he will quit.
If he had the good sense to drop out, late last year was an unofficial deadline because it would have given substitute Democrats time to raise money and get on state ballots.
Practically speaking, it’s too late now, with the first Dem primary, in South Carolina, set for Feb. 3.
More’s the pity for the party, the nation and the free world.
A second omen is the fact that the president had next to nothing to say about what he’s accomplished.
Because he didn’t try to make a positive case for why he deserves four more years, we can assume he will run an almost exclusively negative campaign.
That means many more events like Friday, where he devoted nearly the entire speech to the dangers he says Trump represents.
“We must be clear,” Biden said of the election.
“Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”
Get ready, then, for endless comparisons to dictators and autocrats and Nazis.
No doubt many will become household names over the next 11 months.
Bitter anniversary
The timing of the speech, on the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, also underscores the theme.
The president deemed that day an “insurrection” and used variations on the word 11 times.
Not incidentally, that word fits neatly with efforts by Dems in numerous states to try to keep Trump off their ballots by invoking a Civil War-era amendment to the Constitution that targeted leaders of the Confederacy.
The final decision will be made by the Supreme Court, which said Friday it would hear arguments on the Colorado effort next month.
Even the site of the speech, not far from Valley Forge, where George Washington’s Continental Army camped in the winter of 1777-78, highlighted the contrast Biden aimed to draw with Trump.
Although Biden didn’t actually equate himself with Washington, his self-regard as a leader in what he called a “sacred cause” was unmistakable.
Taken as a whole, the speech indicates the president has given up trying to persuade people that “Bidenomics” is good for them.
And he made only a passing reference to unifying America, which was the dominant theme of his inaugural, so he’s ditching that issue, too, though he never tried to deliver on it.
That effectively leaves only one path forward — scare people about Trump and use the fear factor as a substitute for an agenda of his own.
It’s a big decision that asks voters to overlook their daily experiences and worries and instead focus on Biden’s version of what a second coming of Trump would look like.
Then again, Biden may have no other option.
His approval numbers, especially on the economy and the direction of the country, are abysmal, the stuff of one-termers.
And there’s no reason to believe they will get much better before November.
Rancor without results
He has been as divisive as Trump, but his major policies have been far less successful.
The evidence is not only clear, it’s growing.
Biden’s open-border disaster has waved in more than 5 million unvetted, illegal immigrants and led Democratic mayors and governors to fault the White House.
New York, Chicago, Denver, Boston and other cities are swamped as thousands of poor illegal immigrants from around the world arrive each week.
The race-based DEI culture, supported by the president’s progressive-dominated domestic team, is widely unpopular outside of elite institutions.
The Harvard debacle involving former President Claudine Gay is instructive — the board that picked and defended her resembled a Democratic clubhouse, and was advised by Barack Obama.
Then there’s the inflation Biden’s wild spending helped to provoke.
Although it’s receding, the surge in prices has left many families worse off than before he took office.
To be fair, the anti-Trump theme is not without merit.
The events of Jan. 6 were indefensible and Trump should have been more careful in his remarks leading up to the day and in that morning’s speech.
And he should have urged the rioters to go home long before he did.
But Biden’s attempt to treat that day as a predictor of a second Trump term would be more persuasive if Dems weren’t simultaneously prosecuting Trump and trying to keep him off the ballot.
Claiming to be a defender of democracy while you try to lock up and ban your leading opponent doesn’t pass the smell test.
If you hate autocrats and dictators, why imitate them?
And Biden is no spectator in his party’s abusive use of government power for political gain.
Soon after taking office, he let it be known he wanted Trump prosecuted.
It wasn’t long before his pliant attorney general, Merrick Garland, set in motion the two federal indictments Trump faces.
What would George Washington think of that?
Not much, and neither do the millions of Americans who have rallied to Trump’s side as the federal and state cases against him collide with the election calendar.
Losing the vote
Biden didn’t dwell on the legal assaults Friday because they obviously undercut his claim to be democracy’s bulwark, but his repeated use of “insurrection” was a dog’s whistle to his party and its lawyers.
Meanwhile, the voter shift to Trump has confounded his GOP rivals, who have been reduced to fighting for second place in the nomination race.
The contest likely would have been different if Dems had not targeted Trump in ways that made him more popular.
In that sense, Biden’s use of Jan. 6 as a lynchpin for his campaign has a limited appeal, with even diehard Dem James Carville saying there isn’t lasting value.
“It makes sense on January 6th, but don’t kid yourself,” Carville told ABC News.
“On January 8th and 9th, Americans will still be going to the grocery store. People live in the economy and experience it many times a day. They don’t live on January 6th.”
Similarly, GOP Sen. Mitt Romney, no fan of Trump’s, threw cold water on the effort.
“I think the threat to democracy pitch is a bust,” Romney said in a text to The New York Times.
“Jan. 6 will be four years old by the election. People have processed it, one way or another. Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”
Ah, there’s the rub.
A dead horse is the only horse Biden has.
