Wednesday, Feb 12, 2025

Biden’s Exit Marked by Defiance and Denial

 

The final days of Joe Biden’s White House tenure were marked by the same characteristics of stubborn denial, self-deception, and insensitivity to the wants and needs of most ordinary American voters which ultimately turned the electorate against him and enabled the triumphant return to power of his political nemesis, Donald Trump.

In one of his farewell messages to the American people, a rare one-on-one extended interview with veteran USA Today reporter Susan Page, Biden doubled down on his totally unrealistic claim that, despite his disastrous June 27 debate performance, which clearly revealed to the world the extent of his cognitive decline, he would have been able to defeat Trump in the November election, “based on the polling” that Biden claimed to have seen.

In fact, Biden was forced to step down as the Democrat presidential candidate by intense private and public pressure from senior party leaders, led by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama because he was clearly on track to lose not only all seven of the battleground states, but also many of the reliably blue-voting states including Virginia, New Mexico, and New Hampshire.

Party leaders intervened because they feared, with good reason, that Biden would drag down to defeat with him many of the other Democrat candidates running with him down-ballot. In fact, Harris’ refusal during her shortened presidential campaign to clearly distance herself from Biden’s failed policies doomed her presidential candidacy, but she did manage to create enough enthusiasm among Democrat voters to avoid the widely feared across-the-board GOP landslide victory that the polls were predicting before Biden dropped out of the race. Nevertheless, Trump’s clear-cut victory in the Electoral College and the nationwide popular vote was substantial enough that even many Democrats were forced to concede that it amounted to a mandate for Trump’s agenda and a clear voter rejection of the results of Biden’s presidency.

Biden’s somewhat bitter and wistful comments during his interview with Page revealed signs of his deep regret that he submitted to the pressure in favor of his equally unpopular vice president, Kamala Harris, who also, ultimately, failed to convince the voters that she was up to the White House job.

BIDEN’S 2020 BAIT AND SWITCH

Biden defended his decision to run for re-election, but acknowledged that when he ran in 2020 to serve as a transitional president, “I wasn’t looking to [still] be president when I was 86 years old. So I did talk about passing the baton” to the next generation of Democrat leaders, which was widely interpreted as a promise not to seek a second term.

Biden also campaigned in 2020 on a promise to re-unite a badly divided and politically polarized country. But once in the White House, Biden adopted the radical progressive policy agenda of the extreme left wing of the Democrat Party and rarely reached out to Republicans for bipartisan support.

When reporter Page asked Biden directly whether he still believed that he could have defeated Trump for a second time, he replied, “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes.” When Page then followed up, as delicately as she could, by asking Biden if he would have had sufficient “vigor” to serve as president for another four years, he replied candidly, “I don’t know,” but then added, optimistically, “So far, so good. But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?”

Biden and his remaining supporters still publicly insist, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that he remains fully capable of fulfilling his duties as president, despite his deteriorating physical and mental abilities, as revealed by his shuffling gait, his frequent and sometimes incoherent verbal gaffes, and the look of confusion on his face during his public appearances when not reading from prepared remarks or being prompted by his wife or White House staff. But the nation’s leading mainstream news media outlets are no longer denying their complicity over the past five years in a conspiracy with Democrat party leaders and White House officials to cover up the full extent of Biden’s cognitive decline from the voters.

BIDEN WAS AN ISOLATED PART-TIME PRESIDENT

For example, according to a detailed expose published by the Wall Street Journal last month, based upon interviews with nearly 50 people involved in Biden’s White House operations, Joe Biden has never been fully functional as president and was dependent upon his closest aides and advisers, led by his wife, to “manage the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office.

“To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members. . . were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments.”

The article also revealed that, from the outset of his presidency, Biden’s daily presidential workload was lightened by his staff to the extent possible. Because “Biden has never been at his best first thing in the morning,” Biden’s meetings were scheduled by his staff to start later in the day, and he would rarely work late past 8 p.m. In addition, Biden’s White House meetings would often be canceled at the last moment if his staff determined that he was having “a bad day.”

WHO WAS REALLY MAKING BIDEN’S POLICIES?

The debate continues to this day over whether the Biden administration’s liberal policies reflect his own policies and beliefs, and the extent to which they were dictated by progressive leaders such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, under the terms of the political deal under which they gave him their support in the 2020 presidential election campaign.

Biden became so isolated from direct contact with anyone outside his inner circle of advisors and White House staff, that his critics publicly questioned whether he was the one who actually decided his administration’s policies that were being announced by his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and National Economic Council head Lael Brainard. That lingering uncertainty casts an element of doubt over any attempt to pass judgment on Biden’s presidential legacy.

The Wall Street Journal article noted that “presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater. . .

“There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him, and limits around the sources of information he consumed. . .

“Press aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president wasn’t [even] talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing [Trump] in the 2024 race.”

BIDEN THOUGHT HE COULD MAINTAIN THE CHARADE FOR 4 MORE YEARS

According to conservative commentator Matthew Continetti, writing in the Washington Free Beacon, it was Biden’s deliberate isolation from the political realities and his ego that, “led him to conclude he could gaslight the public into thinking that he was able to execute the duties of president” for another four years.

Continetti suggests that Biden’s “ego prevented him from recognizing that the surprising [strong] Democratic performance in the 2022 midterm election was a perfect opportunity to announce he would let other, younger candidates run. . . for his party’s 2024 nomination. [But] in the end, the attractions of power were too strong.”

Biden had come to believe that the protective shell that had been built up to protect his presidency, would enable him “to keep up the charade” indefinitely. But when Biden’s poor performance in the June 27 debate with Trump exposed the extent of his cognitive decline, the credibility of his candidacy for re-election quickly collapsed.

The Wall Street Journal article notes that “the protective shell that Biden’s White House staff built around him, was designed to protect him ‘from making gaffes or missteps that could damage his image.’

“The system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the chairs of congressional committees and other high-ranking officials. It also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.”

BIDEN’S PRESIDENTIAL INFERIORITY COMPLEX

Some of Biden’s worst policy blunders were the result of the obvious chip on his shoulder which has repeatedly driven him to try to prove that he is a better president than his predecessors, including both Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Upon first taking office, Biden couldn’t wait to reverse Trump’s most important policy achievements, such as canceling the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and halting construction of Trump’s wall preventing illegal immigrants from crossing the border with Mexico.

Some of Biden’s biggest presidential blunders stem from his belief that his many years of service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee qualified him as a foreign policy expert. But according to a famous 2014 quote by Obama’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, “I think [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Those observations go a long way towards explaining Biden’s many foreign policy and national security blunders as president, beginning with the badly botched retreat he ordered of American troops from Afghanistan which first undermined Biden’s popular support from the American people, and from which his job approval rating never recovered.

Biden’s determination to remove all of the American troops remaining in Afghanistan regardless of the consequences harkened back to his opposition as vice president to President Obama’s decision to send more American troops to Afghanistan to help the corrupt U.S.-supported Karzai government defeat the Taliban.

That is why Biden did not heed the warning from his generals that the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops he was ordering and the abandonment of the well-defended U.S. airbase at Bagram threatened the stability of the Karzai government.

The badly botched withdrawal resulted in unforgettable pictures of Afghan civilians desperate to leave the country before the Taliban takeover chasing a U.S. cargo plane down the runway as it was taking off, and a terrorist bombing at the entrance to the Kabul airport that resulted in the death of 13 American soldiers and more than 170 Afghan civilians, projecting an image of Biden administration weakness and indecision.

THE FALLOUT FROM BIDEN’S AFGHAN WITHDRAWAL FIASCO

Biden’s Afghan fiasco was not only a black eye on America’s international reputation, it also likely inspired Russian President Vladimir Putin to believe that the U.S. would not try to stop him from invading Ukraine despite Biden’s stern public warnings against doing so.

Some foreign policy analysts also claim that the Biden administration provoked Putin into invading Ukraine by signing an agreement with Ukraine’s government signaling an intention to bring Ukraine into the NATO alliance, which Putin and other Russian leaders saw as a significant threat to Russia’s national security.

Putin also believed that the Biden administration’s reluctance to provide Ukraine with the kind of weapons it needed to repel a Russian invasion was another indication that the U.S. would ultimately permit him to take over Ukraine, in the same way that it largely stood aside in 2014, when Putin sent out-of-uniform Russian troops to invade Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and then annexed it to Russia.

Even though President Biden eventually did come to support Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to lead the defense of his homeland against the invading Russian army, he was slow to provide Zelensky with the kinds of advanced U.S. weapons, such as tanks and mobile missile launchers, which made it impossible for Ukraine’s military to follow up on its successes on the battlefield.

President Biden also failed to recognize the opportunity presented by Ukraine’s September 2022 offensive in which it liberated the Russian-occupied city of Kharkiv. That victory could have led to a negotiated ceasefire agreement on terms favorable to Ukraine that would have put an end to the fighting and prevented the subsequent death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides in a war that has become a bloody standoff with no end in sight.

BIDEN PROJECTED AMERICAN WEAKNESS RATHER THAN STRENGTH

The Biden administration continued to project weakness when it cut back on the enforcement of the economic sanctions that Trump had imposed on Iran and begged Iran’s leaders to return to the bargaining table to negotiate an improved version of the deeply flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal. In the meantime, the U.S. permitted Iran to violate the deal’s existing safeguards and U.N. inspections designed to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear armaments threshold by increasing its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and paid an exorbitant ransom to Iran to gain the freedom of innocent American citizens it was holding hostage.

However, these efforts by Biden to appease Iran’s Islamic leaders failed to result in any improvement in their aggressive behavior. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s ongoing war on the domestic fossil fuel industry, to the detriment of America’s energy independence, resulted in a bonanza of increased oil export income for America’s enemies, including Russia and Venezuela in addition to Iran.

The Biden administration also projected weakness when it failed to shoot down a high-altitude surveillance balloon launched from China which overflew the North American continent from west to east from January 28 to February 4, 2023, including several highly sensitive American military bases, and was not brought down by the U.S. military until after it crossed the Atlantic Coast and was over the ocean.

That failure by the Biden administration to address an obvious threat to American security was repeated just last month when it failed to respond satisfactorily to hundreds of reported drone sightings over several East Coast states whose source and purpose remain largely unknown.

BIDEN’S ESSENTIAL BUT FLAWED SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL AT WAR

To his credit, 7 months later, President Biden did immediately come out firmly in support of Israel when it was attacked by Hamas from Gaza on October 7. He also committed the United States to supply Israel with the arms it needed to defend itself against this act of aggression and subsequent attacks by Iran and its terrorist proxies, including Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi Shiite militias, despite the vocal objections of several prominent pro-Palestinian Democrat lawmakers.

Unfortunately, certain public comments by President Biden and senior members of his administration criticizing Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, and accusing it of failing to provide adequate protection and humanitarian aid for Gaza’s civilian population, as well as the administration’s decision to delay the shipment of certain American arms to Israel, have encouraged Israel’s enemies to continue their attacks.

Nevertheless, President Biden and his administration’s ongoing support for Israel’s ability and moral right to defend itself after being attacked has been vital to Israel’s victories on the battlefields of Gaza and Lebanon, and against missile and drone attacks from Iran and its proxies.

DEFENDING BIDENOMICS

When he was asked during the USA Today interview about his economic policies, Biden defended his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which his critics claim triggered the spike in inflation that has devastated the budgets of tens of millions of American households and was arguably the most important issue in the November election.

Biden’s critics point out that the American economy was already recovering from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic before he and congressional Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan in March 2021. It was based upon the highly debatable premise that more stimulus was needed in the form of federal spending on a long list of items on the liberal big government spending agenda, in addition to $1,400 Covid relief checks to every American citizen making less than $75,000 a year. Biden and the Democrats ignored accurate warnings from Republican legislators and prominent economists, including Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, that the $1.9 trillion in excess spending would unleash a ruinous spike in inflation that would reach 9.1%, the highest level in 40 years.

But in his interview with USA Today, Biden defended the legislation, claiming that it was crucial to end the Covid-induced recession by boosting growth and job creation. “We spent money doing it. But the fact is that we had a soft landing, no recession,” Biden said, despite the prediction by most economists that a recession was inevitable. In fact, one of the initial talking points of his 2024 presidential campaign was that Bidenomics was a success, even though all of the public opinion polls showed that a large majority of the American people disagreed, and that the sharply higher consumer costs for groceries, energy, rent and mortgage payments, and other daily living essentials continue to be a major problem for tens of millions of Americans, even though the rate of inflation has been reduced to near-normal levels.

Biden also claims credit for the deliberately misnamed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 which reduced prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients, extended subsidies for Obamacare health insurance policies, offered generous tax rebates for the purchasers of American-made electric vehicles, and funded certain green energy projects. But it also instituted a 15% minimum corporate tax increase and funded the hiring of an army of new Internal Revenue Service agents to crack down on federal income tax cheats.

IMPORTANT BUT DELAYED INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS

On the other hand, to his credit, Biden did succeed in generating broad Republican support for the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which called for the spending of a total of $1.2 trillion on long-needed infrastructure projects across the country, including roads and bridges, transportation safety, mass transit, railroads, improvements to the power grid, expanding broadband access to the internet, and building a creating a network of electric vehicle chargers.

But in the interview, Biden expressed frustration about how long it took to get construction started for most of the infrastructure projects. “Historians will talk about (how) great the impact was, but it didn’t (have) any immediate impact on people’s lives,” he said, or win him more political support from the voters. Biden therefore added, “I think we would’ve been a lot better off had we been able to go much harder at getting some of these projects in the ground quicker.”

He also persuaded Congress to pass the CHIPS and Science Act, which is another long-term project designed to attract more investment in the redevelopment of the domestic semiconductor chip production industry to keep America competitive in such fast-growing high-tech fields as artificial intelligence.

“[These] are things that are going to create enormous wealth and work out there,” he told USA Today, “but it takes time.”

FINAL EFFORTS TO FRUSTRATE TRUMP’S GOALS

In the final days of his presidency, Biden has been trying to make it as difficult as possible for the incoming president, Donald Trump, to carry out his declared intention to undo Biden’s failed legacy. These include closing Biden’s open southern border with Mexico and deporting the estimated ten million or more illegal immigrants that the Biden administration welcomed into this country. Biden also attempted to frustrate Trump’s desire to stimulate domestic oil and natural gas production by declaring large swaths of coastal waters in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean off-limits to drilling.

In the end, Biden is likely to be remembered as a transitional president, but not in the sense that he had originally intended. Instead of initiating the transition from Trump’s first term as president to a Democrat who will continue and expand upon Biden’s liberal policy agenda, he will likely become known as the president whose failed policies convinced a majority of the American people that the country needs a leader like Donald Trump willing to disrupt the dysfunctional Washington elite liberal establishment and redirect the federal government to reflect the goals and serve the needs of grassroots American voters.

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