It’s statistically inconceivable that there are not a great many people as tired as I am of President Joe Biden’s compulsion to put on the airs of the tough guy, the back alley scrapper who has fought his way up against all odds from the streets of Scranton all the way to the White House.
Everybody can and should respect that this president had more modest socioeconomic roots than some others: the founding presidents from Virginia and Boston, the Roosevelts, Kennedy, the Bushes, Trump, and even Jimmy Carter. But this president hasn’t had a longer or more difficult climb up the rickety ladder to his great office than many who have preceded him in it, including Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
We are all entitled to our own self-images, and we are almost all, to some extent, delusional. But this is the president most addicted to bellicose imagery and at least a metaphorical resolution of differences with his opponents by single-person combat.
When he was wallowing around America after being denied the almost customary presidential nomination of a two-term vice president (Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore), he never ceased to tell listeners how much he would like, if they were at school together, to “take [Donald Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” Biden is a wispy little man with brittle features whom Trump must outweigh by eighty pounds; Trump only sleeps about five hours a night and is a human tornado. The idea of two presidents of the United States engaged in physical combat in their adult years is too absurd to contemplate, but if any such match as this occurred, there would be unlikely to be much left of the bantam cock from Delaware at the end of it.
Throughout his campaign for the presidential nomination, until it became a subterranean competition with Canada geese to make himself heard as he stumbled over his teleprompter, candidate Biden engaged in pugilistic imagery with male hecklers, or at the least promising to exceed them in push-ups.
Even his “Come on, man” routine is the confrontational cant of the African-American urban back alley. It’s impossible to imagine any of the 44 men who preceded Joe Biden as president speaking in such terms in their adult lives. Last week he was overheard by the media telling an apparently friendly voter with whom he was claiming some sort of kinship: “Nobody [expletive] with a Biden.”
It must be said that the rampaging and inflexible green movement is messing with him very aggressively. The direct intervention of this president has caused a 1.5 million barrel per day reduction in American oil production and has created precisely the vulnerability that caused Biden to seek relief from the regime that he had previously excoriated as having forfeited American goodwill because of its moral turpitude. He’s groveling to a green movement that’s an unholy coalition of authentic if overly dogmatic conservationists and decayed veterans of the old Marxist left and their faddish sophomoric groupies attacking capitalism from a new angle in the wildly spurious guise of protecting the planet. He’s being muscled by a riff-raff of quacks and extremists in his own party who are pushing America back toward $7 per gallon gas and a vulnerable flow of imported energy, after his predecessor had become the first president since Truman to do without oil imports altogether.
This is of a piece with the general tenor of this administration’s comments and the nodding mantelpiece-doll of a Homeland Security secretary’s endlessly repeated assurances that “the border is closed” for the 20 months of this administration, during which several million people have entered the United States illegally, countless thousands of them filmed by independent press crews as they did so, and their presence attested to by the entire border area staff of Alejandro Mayorkas’s department. The secretary’s assurances are lies, and virtually every man, woman, and child who has heard his assurances knows them to be false. The teeming and wretched masses of the world are messing with “the big guy.”
The presidency of the United States is generally regarded as the world’s greatest office. Whoever is president of the United States deserves respect, whether elevated because of great service in a different field (Eisenhower), accident (Truman and Johnson), being an original and bold outsider (Trump), or climbing up and clinging to the greasy pole of office (Biden).
The widespread insults directed, in their time, against Lyndon Johnson as a war-monger, Richard Nixon as a law-breaker, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the Bushes as dunces, Jimmy Carter as a wimp, Bill Clinton as a sexual degenerate, and the large crowds chanting the vulgar original version of “Go Brandon” were unjust and often disgraceful, but were part of the cost of free speech. The obloquy, much of it malicious fabrication as in the entire Trump-Russia nonsense, heaped on Donald Trump vastly exceeded what was appropriate, even allowing for that president’s penchant for what he himself describes as “constructive hyperbole,” which is more often self-serving and unseemly liberties with the facts.
But this is a feeble administration of very moth-eaten credibility: The president and vice president almost qualify as physically handicapped communicators, apart from the credibility gap that opens up after almost every declarative utterance they make. Immigration, energy, crime prevention, inflation policies, and much of foreign policy are disasters. Government is largely a matter of statistics and psychology, and this president is in denial, and his spokespeople, like Mayorkas, state the opposite of what is demonstrably true. The president is an inarticulate shuffler, the head of a scandal-ridden family, who ostentatiously attends a church most of whose principal tenets of conduct he seems to disapprove of. He evinces a forceful and even belligerent nature belied by almost every aspect of his pusillanimous conduct and policies.
If this president wants to salvage anything from his term, he should stop posturing, tell it straight, face down the extremists who are dictating policy, and keep it to unslurred monosyllables. Most of the world wants him to do well, but telling everyone he meets that he’s an enforcer while borders, stock markets, law and order, and international peace are crumbling is bringing on a collapse that will not be alleviated by defaming the previous (and likely future) president.
