For nearly 40 years, Joe Biden has been dedicated to fighting on behalf of his number one issue, which is Joe Biden being the president,” New Republic editor Osita Nwanevu tweeted after the Morning Joe segment. Anyone who talked themselves into believing Biden’s cause was nobler than that, as I did, is a fool and has now been made to feel like one.
One way or another, Joe Biden’s absurdly long political career will be over by January 20 of next year. He’s actively choosing to end it in the most humiliating, destructive, and villainous way possible.
The remarkable thing about the president’s heel turn from anti-Trump champion to prideful midwife of a Trump restoration is how Trumpy it’s been. Time and again over the last two weeks, he and his cronies have borrowed political tactics from his enemy’s playbook. […]
Whenever Trump’s fragile ego is confronted with a harsh reality that it can’t bear, he protects it by retreating into denial. The same is true of Biden lately. When Stephanopoulos asked him what his plan was to turn the campaign around, the president dodged by boasting about the size of his crowds—which sounds familiar. When he was confronted with the numerous polls showing him trailing, he scoffed and insisted that “All the pollsters I talk to tell me it’s a toss-up.”
Fake news, in other words. […]
I will make this as painful for you as I can, the president is telling his Democratic critics. If they try to end his presidential campaign, he’ll nurse a sense of betrayal among his supporters that risks a disaster for the left at the polls.
As of today, like Trump, Biden rules his party’s establishment not by affection but by fear. And like Trump, he’s not above lowbrow demagoguery aimed at “elites” to bind his grassroots supporters tightly to him. […]
The idea of “blue MAGA” is true to the spirit of this political era, though. Once again, instead of reckoning honestly with their leader’s unfitness for office, a party’s rank-and-file is rationalizing his flaws, scapegoating allies who dare to point them out as “disloyal,” and demanding that everyone get back to storming the cockpit in order to prevent the plane from crashing. […]
…[H]ad the party known the full extent of his debilitation, a serious opponent presumably would have emerged in order to spare Democrats from having to gamble the fate of the constitutional order on Joe Biden’s collapsing cognitive health. But that opponent never came because the White House aggressively deceived Americans on that subject.
Biden defrauded his party, depriving primary voters of a fully informed decision, and now he’s touting the success of that fraud as a reason for why he should be allowed to get away with it.
There’s a third absurdity to this fiasco, though: By now it should be clear to all that Kamala Harris, more so than Biden himself, is the “real” nominee this fall.
…Joe Biden might live until January 2029, but it’s inconceivable that he’ll be able to do the job until then. If he’s reelected, Harris will assuredly assume the presidency at some point.
So why not make her the nominee now and give Americans an honest choice? Asking them to reelect Joe Biden to a four-year term he certainly won’t complete is asking for their complicity in a second fraud.
I resent that I’m being asked to participate in it. And if I resent it, imagine how swing voters who don’t view Trump as some sort of providential judgment on America feel.