Joe Biden’s presidency has been falling to pieces before our eyes for months, but recent events have made it clear that his Humpty Dumpty moment has finally arrived. Few will weep.
If you’re looking for a rundown of how awful Biden’s presidency has been, Victor Davis Hanson offers a pretty good summary . Yet for me, five issues stand out above all others: Biden’s COVID-19 authoritarianism , his related efforts to use the federal bureaucracy to fight “misinformation,” his blundering foreign policy that triggered a war in Europe, his student loan forgiveness scheme that will plague America for years, and his embrace of lawfare against his presidential opponent.
This is not what we were promised. Biden campaigned on a return to normal, but his presidency, arguably the most authoritarian since President Franklin D. Roosevelt, delivered the opposite.
America being what it is today, Biden’s rotten policies are not what actually sank his presidency, though all contributed. Instead, Biden’s Titanic moment stemmed from a pair of events that occurred within two and a half weeks that were out of his control, unlike his disastrous policies.
The first of these events was a sad, embarrassing attempt to debate former President Donald Trump on national TV. The 81-year-old Biden struggled badly, but this was no surprise to folks who had been paying attention. Anyone without scales over their eyes had recognized that the toll of the presidency had long ago sapped what remained of Biden’s vigor and cognitive aptitude.
The debate was Biden’s “the emperor has no clothes” moment. People could finally talk about what their eyes had long been telling them: 2024 Joe Biden is not 2019 Joe Biden.
Even the New York Times, which ran 192 age-related articles within one week on Biden’s embarrassing debate performance, conceded that Biden had, to put it politely, lost his fastball.
Following the debate, legacy media could no longer claim with a straight face that Biden was just fine; that videos showing him bumbling, stumbling, and frozen — and confusing French President Emmanuel Macron with a French president who had been dead for nearly 30 years — were just MAGA “cheap fakes”; or that Biden reading aloud teleprompter directions such as “pause” was normal.
The reaction to the debate was so bad that Biden even lost Hollywood star George Clooney, who had appeared with Biden at a fundraiser just weeks before.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” Clooney wrote . “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
In the debate’s wake, “Biden must go” (i.e., drop out) became the rallying cry not of Republicans but of Democrats and legacy media (pardon the tautology).
Then, even as Democrats fought amongst themselves, something else happened.
On July 13, while delivering a campaign speech near Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump was shot in the ear by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks, who was reportedly wielding an AR-15, was shot dead by police, but not before critically wounding two people and claiming the life of Corey Comperatore , a 50-year-old rally attendee.
The harrowing event shocked the nation and left people with an image that will be burned into our memories and live on in the history books long after we’re all gone.
Taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Evan Vucci, the photo shows a defiant Trump with his fist raised and blood on his face just moments after his ear was struck by a .223 round. Whether you like Trump or not, his response was impressive. Heroic, even.
Many pundits are arguing that the assassination attempt on Trump all but assures his reelection, and data suggest that they are right. Following the assassination attempt, Trump’s election chances, which had spiked after Biden’s debate performance, hit new highs in betting markets.
His betting chances of becoming president currently stand at nearly 70%. Biden sits at about 18%.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
There’s obviously still time for an October surprise that could derail Trump, but any last-minute twist is much more likely to involve Biden than Trump. Indeed, a new report suggests that top Democrats believe Biden, who is in isolation following a COVID diagnosis, is preparing to resign this weekend.
The writing is on the wall. Biden’s presidency is shattered, and all the king’s horses and men aren’t putting it back together again.
Jonathan Miltimore ( @miltimore79 ) is a senior content strategist at the Foundation for Economic Education and a senior writer at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow his work on Substack .
Local News