By Moshe Hill
After Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report dropped citing that President Joe Biden was not competent or well enough to stand trial for his crimes, the Biden communication team thought that it would be a great idea to reinforce the accusations. For 10 excruciating minutes on Thursday evening, when most people were eating dinner but clearly past Grandpa Joe’s bedtime, Biden hemmed and hawed and guffawed through in impromptu press conference. His sycophantic cult followers in the Democratic party and the media had a variety of defenses to the abysmal performance of the octogenarian president, and each one should be analyzed for – if nothing else – the sheer audacity of the claims.
First, it’s impossible to ignore how out of character this press conference was. Joe Biden notoriously doesn’t do press conferences nearly as often as his predecessors. Nor does he take questions after giving statements. The most prevalent image of his presidency is of him walking away as reporters shout questions at him and his handlers shoo them away. Biden’s staff also doesn’t improvise his schedule, and definitely doesn’t have Biden out past 6 or 7 pm. And a fixture of the rare presser is alway the note card with the names (and sometimes questions) of the reporters that Biden is allowed to call on. This presser was a unique departure from all of those trademarks.
The defenses after came fast and furious on social media, but they all fell into one of the following categories.
- Look At Trump
This most common defense of Biden is an excellent reminder that the only reason that Biden is anything more than just another forgotten Vice President is because of the unshakeable animosity that many people have for former President Donald Trump. For all the talk that these same people have about Trump’s base of supporters, calling them cult members who do everything Trump says, they also live and breathe Trump. This mentality specifically disregards any and all of the myriad of issues with the Biden presidency because Hey!, he’s not Trump.
Ironically, Joe Biden is a lot more like the caricature that the media has painted of Trump than the actual Trump. Biden lies far more often than Trump ever did, and he actually repeats the same lies over and over well after they’ve been disproven. Biden verbally attacks any citizen that he doesn’t like, and called people “fat” and “lying dog-faced pony soldier” to their faces. Biden has said more racists things than Trump, including saying that if you don’t vote for him “you ain’t black.” Saying that Trump is a unique character in American politics means you just don’t look at what Biden is regularly doing.
- The special prosecutor did not charge Biden with a crime
While the report from the prosecutor did not recommend charges at this time, that’s not because Biden did not commit the crime. Like Hilary Clinton before him, Biden is exonerated on a technicality and will not have to go through what Trump is for doing the exact same thing. The technicality in Biden’s case is that Hur assumed that there would be no jury that would convict Biden because he’s a “’sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” If you’re hanging your hat on that excuse, then good luck.
- I don’t care if he’s senile, look at how much he’s gotten done
In a way this is the most honest of all the defenses, but it also lacks a true assessment of Biden’s first term. Biden was president when the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate in 2021 and 2022, and those years were filled with a lot more legislation than most presidents get to sign. That, however, is more credited to Nancy Pelosi, who kept an iron grip on her caucus, ensuring no dissent amongst Democrats. But was that legislation actually good for the country? In the years since Biden took office, inflation has skyrocketing nearly 20% on almost every good, there have been consistent shortages, and the economy has been stagnant (we even had a small recession in 2022.)
Where Biden has had more authority, namely on the southern border and foreign policy, it’s been an unmitigated disaster. The porous southern border has caused states of emergencies all over the country, with cities like New York, Denver, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and many more crying uncle. On Biden’s watch, multiple major wars have occurred in Ukraine and Israel, and there are a dozen other minor, but deadly, skirmishes with Iranian proxy terror groups in the Middle East. China is getting more aggressive with Taiwan, North Korea is more aggressive on South Korea, and the world seems on the precipice of a global conflict. That’s Biden’s legacy, not an infrastructure bill that only spent 10% on actual infrastructure.
- He’s doing great! He’s vibrant and with it!
This is the most delusional argument and, thankfully, the least used. Only top ranking Democrats are saying this in order to prop up the Biden corpse for reelection, knowing that they have no one else who could beat Trump. This is what they are saying on cable news interviews and on their social media, but everyone knows that behind closed doors they don’t believe it.
This is the problem that Democrats have with Joe Biden. He’s clearly unwell, and there’s no denying that. Watch any video of him from now and from five years ago and it’s painful. What’s even worse is that when you see other world leaders like Vladmir Putin interviewed, it’s hard to imagine that Biden could win a checkers game against him, let alone a geopolitical negotiation. At the same time, they can’t dump him because they know that woud cost them the election. At the end of the day, for Democrats, the party is far more important than the country it’s supposed to serve
