Everything seems to be going wrong for Joe Biden. It can’t be a good sign for him that he no longer trusts one of his most loyal henchmen. Merrick Garland has gone to extraordinary lengths to pursue Biden’s electoral opponent, but Biden, feeling power slip through his fingers, is fuming that the attorney general did not move quicker. According to Politico, the White House fears that Garland took Biden’s bogus pledge of Justice Department “independence” a little too literally, and now Biden may have to win re-election the normal way by convincing the public that he actually deserves a second term.
For Democrats, Biden is automatically redeemed by Donald Trump’s supposedly self-evident and uniquely odious criminality. But some Democrats are beginning to sense that the rest of the country does not share their urgency or their zealous certainty of Trump’s turpitude. Unlike Biden’s mental decline, which is obvious to everyone, it is far from self-evident that Trump is an “insurrectionist,” and it is far from clear that America is willing to go to the extremes that Democrats want to take us to get rid of him.
The unhinged effort to remove Trump from the ballot received a stinging rebuke last week from the Supreme Court, which soberly rejected the tendentious narrative that Trump is complicit in an attack on democracy. As the mild-mannered John Roberts put it, “insurrection is a broad, broad term.” Even the liberal justices showed concern about the “bedlam,” as Trump put it, that Democrats would unleash on the nation.
The liberal narrative about Trump’s character took another powerful hit with the release of Robert Hur’s report, which found that Biden “willfully detained” top secret information, shared it with his ghostwriter, and stored it in boxes in his garage. The Hur report landed like a thunderbolt, but its basic conclusions were hardly shocking. Biden, like Trump, Hillary Clinton, and countless others in politics, has a tendency to treat classified information like personal property, but only Trump has been singled out for charges.
The thing about Hur’s report that upset Democrats the most were his comments about Biden’s deteriorating mental health. Simply by pointing out the elephant in the room, Hur stirred Democrats into a frenzy.
In sharp contrast with the sheltered Biden, no president in modern history has sustained more scrutiny than Trump. In addition to a ruthless and concerted lawfare campaign, Trump has to contend with a daily avalanche of propaganda painting him as the next Hitler and acquitting Biden of his failures. But the best efforts of the media machine can no longer hide Biden’s sharp mental decline or the total breakdown of law and order across the nation.
In the past month alone, there have been two highly publicized attacks by asylum seekers in New York City. With the collapse of Biden’s cynical “border bill,” he cannot avoid blame for the mess he made by undoing Trump’s immigration policies. Biden has pledged to try, but no one is going to care about a stillborn piece of legislation months from now.
The 2024 election will be close, no matter what. But the fatalism of the Taylor Swift conspiracy that has swept the right belies political reality. Biden is an old, unpopular incumbent whose weaknesses can no longer be hidden and whose best, perhaps only, hope of winning a second term is to jail his political opponent, an increasingly elusive contingency. The Supreme Court has already shown it will not rubber stamp partisan lawfare against a former, and potentially future, president, and even if the court rejects Trump’s immunity argument, which it seems likely to do, a careful review of the weighty questions at hand could help Trump avoid a trial before the election.
In times of chaos, people yearn for strong leadership. If the left cannot control its anxiety, the panic over Biden’s weakness and Trump’s aspirations of “dictatorship” could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.