by Daniel Oliver
Now that Biden is toast, Trump has a real fight on his hands. Who’s to blame? Clearly, there are incompetents in both campaigns—which doesn’t bode well for America’s fight against an insurgent Russia and Communist China (and Iran and North Korea), possibly in World War III.
One asks in amazement, whose crazy, unbelievably stupid idea was it to have Biden and Trump debate in June? In time, we may find out. But for now, we can only speculate.
Suspect One may be Jill Biden—’scuse me—“Dr. Jill Biden.” Some doctor! Obviously, she is not a medical doctor. Perhaps she’s an StD, a Doctor Stultitiae (Doctor of Stupidity). Whatever, as the kids say. She likes life in the White House. All those people bowing and scraping. All meals served. Flying private—for free!! What’s not to like?
But really: Joe Biden, standing upright for ninety minutes? You’ve got to be kidding. And at the same time, remembering a boatload of miscellaneous facts and repartees? Double you’ve got to be kidding. What were they thinking? And who did the thinking? Who actually made the final decision?
The answer may be that Joe Biden, lui-même, he himself, made the decision. That would certainly validate—actually extend—the comment about Biden made by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Biden really never gets anything right, from foreign policy to economics to social policy. He’s a walking disaster—and even his walking has become a disaster.
And if it was actually Biden who made the decision to debate, was there no one who had the wisdom and guts to challenge it? What loyal assistant would let Biden decide anything? Ah, question: does he have any loyal assistants?
You’d think a loyal assistant (assuming there is one) would want to keep his job—yes, “his” job; no woman could possibly be that stupid, except perhaps the aforementioned Doctor Stultitiae. Any assistant who saw Biden every day must have known Biden couldn’t possibly survive a debate with Trump. Was there not one assistant in the entire Biden entourage who had the courage to speak and the clout to make a difference on the subject?
If not, that helps explain why Biden’s presidency has been such a failure: no one has had the clout to say no to him.
Of course, it’s possible that he was set up, perhaps by some loyal American in the inner circle who, for the good of the country, thought Biden had to go and knew that having a disastrous debate was the only way of getting rid of him.
We’ll know in due course. Washington is not known for keeping secrets.
And this, incidentally, is worth pondering: Biden’s clinging onto the skids of the White House helicopter puts him to shame compared to Richard Nixon. Nixon probably could have beaten the Watergate rap (the White House tapes, which Nixon never listened to, actually exonerated him) but chose to resign for the good of the country. Biden doesn’t give a fig for the country.
What about Trump? What was he thinking when he accepted the debate challenge? He must have known how feeble Biden was, even if we didn’t. We television viewers only knew what we saw on the evening news. “The powers that be,” the glitterati, all said Biden was okay. Many of them said that. Dozens of them said that. Scores of them said that. Said he was really sharp. Asked penetrating questions. Sometimes, the sharpest guy in the room. What did we know?
But surely Trump knew? Trump was supposed to know a lot more. His secret service protectors probably knew from their secret service colleagues in the Biden entourage just exactly how feeble Biden had become. They would certainly be willing to talk after one of their colleagues was eaten alive by the Biden dog. If Trump didn’t know Biden’s condition, why not?
And if he did know, what was the point of the debate? To bury Biden? In June?
Could Trump have said no to the debate challenge? Perhaps not. But he could have said his June calendar was full (he could have blamed the lawfare being waged against him) and that he’d debate Biden just as soon as it cleared, on . . . whatever the date is, when it would have become far more difficult to replace Biden than it is now.
One has to conclude that Trump was too eager to destroy Biden, too eager to get even, to show how much better than Biden he was. There’s a name for that: hubris.
There’s also a name for criticizing Trump on this matter: “Monday morning quarter backing.” Perhaps.
But perhaps not. We want and expect our leaders to be experts on figuring all this stuff out, and on Saturday afternoon, during the game, when it counts.
Trump didn’t do that. That may turn out to have been a costly mistake, certainly for him, but also for us and for what we still call “the free world.”
Four more years of far-left Democrat governance and this country will look—and be—different, perhaps unrecognizable to people who have read America’s history or who just remember the Reagan years. The wokies may be on the run, but they’ll reappear in another guise. The default position of all government is totalitarian. It will be here too.
Now, it’s not just Trump who has a real fight on his hands. All lovers of freedom and limited government are in the fight of their lives.
We need a new birth of freedom to get us out of this mess. William F. Buckley Jr. said decades ago, “The wells of regeneration are infinitely deep.” That, currently, is our best hope.
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Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Photo “Joe Biden” by President Joe Biden. Background Photo “Debate Stage” by Gage Skidmore”. CC BY-SA 2.0.
