The Democrats Need to Dump Joe But They Just Can't Do It
He can't be an effective or even competent President and almost everyone knows it. The aroma of deep discontent in the country smells like 2016.
The last time the country was this eager to dump an incumbent President was more than 40 years ago, when the electorate couldn’t wait to jettison the feckless and cowardly Jimmy Carter. Right now, the Wall Street Journal has a poll showing Nikki Haley leading Joe Biden by 17 points, which (1) would be an epic landslide and (2) shows that the country is chomping at the bit to ditch Joe, since Haley, although an acceptable and in some ways an attractive candidate, isn’t going to be mistaken for FDR or Ronald Reagan. What’s driving her lead is the country’s correct assessment that Joe isn’t up to the job and that things will only get worse as age takes it relentless toll on a fellow who wasn’t that smart to begin with.
The fact that every last thing you buy costs more now than when Joe took office, that America’s enemies are more menacing and aggressive across the globe, that Joe supports the poisonous, illegal and unconstitutional racial preferences that got gobsmacked by the Supreme Court, and that he has all but surrendered national sovereignty at the border isn’t helping either.
The one thing standing between the Republicans and a landslide is Donald Trump, whom a very significant chunk of the electorate loathes because of his self-involvement, recklessness, classlessness and dishonesty. It doesn’t help that he’s very likely guilty of at least one of the four pending felony cases against him (the Florida-based federal case for misappropriation of documents and obstruction of justice), for which he is likely to be convicted and might very well go to jail. Yet even Trump leads Biden by a statistically significant margin in the WSJ poll and, according to the National Review, leads Biden in all seven swing states. Biden carried six of them last time, and it won him the election.
As the National Review notes:
[T]he Wall Street Journal poll also demonstrates Trump’s growing 4-point lead against Biden across the U.S. When five potential third-party candidates are included in the mix, that lead extends to 6 points. The poll also shows Biden’s dismal approval rating of 37 percent, marking a new low in his presidency.
Q: When has an incumbent with a 37% approval rating been re-elected?
A: Never.
Andrew Sullivan, a determined liberal and NeverTrumper but a smart and honest guy, smells the same thing I do. In his own Substack, he notes:
I was one of a handful of pundits who thought in early 2016 that Trump not only could, but probably would, win the election. I could feel his appeal in my lizard brain, and…I knew his presidency was almost certain was when the Brexit result was announced in June, when everyone still assumed Hillary was a shoo-in. Something was stirring. And…I’m feeling the nausea again.
Something is indeed stirring now, as it was seven years ago. The stock market is at an all-time high and unemployment is very low, but very few people feel prosperous or optimistic or anything like optimistic. The electorate knows that we’re in an unstable, dangerous world, and the guy allegedly steering the country’s ship is, with alarming frequency, just not there. When he is there, he lectures our most steadfast ally — a nation in a war for its survival — that it needs to go easy in the areas where its pre-civilized enemy hides among tortured hostages, women and children.
If Nikki Haley isn’t FDR, Joe Biden can’t even make it to the level of Neville Chamberlain.
The mood is just ugly — a deep pessimism suffused with barely stifled fury. It’s not quite right or left, as we used to understand those things. It’s more irrational than that, and less predictable. A usually mild-mannered, anti-Brexit friend of mine told me that the lockdowns had filled him with a rage that was as unfamiliar to him as it was white-hot…A pollster friend who specializes in focus groups said that pessimism and anger were starker now than ever: almost 80 percent, he said, saw their country as in a “steep decline” — Tories and Labourites, for different and often opposing reasons.
And in our increasingly intertwined Anglosphere online, the same culture war rages [in the United States].
A culture war Biden exacerbates by embracing politically-rigged racial division — a ploy that, if it can be said take root in principle at all, takes root in the nauseating and false “principle” that most or all of American history is merely a footnote to slavery.
But that’s Joe’s party, ladies and gentlemen. How many Republicans are enthralled with “1619”? And for all Trump’s numerous and serious failings, neither he nor any part of the Republican Party sees America as a blight on the world or a racist cesspool. The polls are suggesting that, for large swaths of the public, that’s enough to prefer Trump to Biden.
Brexit isn’t the only parallel.
Look at the Netherlands: a progressive country that just saw Geert Wilders’ hard-right anti-immigration party go from 10 percent in 2021 to 23.5 percent of the vote, and become by far the biggest party in the Dutch House of Representatives, with center-right parties open to joining them. Or Argentina, where a weirdly coiffed, former rock-singer, Javier Milei — who had a near mental breakdown in a televised interview during the campaign, complaining about voices that weren’t there — wiped out the Peronist establishment in a landslide.
It’s an exaggeration for sure, but the wiseguy in me is tempted to think that Wilders and Milei make mere Donald Trump seem like Jeb Bush.
That’s why I find the re-election of Joe Biden so hard to imagine. Biden is the incumbent of all incumbents. He became a senator in 1973! He has been vice president for eight years and president for four. He’s extremely old for the job he is doing, and everyone knows it. He has presided over inflation higher than at any time since the 1970s, and a huge new wave of legal and illegal immigration. We may now have a higher percentage of the population that is foreign-born than in the entire history of this country of immigration. Americans’ support for a border wall is the highest it’s been since 2016.
And Gallup’s latest polling on how the public feels about crime should terrify the Democrats. Coming back to DC this week after seven months away, I’m struck by how stark the decline has become. It says something when a city is experiencing a massive wave of carjackings, bars the cops from pursuing them, and just hands out free AirTags so you can track your stolen car yourself.
The pro sports teams are heading for the door, too.
What is this telling us? That the Democrats’ attempt to re-elect Biden by convincing the public that Trump is Hitler-in-waiting isn’t going to work.
[T]hough I will never vote for Trump, in my lizard brain, I kind of get [his] appeal. Inflation and mass immigration, alongside a bewildering and compulsory cultural revolution, are the kind of uncontrollable things that make people vent, especially if the president seems oblivious to these concerns — as Biden does.
Actually, of course, Biden is worse than oblivious. He fans this stuff and, by the dozen, puts its cheerleaders in his administration, including the Justice Department.
When Elon Musk f-bombed on Andrew Ross Sorkin and the advertisers who are boycotting X this week, the rational part of me shook my head….But at some deeper level, I also wanted to yell “F*ck yeah!” I find myself despising the elites I joined in ways that shock me. I have come to despise the woke left, their indifference to crime, their reveling in reverse-racism, their deep hatred of Western civilization. I hate how they’ve taken so much of the progress we made on gay integration and thrown it all away in transqueer solipsism. I loathe their piety and certainty and smugness. I found their instant condemnation of Israel, even as October 7 was taking place, shocking.
I may be misjudging the moment. I got the 2022 cycle wrong — over-estimating culture war reactionism. All I can say is I can feel the rage that’s destroying incumbents the world over. It isn’t deep down what I know. But it is how I feel. And I fear we’ll find out soon enough that I’m not alone.
When the Democrats are this determined and consistent in showing us how much they hate the country and its history, traditions and standards, and want to bring it down, my fear of their continuing to hold power is far, far more than my fear of Donald Trump.
Great post. Biden's ineptness, policies and fading mental acuity put him in dubious company. I've long thought James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson were our worst presidents, but I think Biden gives them a run for their money. Jim Dueholm
The attraction to Trump (to a lesser extend DeSantis), Milei, Wilders, etc. is a desperate realization that our elites don't have the answers and worse, don't have our best interests at heart. They want transformative leadership, not moderation or reform.
The answers are obvious to ordinary people without the benefit of advanced degrees: close open borders, stop pushing up the price of energy, let our farmers and ranchers produce, stop printing money by the trillions, prosecute thieves and violent criminals among us, shut down useless agencies and programs (Afuera!), clip the wings of the police state (hello Christie!), stop fighting political wars cooked up in the State Dept. (hello Nikki!), manufacture critical components and materials at home, and stop queering the kids.
I, for one, feel nauseous and angry every time I hear a politician offer up the routine, decades-old, failed tropes: "comprehensive immigration reform," "net-zero emissions," "two-state solution," "pay your fair share," "equity," "LGBT rights," "fighting for freedom." The top-of-mind causes in DC are nowhere on the list of Americans' top concerns.
The J6 Jig is up: people can see it was America's Reichstag fire, a catastrophic riot exploited to criminalize political opposition. No one really cares if Trump is indicted or convicted of these cases because they're being prosecuted by Lavrentiy Beria's heirs, making a joke out of the "rule of law."
Our trust in government, academic, and cultural institutions is broken - justifiably so. You can lie to people for so long before they stop listening to you, even when you're telling the truth.
When they're not lying, they're incompetent: the IRS can't answer the phones (you're lucky if they read anything you send them inside of six months), the schools don't educate, the military and can't make its own modest recruitment quotas, the police watched leftist mobs burn down cities across the country, DAs in those cities won't prosecute dangerous criminals. This was true before COVID, and now it's worse than ever.
One footnote: Milei may seem crazy but if you take the trouble to listen to him, you'll find he has a better grasp of economics and history than anyone in the White House or the "four corners" of our own Congress. He is an educated man and he has a compass. He will encounter real strife in his country before his reforms can produce results, and he will be pretty much on his own - if he isn't sabotaged by Washington.
Unlike Trump, he does not have (as you put it) a reptilian brain, and that is probably the greatest risk to his survival. In a sea of crocodiles, such as Washington, you'd better be equipped.