President Joe Biden probably didn’t mean to provide more evidence that he’s slipping mentally, but he clearly couldn’t help himself.
In an interview Wednesday with ABC News, the man who’s already the oldest president in American history declared that he would be willing to seek a second term in office three years down the line if his health is in good shape.
Then, he said that decision would only be more likely if former President Donald Trump were the Republican nominee.
Check it out here:
There are a couple of problems with this position, which a Joe Biden in full possession of his faculties would probably have realized.
The first problem, in “messaging” terms, is that Biden is essentially conceding that Trump would win the Republican nomination if he decides to seek it.
(If he were operating under the pretense that there are other viable Republican contenders, he would be claiming he would not even decide whether to seek a second term until the Republican primary process plays out — sometime in the spring of 2024. Since Democrats would be choosing their nominee at the same time, Biden would have to be committed one way or the other.)
That’s basically an open acknowledgment that his administration has been so politically polarizing that the man who’s been the subject of constant demonization by the mainstream media since announcing his campaign for the presidency in June 2015 — more than six years ago — is still the most potent opposing political force against his administration.
That’s an admission of failure.
The fact is, of course, that that’s true.
The astonishing hostility the Biden administration and the Democratic Party’s leading leftists have shown toward sane Americans — the FBI probing parents over school board protests, for example — have only deepened the stark divisions of the 2020 presidential campaign.
And it proves that Biden’s pledges to unify the country — even stated during his inaugural address — have been empty from the start.
A president admitting his own hypocrisy on national television is the move of a president whose mental faculties are not fully operating.
The second problem is simple self-awareness — and recognition that the world has changed.
Unless he’s completely lost it, Biden, at some level, has to recognize that he was carried through the 2020 campaign by an obscene partnership of Democrats taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to warp the nation’s voting processes and a mainstream media intent on overlooking, or covering up, every one of his considerable weaknesses as a candidate in order to buff him up against then-President Trump.
In the summer and fall of 2020, Biden could be the strident back-bencher, criticizing Trump for his handling of the pandemic, the economy, his decisions on foreign affairs, basically anything a president is either responsible for or gets the blame for.
He could rely on Americans being ignorant of the obvious corruption problems surrounding his family, especially the noble Hunter Biden – thanks to the duplicity of the mainstream media and the barons of Google, Facebook and Twitter.
In a 2024 matchup, he has only his own record to run on, and that record, by any measure, is a disgrace.
Inflation is soaring to a level not seen since the dismal days of the Carter administration; coronavirus remains virulent as the heavy-handed tactics of Democratic governors do nothing to stop it and infuriate their constituents. (“Neanderthal thinking” red states might have the same pandemic problems, but they’re not taking Soviet controls over their citizens.)
Joe Biden is now the face of all of those problems — not to mention the illegal immigration catastrophe he unleashed on the southern border, the country’s diminished standing on the world stage thanks to his disaster in Afghanistan and the other failures of his administration.
It’s practically a given that the Republican nomination is Trump’s for the taking if he decides to run again.
And if that happens, Biden will be facing arguably the strongest candidate in the Republican Party, and Democrats will have only Biden’s own record to run on.
Three years out is an eternity in politics, of course, but at this point in time, given the indications of a Democratic bloodbath in the 2022 midterms, any Democrat would have trouble keeping the White House against a Trump candidacy.
Biden, who is now 79 and would 81 by the 2024 campaign, hobbled by a personal record of failure is probably the weakest of all (with the possible exception of woeful Vice President Kamala Harris).
Smart money would bet against his running for re-election in any event, Trump or no Trump.
And smart money would be betting against Biden, no matter who the Republican candidate is, but especially if it’s Trump.
The fact that Biden apparently doesn’t recognize that, or seems to think that the rest of America doesn’t know it, just proves more than anything that he’s losing it upstairs — a fact which can do nothing but help Trump, or any other Republican challenger.
Biden obviously didn’t mean to let that show. He just couldn’t help it.