The Death of a President

Joe Biden is finished. A month from now – certainly before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, city of Democratic destiny so often before, in 1896, 1932, 1944 and 1968 from August 19 to August 22 – Biden will have been eased out of the White House, and a caretaker president – much more likely to be a briefly returning Barack Obama than an overwhelmed and hasn’t-a-clue always-nervously-fake-smiling Vice President Kamala Harris – will be warming the seat for the next putative national leader.

This outcome was clear within the first extraordinary 10 minutes of Biden’s nationally televised debate with his predecessor, Republican candidate Donald Trump, on Thursday night in the CNN studios in Atlanta, Georgia.

For Biden simply was not there. His senility has been obvious for three years, yet not a single mainstream media outlet in the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave and the Proud Possessor of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States has ever dared to point out to the American people what should always have been obvious to all.

Senile Biden

Their president is a senile moron.

Repeatedly during the Great Debate, Biden literally lapsed into meaningless gobbledygook at the end of his statements and sentences. For significant periods, he was not even coherent. And it was so blatantly obvious that for the very first time in his four-year imposture on the national stage since being rushed in as a desperate stopgap candidate to keep Senator Bernie Sanders – in truth a posturing phony and coward who never wanted the presidency anyway back in the campaign of 2020 – the Guardians of the Myth had to admit in pubic their emperor was naked. He had no clothes. And worse still he was brainless.

But when Biden tried to be coherent in the debate, it was even worse.

When Donald Trump challenged him about epidemic of rapes by illegal immigrants across the United States, Biden wittily and tastefully replied that American women were raped by American men too. Such a horrific answer in the politically correct feminist-obsessed atmosphere of 21st century America is alone enough to eliminate him as a figure on the national stage.

The comment was a godsend to Trump and the Republicans, whose night it was.

The fact checkers who specialize in trying to accuse Trump of being a congenital liar were floored by their own (anti-)hero.

Biden claimed the United States armed forces were the greatest in the history of the world. He thereby forgot already his own humiliation and that of US arms in Afghanistan less than three years ago.

Fake macho bluster

Then, using the pathetic fake-macho, phony-tough language of which, as a lifelong sheltered elitist and draft dodger during the Vietnam War era in his youth, he is so proud, Biden boasted that no country in the world dares to “screw” with the United States, while he remained in charge. And this at a time when Houthi cheap missiles have routed and humiliated the mighty US Sixth Fleet in the Red Sea.

In truth this was no new Biden, no sad decline of a once admirable and manly, sturdy offshoot of American democracy. He was always like this.

Biden’s fiasco of a national run in 1988 was equally pathetic. Even the ludicrous Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, a man so contemptible he could not even bring himself to say he would be tempted to execute a man who had murdered his wife, was able to rout Biden in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination that year.

Biden’s pathetic, indeed contemptible moral and mental condition in fact have not significantly deteriorated at all. He has been that way for years.

What changed was that on Thursday night, he could not prevent himself from being on full display on a national stage in front of scores of millions of people. Even the Democrats had to sit up and admit it was true.

One after another, Democratic party insiders who had stuffed the supposedly impartial CNN – yet another Big Lie no one outside the circle of liberal true believers even pretends to believe any more – got up while the coaxial cables piping the debate were still hot and admitted that Biden was finished.

Democrats rally round their pathetic jokes of God-Kings – and Queens – to the last possible moment. But on the rare occasions they are forced to drop them they do so with a speed and thoroughness that would make any dictator envious.

The Democrats have read their “1984.” President Lyndon Johnson – one of the mightiest figures in the Democratic Party at the height of its power and prestige from 1948 to 1968 – became a non-person even before he was unceremoniously evicted from the White House.

Ghostly Clintons

Former First Lady Hillary Clinton and her shrunken in both physical size and political stature husband, no longer “Big” Bill Clinton, have been fluttering around the outer realms of the party like Banquo’s Ghost in Shakespeare’s Scottish Play for the past eight years, since Mrs. C managed to blow a quarter of a billion dollar campaign chest and a supposed sure thing and lose to Trump in 2016, thereby starting the great cycle of American Sacred Drama in which we are still all participating today.

As Biden exposed his senile, ghostly nothingness in public on Thursday night, so the eternally maligned Trump enjoyed his own karmic satisfaction payback.

Trump was unashamed and unabashed. He reined in his temper and his abuse, which as a construction magnate from the Queen’s borough of New York City he has always gloried in.

Trump even managed to make some crucial politically sensible maneuvers, especially in condemning all forms of political violence and saying he would accept the US Supreme Court’s decision to make use of an abortion pill legal, thereby significantly undermining the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision of June 24 2022 that overturned Roe vs Wade, which in 1973 established a constitutional right to abortion on demand for any woman in the United States.

Since then, the Dobbs decision has offered the Democrats’ their one, fantasy hope of winning the next presidential election legitimacy.

In fact, with a different candidate than Biden, the Dems just might still pull off an election victory in November from Trump.

Michelle Obama’s moment

Either former First Lady Michelle Obama or California Governor Gavin Newsom appear the most plausible candidates for the Democrats at the moment. Mrs. Obama far more than Newsom because: A) she is a lady; B) she is black; C) she has the brand name of a twice elected president; and D) she has never held elected office and therefore has the best chance of escaping the hideous record the Democrats, especially Newsom, have made of governing everything in America since Bill Clinton stepped down as president in January 2001.

Ever since the very first nationally televised debate between Senator John Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960, television appearances have decisively swung presidential elections.

Nixon was held to have won his debates with Kennedy on substance, but he could not avoid looking like himself – and that proved politically fatal.

Whining petulant little President Jimmy Carter got himself entangled in too many facts in 1980. The magisterial Ronald Reagan, who had many inches or centimeters in stature over the incumbent, sighed “There you go again” and that was the end of Carter.

Every time Hillary Clinton opened her mouth in the 2016 debates against Trump, she lost votes. And in 2012, elitist billionaire Mitt Romney thought he was dealing with a wimp in Barack Obama. But the by-then veteran of presidential debates Obama turned Romney into a whining puppy instead in their second clash.

However, all these decisive and dramatic turning points pale compared with the amazing drama of Thursday night. Joe Biden, for so long the Invisible Man of Democratic national politics, was finally forced to take off his wrappings in public under the glare of the cameras for 90 minutes. And surprise of surprises, there was nothing left to see at all. A national audience did not just witness the Death of a President: They Witnessed His Evaporation.

Martin Sieff — writer, journalist, political analyst.