Joe Biden is Governing Like He Knows He's Not Running Again

Gas prices are soaring, inflation is raging, the economy is sputtering, and Joe Biden continues to push for policies that inflict pain on the country.

Why? Stephen L. Miller of the Spectator believes it’s because Joe Biden and his White House handlers always planned on Biden being a placeholder president — someone who would be a cat’s paw for the radical left and initiate the kind of “transformational” effort to remake the country.

Biden has consistently — and vigorously — denied he’s not planning to run for a second term. He insists that while he hasn’t made up his mind, he has every intention of running for re-election in 2024.

There are many things that can happen between now and primary season to change that. Otherwise, why are two of the major contenders to replace him — Vice President Kamala Harris and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — already throwing daggers at one another in anticipation of an open field in 2024?

Let’s consider the possibility that Joe Biden and the White House handlers behind him always knew he would be a one-term transitional president, whose sole purpose was to free the country from the scourge of Donald Trump. Having achieved that, Biden would then have a blank slate in terms of what his administration could achieve in the following four years. If Biden was to be a one-term lame duck on arrival, that would leave open the door for progressives to launch a transformational effort to remake the country into the leftist utopia they’ve been yearning for.

That “transformational effort” is inflicting pain — as it was always meant to. When you’re performing a radical transformation, people are going to get hurt. For some — the very poor or those of the correct color — there will be plenty of government cash to ease that pain.

For the rest of us — not so much.

Policies that inflict pain on people usually lead to defeat at the ballot box. That doesn’t matter if you aren’t standing for re-election in the first place.

The infliction of this pain appears to be very intentional. When press secretary Jen Psaki returned to the podium last week, she acknowledged this. In response to a question about skyrocketing gas prices, she said: “Our view is that the rise in gas prices over the long term makes an even stronger case for doubling down our investment and focus on clean energy options.” Psaki said that as world leaders flooded Glasgow vowing to eliminate fossil fuels over the next nine to twelve years. That is not a coincidence.

If you want to force a population off of meat consumption because you think it’s harming the planet, you simply make things like meat too expensive. If you want to force people into electric vehicles because you believe they’re harming the planet, you let gas prices soar to astronomical levels, to the point where people don’t drive and opt for public transportation.

Amazing. They are deliberately jacking up the price of gasoline not by raising gasoline taxes — something almost certainly on the way — but by choking the supply off. Only an idiot child would fail to see the effects of canceling pipelines and taking other actions designed specifically to create shortages.

In order to accept the scenario of a deliberate one-term president, we have to believe that Biden is such a narcissist that he would allow himself to be used by radical leftists just to fulfill his lifelong dream of being president.

Hail and Farewell, Mr. Biden. And let the catfight begin between Harris and Buttigieg for the succession.