In a lengthy Twitter thread that was trending on Saturday afternoon, far-left presidential historian Michael Beschloss, an energetic purveyor of anti-Trump propaganda, repeatedly compared Donald Trump and Joe Biden to Goofus and Gallant, the bad boy and good boy of a comic strip that has appeared for decades in the children’s magazine Highlights. Predictably, Trump is Goofus, who can never do anything good or right and doesn’t even want to, and Gallant is the sainted empty suit who can barely make it up a flight of stairs. It will surprise no one to learn that Beschloss’ analysis is as puerile as the comic strip hero he invokes.
Beschloss started off with “Goofus and Gallant – attitudes toward political expression” as the heading over a cartoon in which “Goofus blasts his opinion around like fact and makes open conversation difficult,” while “Gallant helps lead discussions with his peers about the possibilities, advantages, and disadvantages of different choices.”
Remember, he’s casting as Goofus the president who patiently faced a blisteringly hostile and dishonest press nearly every day, answering even their rudest and most loaded questions, while Gallant is the chief executive whose handlers shoo away the media after nearly every rare public appearance, and when he does answer questions, he does so only in a carefully-scripted setting. Do you remember Gallant Old Joe ever, in his 600 years in Washington, helping to “lead discussions with his peers about the possibilities, advantages, and disadvantages of different choices”? Neither do I. And it’s Old Joe’s party that is moving to exploit the January 6 riot at the Capitol to stigmatize and demonize all opposition to its policies.
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This claim from Beschloss is particularly ludicrous in light of the fact that Trump repeatedly called for restrictions on the social media monopolies’ ability to close off the freedom of speech (although he is to be faulted for not acting on this in any effective manner when he had the power to do so), while Biden’s handlers have promised to convene an Internet censorship task force to combat “disinformation and hate speech,” i.e., opinions that differ from those of the leftist establishment.
Much of what Beschloss says in his Goofus and Gallant thread is just silly, as when he gives us, “More Goofus and Gallant — at the dining table,” featuring Goofus saying “Make it fast. I’m hungry,” while Gallant reminds his family as it is gathered around the dinner table: “We have so many things to be thankful for.”
Yes, that’s what I think of when I think of Joe Biden: gratitude. In reality, he rode the far-left’s politics of race and class hatred all the way to the White House, and is presiding over the rapid Balkanization of the United States amid unprecedented resentment over a “white supremacism” that is almost entirely a media creation.
“Goofus,” Beschloss tells us, “is obsessed with himself. Gallant thinks about other people.” Yes, the Gallant Old Puppet thinks about how he can lie to us about whose taxes are going to be raised, and dismantle our border security while dissembling about the magnitude of the crisis he caused, and weaken the United States in the eyes of the world so quickly and drastically that Yang Jiechi, director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party, just told Secretary of State Tony Blinken that “the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.” We would all be better off if Biden’s handlers didn’t think about us so very much.
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But as long as Beschloss wants to play this game, here are some for him: Goofus lowers taxes and ushers in a period of prosperity featuring record low unemployment numbers among black and Hispanic Americans. Gallant immediately kills the goose that laid the golden egg by killing off the Keystone pipeline project, leaving thousands of people out of a job, opening the borders to massive numbers of illegal migrants who will compete with Americans for jobs, and raising the tax burden on Americans who are already overburdened, and much more.
Goofus kept Iran’s geopolitical adventurism at bay by strong sanctions that sharply reduced the Islamic Republic’s ability to finance global jihad activity and work toward getting a nuclear weapon, while increasing the Iranian public’s discontent with the regime to the extent that it seemed to be nearing its end. Gallant plans to remove the sanctions, which will bring billions to the Iranian mullahs, allowing them to step up their support for terrorism worldwide.
Goofus aided our allies and put our enemies on notice; Gallant is, like his earlier Gallant predecessor Barack Obama, back to alienating our friends and emboldening our enemies.
Goofus vowed to Make America Great Again; Gallant, as the president of the United States, explicitly said that he did not intend to put his own nation first.
All in all, I’m with the bad boy.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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