“If that’s Trump, then tell him I’m busy,” pretend President Joe Biden quipped during Wednesday’s pretend press conference, and then immediately thought better of it, adding: “That was bad — bad joke.” Yes, but it also betrayed the fact that if anything, anything at all, can be said to preoccupy the mind of the most popular president in American history (81 million votes, folks, most of them from living human beings!), it is the specter of one Donald J. Trump of Palm Beach, Florida.
This is odd. After all, in Biden’s mental universe, if such a thing can be said to exist, Trump was soundly repudiated at the ballot box in an election that gave Old Joe the most votes of any candidate in American history. His party controls both houses of Congress, the establishment media, the entertainment industry, the educational system, and more. Why should his predecessor occupy so much of his thoughts? Joe’s old pal Barack was famous for blaming George W. Bush for anything that went wrong, and Bill Clinton used to do the same with Bush’s father, but neither Obama nor Clinton was known for ruminating about their predecessors and bringing them up at unusual and inappropriate moments, as Biden did with Trump at Wednesday’s presser.
Nor was that remotely the only time. On Sunday in Rome, Biden was asked: “How will you determine whether the Iranians are serious about rejoining the nuclear talks, as they have indicated they will do by the end of November?” In his response, the faux president complained that “we’re continuing to suffer from the very bad judgments that President Trump made in pulling out of the JCPOA.” Meanwhile, demonstrating a stubborn unwillingness to cooperate with the narrative, on Wednesday the Islamic Republic of Iran released video of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps forces seizing an oil tanker and training machine guns on U.S. destroyers, showing an aggressiveness they never displayed during the Trump years of all those “bad judgments” from the White House. It would be enough to make Old Joe think — if he did that sort of thing.
Then at the UN Climate Change statism and hysteria fest on Monday, Old Joe said: “I guess I shouldn’t apologize, but I do apologize for the fact the United States, the last administration, pulled out of the Paris accords and put us sort of behind the eight ball a little bit.”
Those two Trump references can be dismissed as more of the usual Democratic Blame-the-Republican-Predecessor rhetoric, but Joe’s remarks at an Oct. 26 Terry McAuliffe “grassroots” (yeah, sure) rally aren’t so easily dismissed. McAuliffe’s handlers found a crowd that may have been the last group of people anywhere genuinely to like Joe Biden; as the crowd chanted, straining credulity, “We love Joe! We love Joe! We love Joe!,” the object of their affection responded with a weird non-sequitur: “That’s right. This is not a Trump rally. We let them holler. We let them holler.”
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Biden then proceeded to give a rousing speech for McAuliffe, but from some parts of Joe’s stemwinder, a casual listener might get the impression that McAuliffe’s opponent was not Glenn Youngkin, but Trump himself. He hit Trump for criticizing Colin Powell — what did that have to do with Terry McAuliffe or Glenn Youngkin? — and trotted out the Democrats’ flagging “insurrection” talking points, falsely claiming that Trump “invented the ‘Big Lie,’ drove a mob of insurrectionists to breach the Capitol on the 6th of January.” Again, what did that have to do with McAuliffe and Youngkin? Biden did mention Youngkin now and again, but usually in connection with Trump, as when he hit the soon-to-be governor-elect for “put[ting] the words ‘Trump’ and ‘integrity’ in the same sentence.”
Yeah, Joe, tell us more about integrity. How are Hunter’s paintings selling these days?
When Old Joe and Anderson Cooper staged their Potemkin Town Hall on CNN on October 22, they mentioned Trump a total of seven times. The day before that, at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial, Biden marveled, without any connection to the occasion at hand: “It’s something like 20 percent of the Re- — or half the Republicans — the registered Republicans: I am not your President; Donald Trump is still your President. As we Catholics say, ‘Oh, my God.’”
Right. Biden sounds like a rejected lover or recent divorcee who can’t stop talking about his ex, while his worried friends whisper among themselves about how he is still not over her. He isn’t, but poll after poll is making it clear these days that America is very much over Old Joe. And the damage he and his handlers are doing is going to take generations to undo.
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