Joe Biden is a dangerously incompetent president. He’s gotten us tangled up in a war with Russia where one wrong move could end civilization. Literally. And many of us have no confidence whatsoever that Biden is competent enough, smart enough, or brave enough to avoid nuclear war if his rhetoric or his policies provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin to attack NATO.
He’s brought massive budget deficits back into vogue, with this year’s red ink totaling at least $2 trillion. And he doesn’t have the pandemic as an excuse. This is “Bidenomics.” Despite a robust job market, GDP growth is sluggish and his promised “green” transformation doesn’t appear to be on the horizon.
We’re only 2.13 million Level 2 and 172,000 Level 3 public EV chargers short of what’s needed by 2030. Currently, there are 126,500 Level 2 and 20,431 Level 3 charging stations. But Biden insists we’re going to transition to mostly electric vehicles by 2035.
There is little doubt that Joe Biden is among the worst presidents since the end of World War II. But is the country “finished” if he’s re-elected in 2024?
Donald Trump thinks so.
“If we don’t get back, I really believe this country is finished,” he said. “I really believe that. I hate to say it. It’s horrible,” Trump said at a campaign stop in South Carolina.
Surviving bad presidents is this country’s specialty. Take James Buchanan, for example. If you like historical “what ifs,” Buchanan is the most fascinating example of what might have happened if someone else had been president from 1856-60.
Buchanan didn’t understand the nation’s divisions. He sleepwalked through the crises that led to the civil war. But the nation was extremely unlucky in 1856 because the Republican candidate wasn’t much better. The vainglorious John Fremont was equally at sea when it came to the secession crisis.
Despite all that happened — the civil war, reconstruction, and the entire post-war mess — the United States survived. And a few short years after the war, it began to thrive again.
Today, we still have a $23 trillion economy. But if Trump is referring to cultural changes, it only seems as if the country has gone crazy. Whole swaths of America are still “America,” despite what some coastal elites want.
Be that as it may, America is changing. It’s been the most revolutionary characteristic of the United States that change — cultural and economic — has been a fact of life since our founding. Some changes need to be resisted or modified. Some need to be embraced. But just because we’re changing doesn’t mean we’re “finished” if one person is elected instead of another.
Moving 330 million people toward a new future takes years — sometimes decades. And in the biggest economy in the world, changes come even slower.
Trump’s political rhetoric notwithstanding, trying to scare people into voting for a particular candidate appears to be the way campaigns are run these days. Both Biden and Trump are painted in broad strokes of evil. The media helps the fear along by getting hysterical about the “end of democracy” if Trump is elected. If it were that easy to “end democracy” in America, we would have been a dictatorship 100 years ago.
There’s a rock-solid foundation to the United States that has withstood boobs like James Buchananan, proto-fascists like FDR, playboys like JFK, crooks like Johnson and Nixon, and an assortment of small-minded politicians way out of their depth. America is not about presidents or politicians. America is about people — citizens with different visions of what America should be but a shared idea of freedom and liberty.
American won’t be “finished” if Biden is re-elected any more than it will be destroyed if Trump wins in 2024. The partisans on both sides are wrong.
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