Two weeks from tomorrow, the Americans who haven’t voted early or by mail will step into the voting booth and cast their ballots in the Most Important Election Ever™. It’s GO time. In fact, it’s GO, GO, GO! time. But what is Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. doing this week? He’s spending some quality time in his basement.
Yes, the Biden campaign made the astounding, gobsmacking, literally incredible announcement that, two weeks out from Election Day, the presidential candidate will not be seen on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or for most of Thursday. He’s calling a lid on all press events until after the presidential debate with Donald Trump on Thursday evening.
CBS's Ed O'Keefe on Face The Nation: "[Joe Biden] will not be seen again after today until Thursday night."
REMINDER: Joe Biden and his campaign have not disputed the authenticity of the bombshell emails which detail the extensive corruption of the Biden family. pic.twitter.com/obMn3QRxKS
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 18, 2020
Is Joe Biden insane?! Is his campaign off the rails? Do Americans really think a candidate who can’t engage with the press for four days—two weeks before the election—is fit to serve as president of the United States for four years?
Sure, maybe Biden thinks his advantage in the polls is airtight. Maybe his campaign is overconfident. Maybe Biden really will spend 12-16 hours every day between Sunday and Thursday preparing for the debate. Maybe he really needs it.
But again, it’s utterly gobsmacking that a presidential candidate will not appear before the press for four days in the crucial crunchtime before Election Day. It should set off a four-alarm fire about the state of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
Sure, sure, many Americans absolutely loathe Trump. I get it. In 2016, I was there. Trump’s immoral past, his campaign contributions to Democrats, and his abrasive personal attacks grated on me. He talked a good game about the policies I cared about, but I wouldn’t trust him for an instant. Then he won, and as president, he has fulfilled his promises. It also seems like the president has behaved himself sexually in the Oval Office. The Trump administration leaks like a sieve — if anything naughty were going on, we would know about it.
The president is far from perfect, but he has a rather impressive list of accomplishments, despite the constant hate and vitriol he faces from Democrats, the legacy media, Hollywood, academia, and more.
Joe Biden’s greatest argument has always been “I’m not Trump.” He claims he is running to “restore the soul of America,” to take the levers of power away from a man who allegedly called white nationalists “very fine people.” Of course, Trump didn’t actually say that, but it’s central to the Biden mythos.
Biden’s entire premise — the idea that Trump is an evil aberration from American history and that the Democratic nominee can and should “restore the soul of America” — is problematic in the extreme, partially because the ostensible moderate Joe Biden has himself embraced the radical left and openly socialist faction of his party. He has refused to condemn antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters and agitators by name, instead blaming “right-wing militias” for the violence in American cities. Biden has bragged about the character defamation of Robert Bork, lied about the man involved in the tragic accident that killed his wife, and even compared Trump to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Then again, most Americans expect that if Biden wins the election in November, his vice president will take up the mantle sometime before his four-year term comes to a close. In other words, the ostensibly moderate Joe Biden is really a kind of Trojan Horse for one Kamala “let’s lock up pro-life journalists” Harris.
Harris is prickly, slimy, extremely disingenuous, and quite radical. She smeared Brett Kavanaugh with outright lies. After her record as a tough-on-crime attorney general, she tried to get hip by lying about smoking pot in college. She demonized Roman Catholic judges for their faith. Oh, and during the primary, she was the most vocal candidate to condemn a certain Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. for — among other things — working with segregationists in his own party.
Even if Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. wasn’t a threat to the soul of America — not to mention its pocketbook — he wouldn’t be able to lead the country from his basement.
Luckily, Americans have another realistic choice in two weeks. While Biden spends most of this week cloistered away for “debate prep,” President Donald Trump is holding massive rally after massive rally. He held two in one day on Saturday.
Trump has recovered from COVID-19 and is pounding the pavement. Sure, the president has his foibles, but he has the stamina to hold rally after rally shortly after a bout with a deadly pandemic. Does America really prefer a placeholder stuck in his basement in the critical two weeks before Election Day?
Biden wouldn’t be a “return to normalcy” after Trump. He’d represent a revamping of American chaos.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
