Biden Gaslights The Nation In Closing Days Of Presidency

Every president strives to create a legacy that will be part of the headline in their obituary. They crave policy achievements or a foreign triumph with which their name will always be associated while at the same time seeking to avoid the sort of disgrace or defeat to which they will also forever be linked.

In just the last century, though there are cogent critiques to be made of even those presidents considered successful, leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan will always be remembered for their great successes. Though not in the same class as those two, Barack Obama will go down in history as the nation's first African-American president, who created an eponymous national health-care plan that will likely endure. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Richard Nixon's and Bill Clinton's places in the annals of the presidency will be confined to their scandals. George W. Bush's blundering into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that turned out to be disastrous quagmires will overshadow his post-9/11 leadership.

But Joe Biden is in a class by himself.

No president in living memory--or perhaps ever--has been supplanted even before he left the White House in the way that President Joe Biden has been by Donald Trump, who is both predecessor and successor. Trump played a decisive role in the ceasefire/hostage deal between Israel and Hamas while Biden was still technically the commander-in-chief. Trump eclipsed Biden on a policy question in a way no other president-elect and his aides had ever done.

As appalling as that may be, it's a fitting end to a presidency that will likely be primarily remembered for his mental decline, as well as an undistinguished four-year interregnum bookended by Trump's two administrations.

But as it fades into memory, it's important for his successors to learn from his many mistakes and never repeat them.

Evaluations of a president about whom the best it could be said that, as a largely favorable review in Foreign Policy magazine put it, "He meant well," will inevitably be impacted by partisanship.

Yet Democrats who supported him and his policies are even more hostile to Biden these days than Republicans. That's because they blame Trump's victory on Biden's stubborn refusal to give up a bid for a second term, despite his obvious growing mental incapacity. His decline was conclusively exposed in a June 2024 presidential debate. That led to a coup by party elites to force his withdrawal from the race and replace the candidacy by Vice President Kamala Harris, who was equally unlikely to beat Trump.

The last months of Biden's presidency have been largely characterized as a shadow game in which it isn't clear who is actually in charge. There's good reason to believe that it wasn't the president, who seemed even more out of touch with reality and less mentally present than ever. Fears that Biden would mimic Obama and stab Israel in the back at the United Nations on his way out of office turned out to be unfounded. 

But the reason for that may be as much a function of a power vacuum at the top of the administration as anything else. That made it hard for the Jewish state's many foes in the West Wing and the U.S. State Department to make as simple a decision as not exercising a veto on an anti-Israel resolution at the U.N. Security Council.

This kind of cluelessness was on display in both of the president's farewell speeches.

His boastful address at the State Department when he made the astounding claim that he had improved America's standing in the world, strengthened alliances and weakened foes was a classic exercise in denial, if not completely delusional.

Biden admitted no mistakes--not even the over-hasty and poorly planned withdrawal that turned into a bloody rout that left Americans and Afghan allies dead, and put the Taliban back in power. The episode epitomized the fecklessness and weakness of the administration with war in Ukraine and the Middle East as the inevitable result.

The president took credit for helping Ukraine hold off a Russian invasion but that initial success took place before the massive infusions of $175 billion in U.S. aid arrived. Moreover, the war would never have occurred had not Biden convinced Russia's authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin that he would never respond with strength to provocations the way Trump had done. The main impact of Biden on that war was to ensure that it dragged on pointlessly, while casualties grew on both sides as he refused to work on ending the conflict, rather than prolonging it.

One of the main themes of American foreign policy during the last four years was a return to Obama's strategy of appeasing Iran. The 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran proved to be a disaster since far from stopping its push for a weapon of mass destruction, it guaranteed that the Islamist regime would eventually get one. Biden's attempt to revive it was even worse since Tehran not only happily accepted the relaxation of Trump's tough sanctions and the unfreezing of billions of frozen funds; its leaders accelerated their push for a bomb and doubled down on their support for terrorism throughout the region.

The attacks in Jewish communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war that followed an orgy of Palestinian atrocities were in no small measure caused by the Biden foreign-policy team of Obama alumni's mindset about the Middle East. Their former boss was convinced that the United States needed to pivot away from traditional allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia. This was partly rooted in a belief in multilateralism and diplomacy for its own sake.

Yet there was something more to it than that. Obama embraced woke ideas about critical race theory and intersectionality even before most Americans had heard of them. That was why he proclaimed misguided guilt about past American sins against Muslim nations and other Third World people. Biden was merely mimicking Obama's desire to create a new balance of power in the Middle East centered on a rapprochement with Iran that the Islamist regime wanted no part of.

Instead, they viewed Washington's pathetic attempts to tempt them to return to the weak nuclear pact as a signal that the West was vulnerable. The seven-front war against Israel organized by Tehran was their response to such weakness.

So, far from strengthening America's allies, Biden weakened them throughout the world. Instead of leaving Trump a stable and strong position from which to operate, the president-elect is inheriting a world set on fire by a longtime Washington insider who was incapable of learning from his predecessors' mistakes--or his own.

His subsequent farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office was in some ways even more troubling. Sounding themes that were standard Democratic campaign rhetoric these past four years, he claimed that Trump and the Republicans were threatening democracy and instituting an "oligarchy" where the wealthy ruled and took away the rights of everyone else.

This was as ironic as it was untrue since it had been during his four years in office that the Democrats had completed their journey from its old stance as the party of the working people to one that is now solely aimed at protecting the interests of the credentialed elites.

Yet in the same speech, he lamented the end of "fact-checking" on Facebook, which was supposedly aimed at stopping "misinformation" but was really a censorship regime. Indeed, in his announcement and subsequent interviews about the decision, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg confessed that it was a scheme largely driven by politics and used by the Biden administration to silence views on a wide range of issues that dissented from their policies.

As he had for four years, Biden was gaslighting the country. He claimed that his foes were against democracy. But it was his Department of Justice that prosecuted Trump, his chief political opponent. It treated Americans who differed from liberal orthodoxy on gender ideology, critical race theory or abortion as if they were domestic terrorists while largely ignoring the very real threat of Islamist terror.

Biden was no ideologue; he was an unprincipled politician who always followed his party's fashion of the day, whether it tilted right, as it did in the 1990s, or hard left, as it has in recent years. Elected as a moderate who would restore normalcy to the nation, he took his cues from left-wingers on most domestic issues. That's why he became a supporter of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and imposition of it throughout the government.

His policies not only enabled the same leftist ideology that fueled the unprecedented post-Oct. 7 surge of Jew-hatred that happened on his watch. His inability to unreservedly condemn those who engaged in antisemitic agitation on college campuses and elsewhere was motivated by a futile effort to rally support from his party's intersectional left wing that he previously done so much to appease.

Biden proved that having a half-century of experience in government is no guarantee of wisdom, political or ethical principles or an ability to learn from the past. He also showed what happens when weakness is treated as a virtue rather than a liability.

He leaves office as a forgotten man who, regardless of one's opinion of Trump, was largely overshadowed by him even when his opponent was out of office. Though historians will likely treat him as an accidental president better remembered for his decline in office than any achievements, his mistakes must be remembered. As pathetic as his exit from the White House has been, the record of failure he leaves behind is his true legacy.

Originally published at JNS.org