Don’t Blame Biden’s Failed Presidency on His Age Alone

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 20, 2024

 

With all the subtlety of a hand grenade, chroniclers of Joe Biden’s presidency have shifted from insisting that Biden’s alleged infirmity was a malicious lie to soliciting sympathy for having had to spend years covering for the obviously infirm president.

 

There are distinct notes of self-pity wafting from the supporting quotes provided to both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporters as both papers simultaneously published pieces exposing the worst-kept-secret in Washington. Their accounts are certainly valuable as a record for posterity. As Jeff observed, the scandal over which Biden’s handlers presided represents a historic, premeditated act of maladministration, and it must never be repeated.

 

There is, however, an element of revisionism to these accounts, now that the truth can be told: But for the ravages of time, a force to which we are all subject, Biden’s presidency would not have so spectacularly imploded. It’s easy to see why that narrative would appeal to Biden and anyone else who ill-advisedly carried his water over the last four years. But Joe Biden’s presidency didn’t come apart because of his senility.

 

Biden didn’t ignore intelligence assessments, make himself unavailable to his advisers, and forge headlong into a disaster in Afghanistan because he was mentally unfit. The debacle in Central Asia he engineered is consistent with Biden’s instincts on foreign policy throughout his career in public life.

 

Likewise, it wasn’t Biden who crafted from whole cloth the lunatic notion that his narrow election, coupled with his party’s underperformance in 2020, granted Democrats a mandate to remake the American social compact via a multi-trillion-dollar legislative blitz. Biden merely bit on a dubious rationale his advisers were retailing, and he clung to it even after the glittering jewel of his domestic agenda, Build Back Better, exploded on the launch pad.

 

Biden might have been crazy to (at times, admittedly) violate the Constitution by abrogating the rights of property owners, disbursing taxpayer funds based on race, and transferring the debt burden assumed by student loan borrowers onto everyone else. But we can’t blame senility for that. It was a product of a delusion that enjoyed broad purchase among Democrats, most of whom we must assume retain their basic cognitive faculties.

 

Even if Biden was as “sharp” as his apple polishers dubiously insisted, he still would have misread his own political position and preceded from that flawed assumption into debacle after debacle. The ill-fated course this presidency set itself on was apparent from its earliest days, irrespective of the president’s condition.

 

Biden’s misfortune is a product of his own mistakes, not the unforgiving fates over which none of us have any control. We shouldn’t allow a revisionist narrative that absolves Biden or his allies of responsibility for their lots to take hold.