Biden as Inspirational Leader—Except for His Words and Actions

AMAC Exclusive – By David P. Deavel

2022 has only seen three months but has felt like a long, strange trip. One of the weirdest aspects has been the attempt to paint Joe Biden as an inspirational leader, even a kind of Reagan redivivus because he has been talking tough about Russia. Let’s give the man who has offered us the Trunalimunumaprzure Doctrine some credit. He has indeed said some decent official words, some of them in his recent speech in Warsaw, Poland. But unlike Ronald Reagan—and indeed Donald Trump, too—Joe Biden’s words and actions do not mark him out as a leader for the world.

To start, Joe Biden’s acceptable official rhetoric in his European trip have been accompanied by a number of frighteningly imprudent comments that have kept his staff hustling to cover over, deny, or, in the phrase of the day, “walk back.” The Babylon Bee’s recent headline puts it well: “Psaki Reminds Reporters that Biden Does Not Speak for the President of the United States.” It’s clever, but really more of a summary of the situation rather than a comedic exaggeration. Since allowing him to speak in public after hiding him from the public throughout the 2020 campaign, his handlers have spent an inordinate amount of time in Bidensplaining, much of which does indeed seem to involve saying that the Big Guy’s official presidential speech is. . .not official. Last week was dedicated to saying the Commander-in-Chief’s very definitively offered comments on regime change in Russia, the deployment of American troops in Ukraine, and the use of chemical weapons against Russia needed to be, well, redefined.

Usually by adding “not” at the end.

Second, however, the words that were solid in that Warsaw speech often point lamentably to the reasons why Russia, which had taken parts of Georgia and Ukraine under Presidents Bush and Obama, respectively, halted their expansion-by-invasion plan during the four years of the Trump presidency but cranked it up again once again during this sorry administration. Not only did Russia have the encouraging (to them) example of our weak and shameful pull-out from Afghanistan with attendant “donation” to the Taliban of billions of dollars of military hardware, but the Biden administration replaced our energy exports with theirs.

When Biden said to Polish applause that “Europe must end its dependence on Russian fossil fuels,” adding that “we, the United States will help,” it’s hard for anyone paying attention not to remember President Trump telling Angela Merkel not to buy gas from Putin but from us—and getting her to take action with German government co-financing of a liquefied natural gas terminal intended to receive U. S. imports.

It’s also hard to take seriously such a promise from Biden when he follows this up with the demand that, after this immediate problem, “we all need to move as quickly as possible to clean, renewable energy.” Beholden to the environmental left, what Biden might give in the short term to help the Europeans and us in the area of energy will be taken away as quickly as possible in service to Green New Deal-type thinking.

Indeed, this is the problem with much of Biden’s standard acceptable rhetoric. If he means it, he should have been behaving differently. And, given so much of his other rhetoric, it’s pretty unlikely that he will follow the principles enunciated for long. He’s a principled politician! And if you don’t like his principles, he has other principles that he follows when the polls are better than his current 40% approval rating. And other principles that seem to apply differently.

The Ukrainian resistance, Biden insisted, is “part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people. The rule of law, fair and free elections, the freedom to speak, to write and to assemble. The freedom to worship as one chooses. The freedom of the press. These principles are essential in a free society.” And yet the Biden Administration has approached such freedoms in a partisan and sometimes ugly way. Take, for instance, its Justice Department siccing the FBI on parents opposing critical race theory or masks or school closures in school board meetings. Or its probe into and surveillance of Project Veritas’s journalism that troubles even the now-deeply-partisan ACLU.   

More broadly, Biden’s care for the Ukrainian border is lovely but sadly does not seem to be matched by much care for our own southern border, which has become porous over the last year and, given Biden’s action this week to end Title 42—which allows the U. S. to deny entry to anyone except U. S. citizens, lawful residents and their spouses—promises to become an even bigger disaster. As one Texas mayor says about the current situation, there is currently “no vetting.”

Despite his pretty language, there is no sense that Joe Biden is capable of defending the ideals he presents. Perhaps one of the problems is in what was left out of his Warsaw speech that was included in President Trump’s own Warsaw speech on July 6, 2017.

Like Joe Biden, Donald Trump called for ending the dependence on Russian energy and strengthening NATO. (But he did something about both—offering American energy and pressuring European countries to meet their commitments to NATO.) Like Joe Biden, he told Russia to cease and desist with its threatening behavior. (And he was successful.) Like Joe Biden, he appealed to concepts like the rule of law and freedom and democracy. And like Joe Biden, he appealed to the memory of Pope Saint John Paul II.  

But unlike Joe Biden, Donald Trump appealed to some deeper things. In talking about John Paul II, he recalled the moment during the Polish pontiff’s sermon upon his return to his native country in 1979 when the crowd “raised their voices in a single prayer.” The million Polish people gathered that day, Trump recalled, “did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words: ‘We Want God.’” Just as the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed that the problem in the modern world was that “men have forgotten God,” President Trump appealed to and praised the Polish nation’s bucking of that trend. They had not lost their memory of God nor had they lost what is more important, their desire for him.

President Trump’s appeal to the Polish people was designed to remind them—and us—that the basis for all the goods of democracy and rule of law are much deeper than institutions, structures, and politics. They go to the heart of culture. The heart of culture is cult—worship—and it must be beating within the institution which is at the center of any nation: the family. “We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth,” Trump said in his Warsaw address, “but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive.” Families, churches, synagogues, and the greater and lesser associations of civil society are the parts of the culture that help keep together the memory of God, the memory of the foundation of a society on the natural law, and the history of blessings that a country must keep to remain strong.  

President Trump’s appeal to the Polish people was to work with the Americans and the Europeans to jointly keep the memories alive and build a future. “We must work together,” he told them, “to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are. If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.”

Joe Biden doesn’t just shy away from the language of wanting God. He has too often undermined the values and encouraged others to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition that hold our country together. Despite elite media attempts to portray Biden as a world leader and despite getting off a good line or two in a speech, it’s clear he doesn’t have what it takes either in words or deeds.

Even if he’s been able to organize a bit of trunalimunaprzure over the last month.

David P. Deavel is editor of Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, co-director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law, and Public Policy, and a visiting professor at the University of St. Thomas (MN). He is the co-host of the Deep Down Things podcast.