Our Ruling Class Feeds the Flames Inside and Outside the U.S.

They aren’t pretending anymore. As he walked away from the podium on Friday, Joe Biden was asked by a reporter what he thought about Donald Trump’s claim that he is a “political prisoner” and “blames you directly.” Biden turned, looked at the camera and gave a broad grin.

It wasn’t a denial. It was a reminder of the power our regime wields today. That power is being wielded in an incredibly foolish and destructive way. Fixated on destroying internal enemies at the cost of destroying our common life, its reckless foreign policy threatens us with a dangerous multinational war.

The Trump prosecution was at the behest of “The Big Guy.” Well, unless you are given to believe it likely that prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, seen sitting just behind Alvin Bragg as he announced his “victory,” is an ambitious fellow who had reached the number three spot at the Department of Justice and suddenly felt a divine call to join a local prosecutor’s office in 2022.  

Democrats have been setting fire to the rule of law for a long time. Now, they are pouring gasoline and aiming a blow torch at it—all while bragging about how they are the ones bringing justice. The New York verdict is so horrifically bad that a CNN legal contributor named Elie Honig, writing in New York Magazine,could dissect in a few paragraphs this “Frankenstein case,” cobbled together by prosecutors who “contorted the law in an unprecedented manner in their quest to snare their prey.” Too few on the left and too few politicians on the right are willing to say it.

And Joe Biden’s Friday tweet boasting about that case—“No one is above the law”—came a mere day after his boast about his own refusal to respect Court decisions against his own unlawful behavior: “The Supreme Court tried to block me from relieving student debt. But they didn’t stop me. I’ve relieved student debt for over 5 million Americans. I’m going to keep going.”

            Americans are told we must respect the decisions of a New York court presided over by a judge who donated to Biden (in clear violation of New York law) and prosecuted under charges Honig calls “bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else.”

But the Supreme Court’s decisions on loan forgiveness, about which even Nancy Pelosi once acknowledged the President has no authority?

The Biden Administration will do whatever they damned well please.

            Americans revere the Constitution, but we must face the fact that only parts of it have any force with our elected leaders. And the vast, unelected bureaucracy that is nominally under the executive branch (but really reports only to itself) only cares about it as a “living” document, infinitely malleable and changeable according to the whims and theories of the managerial class. All this is breeding the conditions for…well, we really don’t know. National divorce. Civil unrest. An even broader lawlessness than the one that reigns in too many parts of this nation.

            To set fire to the rule of law and all Constitutional checks is akin to burning all one’s furniture in the living room. Yeah, nobody will challenge your authority. But you’ll rule over ashes.

            Too little discussed this weekend, however, are the foreign policy fires the Biden Administration is also seemingly intent upon making bigger. The continuing mess of the U. S.’s position on Israel’s war with Hamas is perhaps the most obvious one. A potent symbol of all Biden-era foreign policy is the $320 million pier built to receive U. S. aid for the Palestinians after it was revealed that Hamas was simply taking it. The pier broke apart after a mere two weeks.

            Now, again in the name of Palestinian people—or, more accurately, Biden’s electoral support among the far left—the U. S. is pushing a ceasefire that has been dubiously represented as being proposed by Israel but has the backing of Hamas. It seems fairly certain that this will go nowhere, and Joe’s attempt to buy off the votes of the far left will leave him stranded and things worse than before. As Daniel McCarthy argued in the Spectator: “Biden is an anti-leader, and the voters who rejected him all the other times he ran for president have proved to be right to doubt his abilities. He facilitates Israel’s war but lectures the Israelis about how they conduct it; meanwhile, he puts US troops in harm’s way with a humanitarian pier—of all things—on the edge of the warzone.”

            But Middle Eastern foolishness is nothing compared to the continuing mess that is Russia and Ukraine. “Soon,” liberal Politico warns, “Ukraine will be using U.S.-made weapons to strike inside Russia—a nuclear-armed power—with a U.S. president’s blessing.” Though the U.S. decision only allows certain weapons to be used in particular geographic areas and for defensive purposes, we read, “for a man who entered office seeking to stabilize relations with Russia, and then directed his staff to avoid World War III after Moscow’s all-out attack on Ukraine, that’s quite the risk to take.”

            Though the article duly notes Fiona Hill’s excuse that “War has found them,” it’s not clear that the risks of this escalation are worth it. Escalation is what this is, for, as Politico notes: “Biden’s choice to cross the line on striking inside Russian territory is likely to lead to pressure to go further. Inevitably, Ukrainian and other European officials will clamor for Biden to change his policy once again, this time allowing Kyiv to attack the whole of Russia.” “In fact,” as the article continues, “it’s already happening.”

            Being tough at the beginning of the Russian action might have made sense. The quick victory predicted in Ukraine did not happen. Pushing for a negotiation last year might have made sense. Instead, we have weakness alternating with recklessness inspired, it seems, by pressure from allies. We pushed for Ukrainian membership in NATO. Now, we are supplying weapons to attack inside Russia’s borders.

As close observers point out, Russia holds the strategic advantage over Ukraine. What is their position vis-à-vis the U.S.? We are sticking our necks out and risking direct conflict with a country whose nuclear arsenal is competitive with our own and whose conventional weapons are being produced much faster than ours are. To add to our problems, we are now looking at an economic fight with China over their supply of goods to Russia—the results of our sanctions on Russia that were supposed to “cripple” them.

David P. Goldman warned in late March that “America Has No Ukraine Plan-B Except More War.” At a time in which our own military seems more fixated on Pride Month than defense, and Russia’s economic and military capability seems even, if not ahead of us militarily (as Goldman details), it seems that this horrific prediction is coming perilously close to coming true. He’s not alone. Elbridge Colby, like Goldman a sober defense strategist, tweeted on Friday: “It is very concerning how blithe people are about the escalation risks. People in 1918 wished the people in 1914 had been more deliberate and prudent.”

Are we ready for a multinational conflict over Ukraine? Are we ready for World War III?

America’s house is threatened by fire from the inside. There is perhaps a greater fire from the outside. We feel the flames ever closer, yet our own leaders seem oblivious to the dangers of both fires. In fact, they seem more fixated on raising the internal fire by imprisoning the man whose presidential term saw peace in Israel and no Russian aggressions akin to those seen under Bush, Obama, and Biden’s—and then smirking when asked if he’s a political prisoner.

Our Democratic leaders may be deliberate, but only about the wrong things. They are not prudent at all. Nor are many of our Republican ones. They need to be removed from power. And we need to pray that it’s done before the flames engulf us.  

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.