Following Joe Biden’s cataclysmic debate performance, the corporate media and political pundit class have been relentlessly zeroed in on the question that’s on nearly every voter’s mind: will Biden remain in the race?
But while Biden’s political fate of course remains a crucial topic, lurking underneath the headlines is a nasty indifference to Biden’s wellbeing that reveals just how repulsive the Democrat Party machine is—and the extraordinary lengths to which they’ll go to preserve their grip on power.
While most left-wing pundits and Democrat officials have claimed that the reason for Biden’s historic unpopularity is his age and strikingly senile appearance, in reality voters first began turning away from Biden in droves because he faithfully adopted the modern Democrat Party’s extremist progressive agenda.
After all, Biden’s polling collapse began long before his debate night debacle. It was failures like Afghanistan and 40-year-high inflation that, far more than any age-related gaffes, have put him on the outs with voters.
Moreover, national polling indicates that possible alternatives to Biden—including Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer—are also losing head-to-head matchups versus Donald Trump, an evident sign that voters are rejecting not merely Biden the man, but also the Biden agenda, which was foisted upon him by the progressive wing of the Democrat Party.
Tellingly, the same people and entities now calling for Biden’s resignation and deriding him as unfit to serve a second term are precisely the same figures who conspired to make him the nominee when the vast majority of Democrats did not, in fact, want to elevate him as their party’s standard-bearer.
Biden’s come-from-behind victory in the 2020 Democrat primaries, even after badly losing both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary (at which point the media acknowledged his campaign was “on life support”), can be largely accredited to a Democrat establishment and mainstream media crusade to coalesce the party’s base behind Biden, who was seen as a more electable alternative to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Biden then went on to win a vast majority of remaining primary contests, including in South Carolina and most Super Tuesday races, appearing to indicate the establishment’s outsized role in boosting Biden in the primaries and ostensibly helping him cross the finish line in the general election. Democrats’ present qualms about Biden’s old age were of no concern to them—at least publicly—in the months leading up to the 2020 election.
Who, then, do the media and Democrats to blame beyond themselves for Biden’s easily predictable slate of failures as president?
As much as political pundits and elected officials on both sides of the aisle like to blame Biden’s age for the perilous state of his campaign, we can only blame the president so much. In the end, Biden is merely a creation of the same left-wing establishment that is now working overtime to expel him from office.
To Democrats and left-wing media operatives, Biden’s senility and feeblemindedness is nothing more than an obstacle in their quest for power and dominion. As such, in their minds, he no longer serves a purpose. Given that he is now undeniably ill-equipped to continue advancing their ideological agenda, they are desperately trying to drop him from the ticket without a second thought—a sign that they never truly cared about Biden in the first place, but only the utilitarian purpose he served four years ago.
Ultimately, though party leaders have been shy to admit it, Biden’s unpopularity stems from the derangement his entire party has embodied since the 2016 election: the Green New Deal, the open borders and “Abolish ICE” movements, the Russia Hoax hysteria, the “anti-racism” and DEI movements, and the kneejerk opposition to Trump’s successful foreign policy.
On the economic front, Biden’s tenure has been defined by historically high inflation, which has reached a cumulative rate of nearly 20 percent. This inflation is the direct result of his adoption of the far-left priorities of his party in Congress, as embodied in a series of massive spending bills packed with DEI initiatives and hundreds of billions of dollars for environmental craziness straight out of the Green New Deal.
The same pattern holds true for the crisis on the southern border. Under Trump, Democrats became militantly in favor of open borders. They universally called for mass amnesty. Democrat senators also demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) be abolished entirely.
Biden’s immigration policies are simply the natural extension of this insanity. Biden reversed nearly every policy that secured the southern border during the Trump years immediately upon taking office, including stopping border wall construction, reducing deportations, and ending “Remain in Mexico,” a policy which ended the practice of “catch and release” into the United States and instead forced illegal aliens to wait for their court hearings in Mexico.
Biden also mandated a functional shutdown of ICE, going so far as to implement what the administration calls “protected areas” in which ICE is not permitted to enter. During his first 100 days in office, Biden issued 94 executive orders overturning the immigration policies of the Trump administration and advancing the party’s open borders agenda.
On the foreign policy front, thanks to Biden policies that were merely an extension of the Obama-era Democrat platform, war is now raging not only in Ukraine, but also in the Middle East—imperiling American safety and security and ushering the world into a state of global chaos.
Each of these outcomes does not suggest that Biden is uniquely unfit for office, but rather the failures of the radical Democrat establishment that enabled him.
It is increasingly important for American voters to understand that the primary problem isn’t Biden. The fundamental problem is the party. These outcomes would have been the same no matter what left-wing puppet the Democrat establishment chose as its standard-bearer in 2020.
So long as Biden remains in the race, Republicans should by all means continue campaigning on his obvious signs of mental and physical decline. But the stronger—and ultimately more effective—line of attack for conservatives this election season will be hammering the fact that Biden’s disastrous and failing presidency is a result of his willingly and faithfully implementing a long list of far-left demands presented to him by progressive activists who now wield control over the entire Democrat Party.
If any Democrat—Biden or not—wins the White House this fall, that record of failure and extremism will only continue.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
