Bumbling Biden is no friend of Britain

Coming soon, from a basement near you – the President of the United States. That, at any rate, is what Democratic supporters hope will be the outcome of this extraordinary presidential election. Until recently, the troglodyte existence of Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, resembled a dystopian feature film set in the aftermath of a nuclear war. 

At first it had seemed a sound strategy to keep this eminently vulnerable candidate under wraps for as long as possible, with anti-Covid precautions as a pretext for his establishing himself in a basement; but, as isolation deepened into hibernation, the perception changed and, goaded by the derision directed by the Trump camp at the invisible candidate, Rip Van Biden was brought up, blinking, into the light of day.

By now, some Democrats must be wondering if that, too, was a mistake. In this bizarre election, 74-year-old Donald Trump is the youth candidate. Despite the Peter Pan resonance to his name, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr is 77, with a further birthday imminent. If elected, he would be 78 by his inauguration day and 82 by the end of his first term. Woke commentators are telling us this is the first American election that will be decided by the young; if that is the case, they are certainly not effecting this revolution from the top.

Biden is ahead in the polls, except for Rasmussen, regarded as an outlier, where Trump has a one-point lead, after trailing by four points just two weeks ago. But, as any pollster will tell you, what matters is not where the polls stand six weeks before an election, but the trend they show. For general election purposes the best guide we have is probably the RealClearPolitics poll of polls, which shows Biden with an apparently healthy 6.2 per cent lead, which looks rather less healthy when compared with the 10-point lead he had at the end of June. Perhaps he should have stayed in the basement.

In any other circumstances but a pandemic that has killed 200,000 Americans, Biden’s candidacy would have been a peep-through-your-fingers-if-you-don’t-like-to-see-blood event, with the Democratic candidate as likely to win as a greyhound to catch the mechanical hare. Donald Trump had done something unprecedented in American politics: kept his election promises. While social media hysterics struggled to find an adequately bilious vocabulary to denounce him as a “racist”, his policies brought black and Hispanic employment up to previously unrecorded levels.

The economy boomed, even Never-Trump Wall Street was privately happy; the President, without engaging in more bloody wars, squared up to China and gave leadership to the world in containing the ambitions of Beijing. If the election had been held a year ago Trump would have been a shoo-in. Today, events-dear-boy have changed the face of American politics unrecognisably. The consensus is that this is an election for Biden to lose – a terrifying thought for Democrats.

In weighing up the prospects for the two candidates it is easy to overlook the deficiencies of Biden. The mainstream and social media hourly deluge the world with a cascade demonising Trump. What few care to dwell on is the curious symbiosis between the candidates’ journeys to their present confrontation and the all-important divergences.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties had a problem in that they had become divorced from their electoral bases. But that happened in very different ways. The Republican elite became absorbed into a Beltway liberal consensus that their supporters repudiated. The grass-roots Republican response was to reject the Republican In Name Only (RINO) establishment and rally to Donald Trump, a non-Republican, to restore conservatism in American politics. The revolt was successful, Trump kept faith with his supporters and won the presidency.

In the Democratic camp, something superficially similar was happening, but the underlying reality was very different. The Democratic Party was subjected to the same kind of entryism as the Corbyn Labour Party. By rallying around Bernie Saunders, the American hard left forced its views upon a feeble Democratic establishment and eventually set its agenda. But, unlike the GOP experience, that programme is shared by a smaller proportion of Democratic voters than the number of Republicans who find Trump’s policies acceptable.

So, the Democratic establishment was driven to find a candidate respectable enough to retain centrist voters, but radical enough to keep the woke brigade on board. Biden was seen as that man. The life title of vice president testifies he has lived within a heartbeat of the Oval Office, supposedly reassuring to independent voters, while he plays the radical card, telling African-Americans that if they don’t vote Democrat (i.e. Biden), “you ain’t black”. 

That says it all about what an uncomfortable fit the Biden candidacy is. Worse than that, Biden is increasingly showing his age. The public are sedulously shielded from his most incoherent ramblings by a complicit mainstream media, but even the censors on social media cannot prevent his gaffes going viral. Ahead lies the nightmare of the television debates. If Trump performs eccentrically and sprays malapropisms all over the studio, it will not harm him; the public is accustomed to his style, it has already been factored in.

But Biden is supposed to be the statesman, the White House veteran from more decorous times. Once it becomes evident that, so far from having a firm policy on healthcare, he lacks confidence on the question of whether he has had his lunch, the dotard narrative threatens to destroy him. There is no real initiative or authority to him: he follows the advice of advisers who are themselves influenced solely by woke-dominated social media.

Biden waited weeks before condemning the riots in American cities. The insurance industry is now indicating that the cost of riot damage during the short period from 26 May to 8 June alone, the first stage of violence, may amount to $2bn. Biden cannot now credibly dissociate his campaign from a laissez-faire attitude towards that insurgency. Some on the Democratic left have gone so far as to suggest that only by voting for Biden can Americans secure peace, otherwise the riots will continue. That intimidatory tactic has worked before in history, but its proponents were wearing brown shirts. 

Most recently, Biden has provided further evidence of his party’s inept approach to international affairs, with his clumsy intervention into the Brexit debate. On Wednesday he tweeted: “We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit. Any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K. must be contingent upon respect for the Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”

The best response to this impertinence came from Iain Duncan Smith, who said: “We don’t need lectures on the Northern Ireland peace deal from Mr Biden. If I were him I would worry more about the need for a peace deal in the USA to stop the killing and rioting before lecturing other sovereign nations.”

The fetishising of the Good Friday Agreement – of which the British government is equally culpable – is a long-standing ploy by Brussels and its allies. It implies that history stands still and, insultingly to the Irish, that any alteration in customs arrangements will cause them to erupt into murderous conflict. If a hard border is ever established between Northern Ireland and the Republic, it will not be put there by Britain, but by the EU. The US Democratic party is in hock to the so-called Irish lobby in Congress, with Congressmen such as Richie Neal and Brendan Boyle orchestrating anti-British sentiment over Brexit.

This is not a one-off gaffe by Biden, but part of a pattern. It follows Barack Obama’s threat, in April 2016, just two months before the UK referendum, that if we voted for Brexit, “The UK is going to be in the back of the queue.” One of that same president’s first acts was to remove the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. People in Britain, brainwashed into an anti-Trump hysteria, should recognize that Britain has a dog in this fight. The Democratic Party is now a consistently anti-British entity.

We should not welcome a Democratic administration – regardless of what much of the media tell us – because it would be hostile to our interests. We need to embrace realism and its political expression, Realpolitik. It is about single-mindedly consulting Britain’s interests and pursuing them, dispassionately and forensically, rather than wallowing in synthetically induced “feelings”.

It is not a congenial thing to have to say about what was formerly one of the two great parties of state in the world’s leading nation, but the Democrats are our self-declared enemies and we should accept that reality, contesting their influence whenever possible. That is how sovereign nations survive. Let’s hope dozy Joe implodes in public before 3 November and saves both his country and ours a lot of grief.