Why rambling Joe Biden and his chaotic party are wrecking the US

Imagine if you had switched on the wireless on 16 June, 1940, in time to hear Winston Churchill declare: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ End of quote. Repeat the line.”

Would your morale have soared? Would your sinews have hardened in preparation for the struggle? Or would you have thought: “Gawd, we’re at war with Germany and the Prime Minister is several suspension lines short of a parachute”?

Spare some compassion, then, for our transatlantic friends who find themselves under the executive power of Joe Biden, whose relationship with the English language is akin to alphabet soup and whose incontinent orations are increasingly striking a chilling chord with the American people, already marginally involved in the Ukraine war. Biden’s latest gaffe suggested the problem was worsening.

Fronted by a CBS News caption “Pres. Announcing Reproductive Rights Action”, Biden told the nation: “It is noteworthy that the percentage of women who register to vote and cast a ballot is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so. End of quote. Repeat the line. Women are not without electoral and/or political, or, um, precise – not and/or – political…”

Those are the ravings of a dotard with his finger on the nuclear trigger. Do you remember how the pro-Democrat media used to mock and inflate verbal infelicities by Donald Trump? Those same media are straining every nerve to conceal from the public Biden’s fast deteriorating cognitive abilities — rather futile when they broadcast them live and they go viral as far afield as India.

Meanwhile, the First Lady, at a different podium, was further alienating the Democrats’ already defecting Latino supporters by comparing them to tacos and mispronouncing (Dr Biden, that is) every Spanish term her speech-writers had inserted. However, she remains the merest amateur, compared to her husband’s fecund facility for gaffes. Among his recent gems were getting the date of the Parkland shooting wrong by 100 years and welcoming Switzerland into NATO (that must have given the Kremlin a bad moment) instead of Sweden.

Joe Biden might look pretty clapped-out, but he retains the ability to shatter successive records as fast as a decathlon champion on a roll. On 10 July, Five Thirty Eight Polling reported that Biden’s approval rating 18 months into his presidency, down at 38.4 per cent, was lower than any president’s in the past 75 years. Scarcely had punch-drunk Democrat spinners launched a half-hearted rebuttal (the hot weather was one ingenious alibi, making the electorate bad-tempered), than this record was toppled.

Civiqs reported that Biden’s approval rating had tumbled to an historic low of 29 per cent. Gallup states that only five American presidents have ever descended into the 20s at any point in their presidency: Truman, Nixon, Carter and both Bushes. Biden has managed it in his first 18 months, which invites speculation on how low he can sink before he is taken into care and departs the Oval Office. Donald Trump, at this stage, had an approval rating of 42.1 per cent.

Other polling shows acute discontent with their lot among the American public. A survey released by the Federal Reserve this week showed that 36.1 per cent of respondents said they were somewhat worse off financially than a year ago, up from 19.9 per cent last year; a further 15.2 per cent said they were much worse off than a year ago, up from 3.9 per cent. This is the first time that a majority in the survey (51.3 per cent) have declared themselves worse off. It marks the end of an American dream.

Inflation emerged as an overarching concern. In that context, is it likely Americans will forget whose massive “infrastructure” programmes, measured in trillions of dollars and designed to hand massive chunks of taxpayers’ money to woke projects and institutions, kick-started the inflationary surge? Biden’s chickens are coming home to roost.

The latest on this is that Democratic election managers believe that, by orchestrating rage over the Supreme Court’s striking down of Roe v. Wade, they can turn around their fortunes in November’s mid-term elections. Nothing could better illustrate how far the Democrats have become divorced from reality. The notion that, because the Supreme Court, in a notably well argued judgement, has returned abortion issues to state legislatures, which is where some would argue they belong, citizens suffering acutely from a cost of living crisis, for which the government bears more direct responsibility than in any other nation, will rush to vote for the people who have diminished their standard of living is beyond fatuous.

Of course, a hard core of obsessives will still vote Democrat, but that means nothing: it is independent voters Biden needs. Good luck with that, Joe. The ultimate dignity that enshrines the presidential office, the role of commander in chief, was squandered by Biden near the start of his presidency when he humiliated America before the whole world with his squalid scuttle from Afghanistan.

Now the domestic issues remain: 40-year-high inflation and petrol prices rocketing in the most car-cherishing nation on earth. This week’s New York Times/Siena poll recorded 58 per cent viewing the economy as “poor”, with 96 per cent saying it was important with regard to how they would vote in November. Only 13 per cent of voters thought America was on the right track. The Democratic term for this situation is “normalcy”. Remember the great cry of the Biden camp was: “We have returned to normalcy”.

It would be instructive to know which era in American history they are drawing upon for a definition of “normalcy”: Sherman’s March to the Sea is about the only instance of equivalent chaos that comes to mind. While the economic meltdown is likely progressively to eclipse other considerations, it should not be allowed to obscure the fact that other, very significant, occurrences have transformed American public discourse, profoundly for the worse.

From the night when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 it became evident that the Democratic Party, one of the twin pillars that had dominated American politics for much of the nation’s history, had shifted its axis from Congress to the streets. The hard-left wing of the party, which could not now be dismissed as an insignificant minority, had fused with Antifa, BLM and other malcontents to embrace the politics of protest, intimidation and street violence.

But the rot has spread far above street level. Biden’s recent attacks on the Supreme Court — for delivering verdicts on abortion and gun laws that he dislikes — strikes at the very roots of the American constitution and the crucial principle of separation of powers. The Democratic Party has fallen so helplessly into the hands of fanatical lobby groups that it now places its supposed obligations to them above the duty of respecting and maintaining the fundamental constitutional settlement of the United States.

If Supreme Court justices deliver a judgement that is unpalatable to the left, they are to be harassed at their homes or in restaurants, even targeted for assassination in one instance, without any condemnation coming out of the Oval Office. While Biden delivered his inarticulate autocue message, the CBS news caption in front of him read: “Pres. Biden: Supreme Court is playing fast and loose with the facts.”

That was a cheap slander on the justices and the reverse of the truth: it was Biden who was playing fast and loose with the facts. But the more serious implication of this abusive attack by the executive wing of government on the judicial wing was the abandonment of all the constitutional proprieties, provoking civil war within the organs of law and governance.

The notion that if “AOC” and a bunch of other strident cultural Marxists disagree with a Supreme Court determination, then the court must be packed with political clones to unpick the constitution is a nihilist delusion. When it is shared by an American president, it signals he is unfit for office.

The Democrats have lost their respectability and, with it, their credibility. Their exploitation of racial divides, which it should be the responsibility of any political party in a parliamentary democracy to heal rather than aggravate, has been disgraceful. When Portland burned, night after night, how audibly did their leaders condemn it? Yet they went into overdrive when a right-wing riot broke out at the Capitol, ludicrously terming it “The Insurrection”. In fact, the number of deaths caused by the left-wing riots was a multiple of those at the Capitol, all but one of which were of rioters.

To this day, the Democrats are still trying to milk the January 6 riot by means of a kangaroo investigation but, according to Politico, it is having no impact at all, “it appears to have done little to change Americans’ minds about another presidential bid by Donald Trump, according to a new Morning Consult/Politico survey”. Morning Consult/Politico reports that in October 2021, 67 per cent of Republicans said Trump should run again in 2024; today, 66 per cent say that.

Unfortunately for Mrs Biden’s wee boy, the same loyalty is not in evidence in the Democratic camp. Democrats’ chief concern now is to prevent Biden seeking re-election in 2024. A left-wing organisation is running an expensive advertising campaign against him. The New York Times, his party’s house magazine, has published half a dozen anti-Biden articles in the past month or so. As the economy worsens, psephologists are beginning to predict a red wave even in some blue states.

“Have I had my lunch?” Yes, Mr President, in every sense of the term. Let’s go, Brandon.