“BIDEN DROPS OUT OF 2024 RACE” was the banner headline across The New York Times’s digital front page Sunday. How could I not think back to Aug. 9, 1974, when the Times fronted its editions with “NIXON RESIGNS” — same font, same type size, all caps?
Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in disgrace. Everyone knew this, even Nixon, and there was no pretending otherwise. Nixon seemed to try his best under the circumstances: “HE URGES A TIME OF ‘HEALING,’” was the subhead on the Times’ news report.
Maybe Joe Biden did his best, too, by the time he announced Sunday morning he would not run for reelection this November. But best or otherwise, Biden made the absolute worst of his circumstances.
He could have stepped aside weeks ago, even months, with grace and some semblance of dignity. Instead, he insisted he “wasn’t going anywhere,” sheltering in a state of full denial until he was forced from office looking like a foolish old man who simply gets in the way of things.
“America has never been better positioned to lead the world,” Biden wrote in the letter to “My Fellow Americans” he published on social media Sunday. If I were Ronald Reagan I would shake my head derisively and say, “There he goes again.”
Biden will end his days assuming, as he does here, that he can utter the most preposterous bunkum, contradictory to perfectly visible realities, and it will be accepted as true because he has said it. The Man from Scranton, authenticity beyond his reach and ordinary honesty foreign to his repertoire, got away with this chicanery for decades while he served in the Senate.
But the White House has simply defeated him. A lightweight when it came time to prove himself as a statesman and a leader, he never should have walked its halls as anything other than a visitor.
Of the many large truths worth noting about the Biden presidency, the most important in my judgment is that he has turned, error upon error, misjudgment upon misjudgment, stupidity upon stupidity, a gradual but long-evident erosion in American power, prestige and reputation into a precipitous collapse. There are a few things to say about this straightaway.
Hellbound and Down 