He can’t defend his record on spending, the border, or Iran, so he won’t even try.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins asks why Joe Biden is running for reelection. He concludes by asking, “If Mr. Trump is such a danger to America, democracy and apple pie, shouldn’t Mr. Biden be heeding voters, stepping aside and opening the door to a new generation of Democrats—albeit not represented by Adam Schiff, of course—with some class and decency, who can put up a better show against Mr. Trump?”
Before Joe Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history was Ronald Reagan, who, on his last day in office — January 20, 1989 — was 77 years and 349 days old, or almost 78. Today, Biden is 81 years and two months old.
(The third-oldest president was Donald Trump on his last day in office, at 74 years, 220 days old. On Inauguration Day 2025, Trump will be 78 years, seven months, and six days old.)
We all know it’s unprecedented to have an octogenarian president, and it’s exceptionally unusual for a president past 80 to be running for another four-year term. The fact that Biden is running for another term at such an advanced age, after considerable talk about Biden serving just one term back in 2019, is a de facto admission that he and his team do not believe that Kamala Harris can either win the election, or effectively perform the duties of the presidency.
Of course, God forbid, President Biden could have a bad fall or some other health issue any day. If Biden doesn’t think Harris can handle the presidency starting January 20, 2025, he doesn’t think she’s capable of handling the presidency tomorrow. (This is also an indictment of Biden’s decision to select Harris in the first place.)
Joe Biden has made three major decisions as president. The first was to spend trillions as the economy was recovering from the Covid pandemic; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that “the Biden Administration enacted policies through legislation and executive actions that will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits between 2021 and 2031.” Throwing trillions of dollars into the U.S. economy, with no comparable increase in goods and services, set off the inflationary cycle and exacerbated our considerably higher cost of living in recent years.
The second was to enact a series of changes to U.S. border and immigration policy that were interpreted by many, many migrants from Central America and around the world as an announcement that the U.S. had an open-borders policy. It may not be an open-borders policy on paper, but the sheer number of migrants who are either crossing the border and getting away, or being released for a far-off date in an immigration court to evaluate asylum claims, amounts to a policy that is not all that different from open borders.
We are still witnessing the consequences of Biden’s third major decision, which was to attempt to reach out to the Iranian regime and rescind Trump-era sanctions on that country. Perhaps we should not be shocked to learn that for the past two years, at least two of the people advising Biden’s Iran envoy were actually secretly working for the Iranian government. The result is more than 150 attacks on American forces in Jordan and Syria, as well as in Iraq and U.S. Naval forces in the Red Sea.
The record of Joe Biden is revealed in his campaign’s focus on abortion and the menace of Donald Trump. Biden can’t defend his record on inflation, on the border, or on an increasingly dangerous and unstable world, so he won’t even try.