Joe Biden was never known for his fidelity to the truth.
Prior to his ascension to the presidency, previous bids for the White House had yielded a plagiarism scandal and a number of notable fibs about his academic record.
There is much more. The Washington Post has called his story about being arrested while trying to see Nelson Mandela “ridiculous.” His tall tale about his father teaching him that love is love was undermined by his own four decades of opposition to same-sex marriage. He slandered the truck driver involved in the tragic car crash that killed his first wife and daughter as a drunk, chasing him to his grave with the stunning, and unfounded, accusation, only stopping after the press picked up on the smear.
But even those accustomed to Biden’s dishonesty have been taken aback by both the frequency and audacity of the lies he’s told since taking his final oath of office.
Those lies are the rotten fruit of Biden’s dismal tenure as commander in chief.
By any and every objective measure, the 46th president was an unqualified failure. Biden’s approval rating was underwater less than eight months into his term, and he never came up for air again. The economic conditions cultivated on his administration’s watch are resented by voters of all allegiances and backgrounds. He surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban and invited aggression from America’s enemies in Moscow and the Middle East, who launched brazen attacks on our allies that have left tens of thousands dead. The country remains just as divided as it was when he moved into the Oval Office, if not more. And Donald Trump not only mounted an improbable political comeback but was thrashing his successor so thoroughly in the polls that Biden was forced to give up a nomination that he had already won and his chance at a second term by the elders of his own party.
How did he make it as far as he did — and nearly consign his party to what would have been a certain general election loss to Trump this fall? Until this summer, Biden held his base together by telling untruths that only hardcore Democratic partisans could bring themselves to believe. The rest of the country saw it for what it was: gaslighting.
Inflation, arguably the force most responsible for Biden’s political misfortune, was nothing to be concerned about, he and his team insisted again and again in the early days of his administration. “Our experts believe, and the data show, that most of the price increases we’ve seen are expected to be temporary,” he said in July 2021, just a few months after he passed a $1.9 trillion spending bill advertised as a COVID-19 relief measure but that was, in practice, a series of handouts to Democratic constituencies.
Time after time, Biden and his economic lieutenants parroted his line about rising prices being a passing inconvenience rather than an anchor tied tightly around everyone’s ankles. “Transitory” could have been the word of the year. By late 2021, Biden was forced to acknowledge that inflation had become a problem. Still, he spent the better part of the next year bragging, often erroneously, about other supposed accomplishments. “We have the fastest-growing economy in the world — the world,” Biden emphasized during a 2022 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
It wasn’t true. Fact checks from even sympathetic outlets noted that more than 50 countries had faster-growing economies the year prior. As it turned out, the economy had actually contracted in the first quarter of 2022.
When Biden did finally profess to come up with a solution to the surplus of money in the system, it turned out to be pumping still more money back into it via a profligate environmental spending bill decorated with the name “Inflation Reduction Act.” Critics of the bill made hay of the misnomer at the time, but Biden and his party insisted it was an apt solution.
Prices kept going up, though, and just a few months after casting the deciding vote in favor of the bill, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), realizing that he had been bamboozled, accused the president of using the legislation to implement a “radical climate agenda.” A few months after that, Biden himself all but admitted that the bill’s name had been a red herring to provide political cover for progressive policy making.
“It has less to do with reducing inflation than it does to do with dealing with providing for alternatives that generate economic growth,” he explained.
Ah.
Biden’s strategy for mitigating the political effect of his myriad other failures was the same: deny, deny, deny. He dispatched members of his administration, including his border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, to call the southern border secure even as record numbers of illegal immigrants flooded across it. He submitted that the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, which saw Kabul fall to the Taliban well before it was complete and 12 U.S. service members killed and left tens of thousands of American allies behind to twist in the wind, was an “extraordinary success.” He boasted about how he would bring Vladimir Putin to heel before greenlighting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And in a speech before the United Nations, Biden took an inexplicable victory lap over his foreign policy vision, arguing that he had taken office at a moment of “crisis and uncertainty” and was leaving the field with the world in better shape than he had found it.
Now Biden’s gaslighted presidency has given way to Harris’s gaslighted candidacy — with disastrous results.
Much has been made about the strategic decisions of the Harris campaign since its inception in July, but the truth is that most of its flaws were written into its DNA. The Democrats’ second standard-bearer this cycle carries all of the same baggage as the first.
Had Harris not run her own 2020 presidential campaign well to Biden’s left, she might have been able to make a credible case that she is not a one-for-one substitution but instead marks a break from the woeful Biden years. But because nearly all of her past positions five years ago were just more extreme versions of the unpopular ones Biden himself has championed, that case has been impossible to make honestly. After all, even Biden’s advanced age and cognitive decline are yolks Harris must carry thanks to her often indignant insistence that he was up to the job.
The only way around it all was more lies. For a time, Harris was able to climb up the polls on the sugar high of not being the octogenarian incumbent. But once the crash came, she had to buoy herself with something.
That something has turned out to be a multitude of platitudes, mealymouthed retractions, and outright falsehoods. In other words: gaslighting.
The same woman who last ran for the presidency as an open borders ideologue open to abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running ads touting her immigration hawk bona fides — or, to be more precise, inventing them. The same woman now eager to condemn Iran as America’s greatest enemy once reacted to the death of its highest-ranking terrorist general, Qassem Soliemani, by chastising Trump. The same woman who repeatedly and impassionedly vowed to ban fracking now just happens to cry “Drill, Baby, Drill!” with Pennsylvania’s electoral votes on the line.
Harris’s campaign slogan is “A New Way Forward.” She assured audiences that her own presidency will be much different than Biden’s. But after three months of thinking about it, she still hasn’t been able to figure out how.
“Turning the page” has become a common refrain of the vice president’s on the campaign trail. Yet when she was asked for an explanation of what the next page might look like at one recent event, she replied that “it is a metaphor that is meant to also describe my intention to embark on a new generation of leadership. And needless to say, mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration.”
“I bring to it my own ideas, my own experiences,” she added, leaving what those ideas might be to the imagination of her audience.
Believe it or not, that was an improvement on previous iterations of that answer.
Tacking to the center come general election season is a road taken by presidential candidates since time immemorial. To condemn one for doing so is to condemn all of the rest for the same.
But the project that the Harris campaign has embarked on is of an entirely different character. Almost all of its principal’s supposed reversals have been announced through campaign spokesmen or unsigned statements. And when she is asked to vouch for them herself, her explanations are incomprehensible. She can’t say when, how, or why she changed her mind about anything. And she can’t articulate any material differences between herself and the historically unpopular incumbent.
There’s a distinction between a caterpillar turning into a butterfly and a chameleon changing its colors. Which does the vice president’s purported transformation best resemble?
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Harris’s great hope is that she can get away with asserting that with herself at the helm, the next four years will look nothing like the last four instead of having to explain why that is.
Unfortunately for her, Biden lost the public’s confidence and then its trust — and she’s done nothing to earn it back.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a Robert Novak fellow at the Fund for American Studies.