President Joe Biden does not want to save democracy — he wants to save himself. That’s why he started his 2024 reelection run where most campaigns end: with rhetorical high hyperbole uttered when none but the party faithful are listening. In so starting, Biden and the Democrats have shown where they will go to win: anywhere, everywhere, and all points in between.
On Friday, Biden started his election year with a speech following a visit to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. In case you missed the date’s proximity to the three-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Biden bludgeoned the point home. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about. … Our campaign is about preserving and strengthening our American democracy,” he said.
So now Biden’s reelection is about saving democracy?
This is from the leader of the party that wants to bar Biden’s chief opponent from the ballot in Colorado and Maine so that people cannot vote for him. This is from the same man who told donors last December that he was not sure he would seek reelection if former President Donald Trump were not running, who then hours later told reporters that because Trump is running for reelection, he must too, and who, when then asked whether he would leave if Trump left the race, said, “No, not now.”
This is from the same president who pursued astronomical new spending (including his America Jobs Plan and American Families Plan) even as inflation began to accelerate, culminating in a four-decade high. This is who, when he could not get the astronomical spending he desired (because senators from his own party refused to go along), settled for just huge increases instead. And Biden then had the chutzpah to call the bill the Inflation Reduction Act, a proposal that the Congressional Budget Office said would not reduce inflation.
This is from the president of an administration that insists there is no border crisis despite the fact that he himself said there was a “crisis” more than two years ago when illegal entries were even fewer than they are now. This is from the president who will not lift a finger or spend a penny to address the crisis, even as his administration spends $7.9 trillion above 2019’s pre-COVID spending levels and uses even illegal means, such as forgiving student loan debts worth hundreds of billions, to dole out more money.
This is from Biden, who ignores the state and local leaders of his own party whose governments are hemorrhaging money to pay for Biden’s illegal immigrants. This is from Biden, who dismisses any border problem as a symptom of America’s “broken immigration system” despite the fact that the number of illegal immigrants entering our country reached historically high levels during his presidency.
This is from the head of the party that at least tacitly, if not outrightly, accepts radical critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies’ explicit racism as a means to prevent what its practitioners deem to be implicit racism that only these practitioners can discern. The fullest practice of these theories on America’s so-called elite college campuses has produced the most grotesque and explicit racism in recent memory and has sanctioned in American academia antisemitic rhetoric and beliefs worthy of the Third Reich.
This is from the commander in chief who insists that the public be drafted into an extremist environmental agenda to fight climate change, which our chief adversary, China, is not adhering to and actually benefits from America’s loss of energy security and economic performance. This is from a president whose administration is spending $400 billion in so-called green energy funds on projects that are failing across the United States, projects that are also hobbling other Western nations, including the United Kingdom.
Biden and the Democratic Party he leads do not care about democracy or the immense damage they have done to it and our system of government over the past three years. The Democratic Party only wants to save Biden, a candidate seeking the presidency for the fourth time (fifth if you count his bid’s rejection in 2016 in favor of Hillary Clinton) whom they resoundingly rejected twice and only embraced by default in 2020, from his multitude of failures that have made people less prosperous in their incomes, less secure at their southern border, less respected abroad, less safe in their streets, and their children less educated in school.
Even more, the Democratic Party is seeking to save Democrats from their own failed, extremist ideology. Biden is politically akin to air: Without any of his own discernible qualities or form, he takes on those of his surroundings. Biden’s failed policies are the Democrats’ failed policies that he has dutifully carried out to their inevitable, disastrous conclusions. And in its headlong pursuit to save its president, its candidates, and itself, the Democratic Party is willing to say and do anything necessary.
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J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987 to 2000, served in the Department of Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, and was the director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004 to 2023.