Perfect!
I had been musing about a post on how Joe Biden’s Presidency was the most dishonest in U.S. history, and then Brad Polumbo of the Washington Examiner coined the description, “Trojan Horse Presidency.” I’m angry at myself for not beating him him to it, but I am grateful for the metaphor.
It would be more useful, of course, if more than a fraction of the public were culturally literate. I wonder how many Americans know what the Trojan Horse was? They don’t teach Greek mythology in public schools; an amazing number of fans of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” are amused by the huge wooden rabbit King Arthur’s troop uses to invade a castle without knowing what it satirized. This is the tragedy of declining cultural literacy: it makes concepts harder to visualize and explain.
The tale of the Trojan Horse isn’t in the “Illiad” of Homer, which relates the tale of the Trojan War. It was the invention of Virgil, the Roman poet, in his rip-off of Homer’s “Odyssey,” “The Aeneid.” After a decade of attacking the walled city of Troy without success, the Greeks decided to try an off-the-wall scheme offered by “Wily Odysseus,” as Homer called him, one of the Greek generals. His loopy idea was to build a huge wooden horse and leave it outside the Trojan gates at night. The Trojans, see, being morons, would think the thing was a sacred gift from the gods, and move it inside their walls. Then, once they were all asleep, the Greek soldiers hidden in the hollow horse would come out and slaughter the city! Hey! It’s so crazy, it just might work!
It did work, but why used to confound me. Virgil wrote that three times while dragging the thing into the city, the Trojans stopped pulling, and heard the clatter of armor coming from inside the wooden horse. “Nah, it’s nothing! Keep pulling!” There was also the incident where Troy’s high priest, Laocoon, declared that the Trojan Horse was evil and hurled a spear at its side. Then two sea serpents arrived on the scene and ate him and his two sons. (The big snakes were the agents of sea god Poseidon, who was rooting for the Greeks.)
Palumbo writes,
Joe Biden was elected president after a campaign rooted in rhetoric emphasizing unity, moderation, and compromise. But with every day that passes, the veneer of centrism that got him elected over rivals such as Sen. Bernie Sanders becomes more distant of a memory. Simply put, it sure seems like “moderate Joe” was a thin facade used to usher an ultra-progressive agenda in the backdoor….Biden’s centrist facade got him in the door, and now the liberal hordes are taking over his administration. On Friday, the White House announced a commission to study the idea of packing the Supreme Court, an idea that would constitute a partisan assault on the judiciary as we know it and erode the rule of law.This flirtation with radicalism is just the latest development in a series of extreme Biden administration policy overhauls that make former President Barack Obama seem like a conservative in comparison. For example, the president has embraced a federal $15 minimum wage, a job-killing policy rejected even by then-candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, and even tried to force it through as small businesses were struggling to survive amid the pandemic. And Biden’s early approach to spending makes the New Deal pale in comparison. He has utterly discarded any semblance of fiscal restraint he ever had as a senator, throwing caution to the wind to push through a $1.9 trillion partisan COVID-19 “stimulus” package that, adjusted for inflation and population, is twice the size of the Obama-era bailout and slightly larger than former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Never mind whether you like Biden’s emerging radical agenda or not; that’s not the point. The point is that this is not who and what he claimed to be when he was a candidate. Indeed, it was the consensus that Democrats and progressives were accepting him as a “none of the above” candidate because they knew one of the more extreme alternatives—they were all extreme—would not be able to defeat that hated Donald Trump. Most Americans are not socialists, totalitarians, statists or radicals. Thus a moderate Democrat, one who was familiar, religious (Joe is, he has always explained, a devout Catholic who believes that abortion is the equivalent of murder but that everyone should be able to decide to whether to murder their unborn child or not. Joe has never claimed to be consistent or bright), a known quantity and a nice guy, would be the candidate because the alternative was losing. Even with those assumption, it required a massive abandonment of integrity by woke Democrats to make Biden the standard-carrier. He is old, white, male, and a serial sexual harasser—“#MeToo? What #MeToo?” He is also obviously sliding into dementia, which makes supporting him especially hypocritical for those who kept trying to get Donald Trump removed via the 25th Amendment. Democrats, however, have adopted “the ends justify the means” as a core value.
Yet many or most of those who voted for Joe really did assume that he would be a centrist, unifying leader—because he said he would, and Joe was the honest candidate. It’s Donald Trump who always lies.
It is here that my planned essay was going to have as its starting point. For despite the four-year talking point that Donald Trump was a habitual liar, and all the exaggerated media lists of Trump “lies,” the vast majority of which were either not lies or absurdly trivial, Donald Trump was one of the very few modern Presidents who was exactly who he claimed to be during his first campaign, and his administration was remarkable in following through on the policies and governing philosophies he ran under. Reagan and Carter were similarly honest in presenting to the nation the kinds of leaders they would be. Bush I ran as a disciple of Reagan, which he was not (he was also not a leader.) Bush II said he was against nation-building and policing the world. Obama was going to bring the races closer together. None, however, deceived and betrayed the nation to the extent that Joe Biden is in the process of doing.
Biden is the opposite of the President most Americans thought they were voting for. Yes, yes, I know, he’s lost it, he’s old, he’s feeble, he’s being manipulated like an abused elderly parent whose adult children are bullying him. Maybe. It doesn’t matter: he was complicit in this cheat, and he is as responsible as his party. He wanted to be President so badly that he was willing to deceive voters and be a Trojan Horse, and for that he deserves to be judged as the most dishonest and despicable President ever. I can’t find another President who so completely misrepresented himself, though both Wilson and FDR are runners up.
There were a lot of modern Laocoons who saw through this scheme, and they were metaphorically devoured by the Trump-hating news media, nicely type-cast as serpents. There were also many equivalents of the Greek armor clattering from inside the hollow horse. As with the Trojans, Americans were weary of the partisan battles, and wanted to believe that this gift was benign and would solve all of their problems. They allowed themselves to be tricked. They wanted to be tricked.
Here, however, the analogy breaks down. It only took one night to sack Troy: Americans have every reason now to comprehend the dastardly deception that was used on them. The nation isn’t sacked yet. The Democrats know that if they don’t conquer quickly, the backlash at their perfidy will be furious.
No party, and certainly not a President, who attempts such a plot should ever be trusted again.
Ethics Alarms 
“It only took one night to sack Troy: Americans have every reason now to comprehend the dastardly deception that was used on them. The nation isn’t sacked yet.”
Yes – now, the horse stands in the center of the town square. Every day, we wake to find guards dead, warehouses looted, the sound of snores emanating from within and candy bar wrappers strewn about its feet. Whatever could possibly be happening? Perhaps we’re just not thanking the gods for the horse hard enough yet. What we really need is a second horse. Perhaps if we shoved some more money and food into the mouth of this one, we’ll get another one!
What have I seen from this administration:
(1) Lock down the Capital to protect the rulers from the ruled.
(2) Give money away to big business. How much of these ‘stimulus’ bills went to big business that was already bringing in record profits?
(3) Allow big business to restrict our rights on behalf of the government (COVID Passports, closing bank accounts of conservatives, etc).
(3) Bring back overt racial discrimination as an official policy of the Democratic Party.
(4) Call for gun warrantless gun confiscation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2021/03/23/biden-administration-urges-supreme-court-to-let-cops-enter-homes-and-seize-guns-without-a-warrant/?sh=17e9722f2829
(5) Print money until we have to go to a digital dollar. The digital dollar will allow the federal government to control what you are allowed to buy and the interest rates will be negative. Savings will be eliminated. You will own nothing and be happy (that’s an order, not a promise). The digital yuan, not in trials, expires. That’s right, your money will expire. Before this happens, we will experience an economic collapse more severe that any living American has seen.
(6) Use a Chinese Social Credit System to determine your rights in society.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/begins-financial-giant-merril-lynch-assigns-environmental-social-governance-esg-scores-rate-customers-just-like-chinese-communist-party-video/
I think the “Trojan Horse Presidency” is completely appropriate.
I’ve written on Ethics Alarms that “I think Joe Biden a empty suit sock puppet for progressives” and that we should “ignore the propaganda that flows freely over Biden’s lips and pay attention to his actions and you’ll see the false moderate facade slowly peel away”. I think the actions of President Biden, so far, have shown that his talk of unity, bipartisanship and portrayal of being a moderate Democrat were nothing but intentional lies pandering for votes.
Back on January 21st I wrote, “President Biden emphasized the word truth five times in his speech and I’ve got to ask, is the unsupportable truth, propaganda, that has been spewed out by the left leaning media the “truth” that Biden want’s to push or is it the truth that is actually supported by facts and evidence? We’ll soon see.”
The Biden administration showed us pretty quickly that they really don’t care much about the truth, they only care about smearing the political right. The ends justifies the means.
Biden said in his inauguration speech, “I will be a President for all Americans, all Americans. And I promise you I will fight for those who did not support me as for those who did.” This statement from President Biden was a bald-faced LIE!
The Trojans were defeated because the Greeks within the Trojan horse opened the gate to the rest of the Greek army who caught Troy and its army asleep and not ready for battle, never mind the fact that their best warriors and leaders were already dead.
King Priam, whose now dead son Paris (shot dead with one of the arrows of Hercules given to Philoctetes) had brought this terrible fate upon Troy by his abduction of Helen, armed himself and was about to join the battle and die fighting. Depending upon the version of the poem you read either one of the female members of his family or Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, says to him “non tali auxilio nic defensoribus estus tempus eget.” It literally translates as “not such aid nor such defenders does the time require” but the point is that the time is passed for defending Troy by force of arms and the city is lost. Either way, Pyrrhus plunges his sword into Priam, and that is the end of him.
A king who governed well for many years and had built a powerful army to defend his kingdom and strong defenses, brought low by a foolish decision on the part of others that he accepted, by weariness at home that caused an otherwise resolute people to give up the ghost long before the fight was over, and by an enemy who was willing to play dirtier than he was. Troy would never rise again. An era was ended, as generally the Trojan War is considered to mark the beginning of the end of the Greek mythological cycle, which ends officially with the Odyssey, Odysseus’ voyage home through all sorts of mythical and mundane dangers. He’s actually one of the lucky ones, most of the other surviving Greek commanders, including supreme commander agamemnon, meet some very unpleasant fates. Of course then Virgil, as you point out, picks up the poetic baton and Aeneas, one of the few decent Trojan commanders to escape this massacre, sailed to Italy and became the founder of Rome.
In a way, I guess the Trojans were lucky, most of them perished in one night. Most of them did not live to see their city burned to the ground and everything dear to them destroyed. There is a very good chance at this point that the Greeks here, who did not destroy Troy in one night, will do as Frederick Barbarossa did to Milan many centuries later, and systematically dismantle it one brick at a time, while they believe the Trojans cannot do anything about it.
The fact is that the Trojans at this point will not be able to do very much about it for at least 2 years. At this point it is a race between that systematic dismantlement and the appointed day of reckoning. I don’t believe it is for nothing that the current leadership is pushing some very big projects very early. If they can grant statehood to DC and possibly Puerto Rico, expand the supreme court, and achieve a few other long cherished goals before next year’s midterm elections, it might not matter. They may have consolidated their power to such a degree that it will be impossible to push them out of power without an actual violent insurrection, and I don’t think anyone is willing to do that, no matter how bad it gets. I think too many people would be willing to just try to live within the system at that point. Even if they are not able to achieve those goals by that date, the media, as they are already doing now, will be making sure everything they do receives good press and liberally sprinkling stories here and there about anything that the Republicans want to do to oppose what’s going on is not going to go anywhere. It’s a question of how many on the right are going to see the left’s playbook and be willing to adopt it as their own or improve upon it. If enough do, I think the Democratic party could be in for a very rude awakening come next year’s elections. At this point I can’t really predict how that race will turn out. Talk to me end of this year and I think we will have a better picture.
“…..and I don’t think anyone is willing to do that, no matter how bad it gets.”
I think we’ve seen the end of the D-R system. The left now knows they can cheat their way into the WH and elsewhere if necessary, if they haven’t imported enough democrat voters across the border to ensure a permanent hegemony by then. The indoctrination process for generations of children and young adults is obviously near completion. The fact that they’re talking about things like packing the Supreme court in broad daylight, without worrying about any significant public backlash speaks volumes. The Chinese have their tentacles everywhere, and we know the type of government our new masters would prefer (not to mention the Biden family’s cozy relationship with them). As time goes on, a violent insurrection IS appearing more and more like the only viable remedy, but how is that accomplished in such a huge, diverse, technologically-advanced police/surveillance state like ours? You couldn’t even gather enough like-minded people to TALK about it, for fear of getting caught in any of a number of ways, let alone plan, fund, and execute. A communication blackout would happen almost immediately. The number of potential pitfalls would be staggering. I think that rather than any kind of organized resistance, there would be random violence committed by individuals under desperate circumstances.
I am actually more optimistic that the “D” monopolists will fail.
In fact, I have taken to calling the newly trafficked-in gangsters and sexually molested children “FRVs,” for “Future Republican Voters.” Well, maybe not Republican, but so what? Republicans are almost eternally self-done-in, anyway. Over time, most of the imported people will surely see how they have been played and abused at the hands of their importers, and will change their vote to the “Reconquistas” or some other opposition party. But the majority of them will almost certainly NOT vote Democrat (or leftist-socialist-fascist-communist) forever, as the crisis-mongers on Fox News keep projecting, and as the current stupid short-sighted reactionary Democrat junta keeps expecting.
The current hoarders of authoritarian power will have other forces working against them, securing failure to the benefit of us “powerless.” Techno-oligarchic police state? That worries me least of all. Either a Coronal Mass Ejection, or a planetary magnetic field-flip, or a genuine war in earth’s orbital space that screws up the wannabe Lex Luthors’ satellite constellations, or Electromagnetic Pulse bombs delivered by one or more of the Democrat-emboldened enemies of “law and order” in this part of the continent, or some combination of the foregoing, will in short order render the “tech oligarchs” into helpless, lame silicon-worshiping has-beens. Power will shift drastically and dramatically. Millions of hungry, thirsty, jobless would-be code-learners and -users will stream themselves out of the urban and suburban areas, desperate, with nowhere to go and no one to dominate. It’ll be a wonderfully liberating, cataclysmically violent Season of Mass Murder of, by, and for The Masses. Some of us blog-followers might survive, some might not. But, “meh.” That’s how war goes. You use the media, you take your chances. In any case, the playing field WILL be more leveled, one way or another. LOTS of people like me will survive and benefit. And those who counted on their permanent dominance in their siliconized Field of Dreams will suffer horribly and die in very large numbers.
All of which gives me reason for enormous optimism, be I a survivor or not.
“You couldn’t even gather enough like-minded people to TALK about it, for fear of getting caught in any of a number of ways, let alone plan, fund, and execute.”
A number of fiction authors have written hypothetically but intelligently about how a resistance or insurgency against a high-tech tyrannical government could be conducted. There are more than 3.3 million modern-era (post-2001) military veterans. Tens of thousands of those veterans have special operations training and insurgency / counterinsurgency experience. Three percent of the US adult population is still nearly 7.5 million people, which would present a fairly robust resistance if mobilized. There are an estimated 300 million firearms owned by private citizens, including estimates of from 20 million to 40 million “military style” rifles (mostly AR15 and AK47 variants). Americans own billions of rounds of ammunition. So long as Americans don’t surrender their guns, there is recourse. Armed people are much harder to load into cattle cars. Freedom can and will find a way. Si vis pacem, para bellum
.
I am by no means advocating armed insurgency or resistance, and I remain hopeful that the red state legislatures will act to exercise their Tenth Amendment powers and defy or nullify federal authority when it becomes unconstitutional and oppressive. I am also optimistic that Dems will lose both the House and the Senate in 2022 (even among Dems I know, there is much “voter’s remorse” over Biden.) and that “Trumpism without Trump” will rise. I shudder to think of America becoming war-torn and Balkanized, but I also shudder thinking of the totalitarian country that my grandchildren will inherit if we do not reverse the current leftist course.
“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay,
“Unity” means what it’s always meant — “Unity beneath the ideology of the democrat party – submission”
ceterum autem censeo, factio democratica esse delendam
I was using “Trojan Horse” to describe Biden last fall.
Me too! Me too!
But I always thought he was just there to get Kamala Harris inside the walls. I thought she’d have popped out by now. But I was wrong.
Ron Klain is our new President. Hail to the Chief, and not just of staff.
Same. I thought it would be Kamala.
I think that getting Kamala in as quickly as possible was the plan initially, but the people who are pulling the strings didn’t realize what a liability she is. She is plainly not very smart, and is terrible at politics. I suspect they’ve had to undertake a massive project to rebuild her from the ground up to not be incredibly off-putting and exceptionally unexceptional. It does them no good to install her too early and have her take the heat for all the administration’s failures and then not get reelected in 2024. Better to let Joe take the hits while they try to build a facade around Harris that sort of resembles competence, and groom her to have some kind of shot in 2024. She’ll take over sometime after the 2022 midterms.
I actually believe the intent was to give Joe a nice honeymoon period with all kinds of reverent media coverage for about six months before they reveal that any verbal gaffes he makes are, sadly, the result of a mental decline that is regrettably necessitating his departure from office.
That way they can say that Joe never lied; he was just confused.
If they have to force Joe from office using the 25th Amendment, they can say that they were willing to do what their opponents weren’t – get rid of an incompetent President.
The timing is the only thing up in the air in my opinion. I don’t think Biden will last two years.
A.M. Golden wrote, “The timing is the only thing up in the air in my opinion. I don’t think Biden will last two years.”
If this is their plan, and I’m not saying it is or isn’t, then timing wise and politically it would best if he wasn’t removed from office until after he’s one day passed the two year mark of being in office that way Harris would be eligible to be in office for a full 10 years minus one day. After all; only racist misogynists would vote against an incumbent President that’s a black woman.
My theory: they’ve scrapped the transition to Kamala ASAP plan because, as Jeff has so eloquently pointed out, she’s a disaster. I also think they (Ron Klain et al.) have realized Joe, with Jill Biden’s coaxing, will do or say whatever he’s told to do or say. He’s the perfect ventriloquist’s dummy and he’s fallen into their laps. And it’s working like a charm so far. They must be saying amongst themselves, “Hey! This is pretty neat! Why didn’t we think of this right out of the chute?”
I am not sure that actual progressives would agree with this analysis. They seem to despise Biden as much as the right, or at least approaching those levels. He caved on the minimum wage, he lies about more substantive things than Trump ever did, his border policy is the height of hypocrisy, and Trump was far better on the Anti-war interventionalist side of things. I try to pay attention to progressives like Jimmy Dore or Kyle Kulinski, who are actual progressives (bless their hearts), and they are not happy with Biden because he is too centrist. He is, as Steve mentioned above, an empty suit and bends to the will of the wind. That is the calling card of a weak leader, and he (we all) will no doubt pay the cost of that.
Do you think actual progressives would like anyone as president? Since the president doesn’t get to make the sweeping changes that they’d like to see, I would imagine that they’d never really have a president that they really liked–even if AOC were president, she wouldn’t be picking 3 new wise Latina Justices this week, or likely even this term.
I think they probably see Biden in the same way a lot of libertarians saw Trump–he’s still a pretty normal politician, but hey, he’s doing things that I never thought I’d see a president doing.
“Bush II said he was against nation-building and policing the world.”
In fairness, let’s recall that some unforeseen incidents occurred early in his administration that would have forced him to rethink that particular campaign promise.
Recall his campaign promise came on the heels of Clinton-era “small wars” adventurism that were typical of limp-wrist UN responses to local crises that mostly involved Americans dying and crises not getting resolved.
I doubt his campaign promise anticipated a surgically coordinated attack by a well funded and resourced non-state actor resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans in a single day.
Yeah, but Bush II preached to the nation about “American humility” in not presuming to police the world. Afghanistan, sure. He had no choice. But Iraq was “we’ll enforce the Iraq cease fire deal even if the UN won’t.”
Even if I agree with that call, and I did and do, it still doesn’t jibe with what he had said in the campaign and debates.
You have forgotten the more important Trojan Horse.
The Democrats wanted a woman President, identity politics being what they are. They could not do it with Hilary. They could not do it with Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, or Elizabeth Warren.
They needed a President who would not make it through his term. So, Biden gets the nomination and announces his running mate will be a woman (that is all that matters, after all). So, Harris is brought in as a Trojan Horse to be the first female President.
But, who knows? Maybe Biden will remain healthy and competent for three and a half more years.
-Jut
I think they could have got it done with Tulsi (she could probably have beaten Trump without all the dirty tricks they had to employ to drag Biden’s dried-out husk across the finish line), but she’s too much of an independent personality, and the party apparatchiks were worried from the get-go that she might occasionally put loyalty to the country over loyalty to the party, something that cannot be tolerated.
Palumbo;
“But with every day that passes, the veneer of centrism that got him elected over rivals such as Sen. Bernie Sanders becomes more distant of a memory. Simply put, it sure seems like “moderate Joe” was a thin facade used to usher an ultra-progressive agenda in the backdoor….Biden’s centrist facade got him in the door, and now the liberal hordes are taking over his administration.”
Oh…. Is that what got him elected? And… Bernie Sanders is a centrist? Interesting.
So… This needs a reality check. Biden was nominated by the Democratic Party because they thought he was the candidate most likely to beat Trump. But there was a danger that the party was splitting their votes among a whole bunch of non-socialist candidates, and while the party overall wasn’t sure who their candidate should be the vast majority actually wasn’t sold on socialism, and more importantly: They couldn’t beat Trump with socialism, because that’s still a minority position in America. But because of those split votes Bernie was in front of Biden in the polls for a week. In response to that; Warren, Klobuchar, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Steyer dropped out days before Super Tuesday to try to Block Bernie from getting those sweet, sweet DNC delegates.
This election, from start to finish, wasn’t an election *for* anything, It was “I’m not Trump.” Because Biden’s policy portfolio was basically, “You know me, I’ve been in congress 1/5 of congress’ existence. I’m Joe, that guy that did all those photoshoots with Obama. I’m kind, I got a heck of a smile, I’m harmless. I’m definitely not that orange guy over there, and that’s what you were really worried about, wasn’t it?
And so now, having run a campaign that was basically “Anyone but Trump”, and getting elected on that platform, I don’t know what the electorate gets to complain about: Trump certainly wouldn’t have done much of what Joe did in his first 100 days…. Except for the parts of Trump’s plan that Biden continued on while pretending that his team came up with them.
That doesn’t mean that this is politically savvy for Democrats. Having been elected on an “I’m not Trump” platform is a double edged sword because depending on how you want to look at it, you either have the mandate to do everything, or to do nothing. I think it’s reasonable for the administration to think that they have *some* kind of mandate, because if nothing else, the voters signaled that they want a lot of Trump’s policies undone.
The limiting principle is what the voters will put up with, and this is crystal-ball territory: There are a whole lot of people, hundreds of thousands, that voted Biden and not a single other name on the ballot, there are hundreds of thousands more that voted Biden, and straight-line Republicans downballot. Those voters, along with centrists, progressives, and liberals represent a spectrum of voters, and that spectrum is exceptionally broad in what they will and will not support, and what their personal “red lines” are. There are going to be Biden voters that have never supported a Democrat before, and never will again, there are people who just wanted Trump gone, there are people who wanted a return to normalcy and Joe Biden is not governing normally (this court packing example is probably prime), there are people who wanted serious progressive outcomes, and let’s be real, Joe isn’t exactly on the wagon, at least not as squarely as they were hoping for. The reality is that nomatter what Joe does, he’s going to piss off some of his base, and that doesn’t bode well for the party long-term. I think 2022’s midterms are going to be very interesting.
Y’know… In a second reading… Polumbo was obviously making the case that Joe beat Bernie because Joe was making more centrist signals than Bernie, not that Joe out-centristed Bernie. I misread it, and I agree… It basically lines up exactly with what I wrote in the paragraph that said “This needs a reality check”.
Right up until you consider that while Joe might have had a platform, I don’t think anyone who voted for him could have recited the exact policies they liked, or which ones they were holding their nose on. I still think that general-election viability was 80% of Joe’s charm, the other 15% and 5% being nostalgia and policy, respectively.
How does the quoted section suggest that Bernie is a centrist? “The veneer of centrism that got him elected over rivals such as Sen. Bernie Sanders” implies the opposite, no?
Yeah, exactly. I’m not sure how I read it the first time around, but I somehow came away with the impression that the author thought Bernie and Joe were trying to out-centrist each other.
“I don’t know what the electorate gets to complain about”—but obviously it was NOT “anyone but Trump”. Bernie, Warren, Kamala, Buttigieg—they would have lost. Biden almost lost. It was anyone but Trump who isn’t irresponsible and a demagogue. They can’t complain TOO much, because there were plenty of equivalents of the rattling armor, but they were still conned.
I… don’t know. Right before everyone dropped out, directly behind Joe and Bernie were Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg, and Pete Buttigieg. When they dropped out, their voters, representing around 35% of the DNC primary support, moved almost exactly 1:1 to Biden. Those Voters, more than half of Biden’s ending primary support, obviously didn’t mind supporting demagogues, because they supported their demagogues right up until they suspended their campaigns. By early March, Biden’s support was bottoming out around 20%, following the great suspension, he was around 55%, Bernie was a flat 35% and Undecided was at 10%.
“I think it’s reasonable for the administration to think that they have *some* kind of mandate, because if nothing else, the voters signaled that they want a lot of Trump’s policies undone.”
HT
I would bet it would be a challenge for most Americans who voted for Biden to articulate which of Trump’s policies they wanted undone. The 2020 election was like the vote for the president of the high school student council. Most people voted for the popular guy.
Even if they could identify Trump’s policy and had an some understanding of them they would be hard pressed to explain the costs and benefits that will accrue to Americans by undoing said policies. I can’t put a number on it but I would bet that a very large amount of the electorate is woefully ignorant of the costs and benefits of various policy choices and also choose to remain ignorant. That is not a partisan statement.
That would be a safe bet. There’s more than one of those “social experiment” videos on YouTube where they interviewed college students and other young adults, asking those who voiced disapproval of Trump, “which of his policies do you dislike?’, and getting nothing but stuttering and stammering in response. Same thing on Facebook:” which of his policies don’t you like”, and “can you name any good ones?” (knowing, of course, that he did plenty which the left would have approved of).
You aren’t wrong…. But if the electorate voted for someone who’s entire platform was: “I’m going to push legislation that makes everyone hop on one knee” then that administration has the mandate to legislate mandatory hopping. That very few people would comply even if the law were passed, which it wouldn’t be, and even if it was, it would be overturned as incredibly unconstitutional…. But they’d have the mandate to try.
“KIDS IN CAGES!!”
Everything else would be what they hear on CNN.
Yes, it is apparent that what the Democrats objected to was the small number of children Trump was putting in each of those cages. Now we see how many you can ACTUALLY fit in those cages. We also get to see that children can be forced to sleep in the dirt under overpasses. This seems to please Democrats much more. If this isn’t what they wanted, would the news media complain about the situation?