Is Biden Morphing into Trump?

One of the ironies of our current political situation is that many voters pulled the lever for Joe Biden for no other reason than they found Mr. Trump's personality to be insufferable, but as evidenced in last week's Georgia speech Mr. Biden seems to be very much like the man he and his supporters abhorred.

Both Peggy Noonan and Kimberley Strassel make this point well in two excellent columns at the Wall Street Journal (paywall).

In this post I'll quote from Ms. Strassel's column. She writes:

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Joe Biden is an admirer of his immediate predecessor. The president’s Georgia speech was as close as they come to a Donald Trump special.

Mr. Trump went to Georgia just over a year ago to rally voters for the Senate runoff elections. In a rant of a speech, he made false claims about the electoral system, accused Democrats of undemocratic aims, and attacked the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Mr. Biden this week went to Atlanta to rally support for two federal voting bills. In a rant of a speech, he made false claims about the electoral system, accused Republicans of undemocratic aims, and pre-emptively attacked the legitimacy of the 2022 election. Now who’s the wrecking ball?

When Trump made specious claims some of the media, as well as some of my acquaintances, were outraged by his mendacity, citing fact-checks, tut-tutting and in general castigating Mr. Trump for his dishonesty.

Well, the dishonesty needle on our political lie-detector is hovering in the red since Mr. Biden's speech, but I've heard few complaints from those who thought Mr. Trump's lack of integrity disqualified him to be president:

Mr. Biden ... baldly claimed Georgia Republicans enacted an election law designed purely to put up “obstacles” to voting. He said the law made it “harder for you to vote by mail” and limited “the number of drop boxes and the hours you can use them.”

These changes, he asserted, were designed to create “longer lines at the polls,” causing hungry voters to give up. He promised the state GOP would “subvert” future elections with a provision allowing it willy-nilly to “remove local election officials” it doesn’t like.

The law overall, he claimed, enables Republicans to get “the result they want—no matter what the voters have said, no matter what the count.”

Each of these claims, Ms. Strassel notes, is false:

The Georgia law leaves in place no-excuse absentee voting—and actually makes it stronger, by getting rid of signature matching. It expands weekend early voting and sets minimum Election Day voting hours. It enshrines in law the use of absentee-ballot drop boxes—which didn’t exist in Georgia before their temporary pandemic use.

Yes, the state Legislature can remove officials, but only after proving “malfeasance” or “gross negligence” over at least two elections. And Georgia’s broader electoral safeguards remain in place—the exact checks and balances in place when Mr. Biden carried the state last year. The president’s claims are straight-up fiction.

Mr. Trump was roundly criticized for casting doubt on the integrity of our election process, and Mr. Biden has followed his predecessor's example:

Mr. Biden ... bluntly told his followers that if his bills failed, “your vote won’t matter,” because Republicans will simply “disenfranchise” you. Just as Mr. Trump in Georgia accused “left-wing, socialist, communist Marxists” of “stealing” an election so as to impose “unchecked, unrestrained, absolute power” over Americans, Mr. Biden branded Republicans segregationists, traitors, and domestic “enemies” while predicting national collapse if he doesn’t get his way.

The coming vote on his federal election takeover would mark no less than a “turning point in this nation’s history,” the choice between “democracy” or “autocracy,” and whether the GOP obtained the “kind of power you see in totalitarian states.”

A lot of Biden voters who are paying attention are learning that what they actually voted for was a man who actually shares many of Mr. Trump's personal flaws without sharing any of Mr. Trump's policy virtues.

Ms. Strassel concludes her column on Mr. Biden's Trumpian rhetoric in Georgia with this observation:

Mr. Biden ran on a promise to lower the temperature, and what a joke that has been. It turns out Democrats and the media have no real problem after all with a hyperbolic, name-calling, factually challenged president.

Just so long as that president is their guy.