Dumping Mr. Biden

Many Republicans were willing to tolerate Mr. Trump's boorishness, at least until after January 6th, because his policies were putting the country back on the right track.

He appointed constitutional conservatives to the courts, stemmed the tide of illegal immigration, had the lowest minority unemployment in history, facilitated a rapprochement in the Middle East between Israel and its Arab neighbors, presided, until the pandemic, over a healthy economy, and once the pandemic struck implemented Operation Warp Speed to bring a vaccine to market in record time.

If, after the 2020 election, Mr. Trump had gone gently into temporary retirement and conducted himself with unwonted class he'd be a lock to regain the White House in 2024.

Alas, such was not in the man's character and so the question for Republicans after this November's midterm elections is whether they can produce a presidential candidate who will possess Donald Trump's virtues without his many manifest flaws.

The question for the Democrats, on the other hand, is how they can dump Joe Biden without winding up with Kamala Harris.

But why would they wish to dump Mr. Biden? Historian Victor Davis Hanson enumerates some of the reasons among which is Biden's chronic dishonesty:

Walking back Biden’s absurdities has become the nonstop, tiresome task of many on the Left. As they face a midterm disaster in November, many no longer see any compensating reasons not to drop Biden....

Unlike Trump’s art of the deal, exaggerations and distortions, Biden says things that are not simply untrue, but abjectly preposterous – such as the United States currently has a lower inflation rate than major European industrial powers.

In Biden’s world, there were no COVID-19 vaccinations until he took the oath of office. Russian President Vladimir Putin, or the oil companies, or the refiners, or Trump are responsible for the historic crippling gasoline price hikes he caused by canceling drilling and pipeline projects.

Biden claims his negative-growth, hyperinflating economy is not disastrous but strong.

He serially lies that he drove a semi-truck. He has not been to the Middle East 38 times. He never received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Nor was he a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The MAGA movement is not the “most extreme political organization in American history.”

In other words, Biden reveals the same fantasies and plagiarism that ended his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

His penchant for the whopper is troubling enough, but there's more. Mr. Biden has a history of making maladroit racial remarks that would outrage Democrats were they made by a Republican:

On matters of race and sexuality, Biden is the epitome of that for which the Left, supposedly, has zero tolerance. Biden was infamous for damning with praise candidate Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” African American presidential candidate.

In a fake patois, Biden once warned an audience of black professionals that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden derided a black journalist as a “junkie” and lambasted a radio host and his audience with the claim “you ain’t black” if they didn’t support his candidacy.

Spinning racialist fables like Biden’s “Corn Pop” stories would brand any conservative politician as a racist. As president, Biden still uses the term “negro,” and he called an African American adviser “boy.”

Then there are his dubious sexual antics and alleged transgressions. When Trump was accused of having an affair with porn "actress" Stormy Daniels or was discovered on tape boasting about groping female admirers inappropriately, the uproar nearly cost him the presidency in 2016. Yet Biden has a history that's arguably even more sleazy than Trump's:

After the Justice Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the nation was lectured that “women must be believed.” But it was the Left who attacked former Biden aide Tara Reade who surfaced in 2016 to accuse then Senator Biden, her former boss, of sexually assaulting her.

Biden himself had a creepy history of invading the private space of young women – inappropriately kissing them, hugging and squeezing them, and smelling and blowing into their hair and ears.

Finally, Biden was forced to apologize – sort of – by claiming he belonged to an earlier generation when such aggression was simply normal behavior. It was not then or now.

The latest controversies whirl around the British tabloid Daily Mail’s publication of the diary of Biden’s own daughter.

From the Mail’s lurid reporting, Ashley Biden seems to suggest that she showered with her father at an age when “showers w/ my dad (probably [were] not appropriate).” And she seemed to connect Biden familial inappropriateness with her regret over being “hyper-sexualized (at) a young age.”

Add to all this Mr. Biden's terrible poll numbers, his failure to do much of anything that makes the country recognizably better, and the coming, if the GOP controls the House in 2024, congressional investigations into his and his son's questionable financial arrangements, and the Democrats will be in a very difficult and embarrassing spot over the next two years.

Their challenge will be to finesse dumping both Mr. Biden, whom few Democrats really want as their president for eight years, as well as Kamala Harris who's as embarrassing in her own way as Mr. Biden and whom they don't want to succeed him.

It'll be interesting to see how they do it.