If The Plan Is Not To Be President In 2024, Then Joe Biden Is Doing A Great Job

President Joe Biden departs from 10 Downing Street following a meeting with Britain Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on July 10 in London, but he really needs to show the American people what he’s done to improve the U.S. if he wants to win reelection in 2024.

“It’s fine.”

Back in 2016, after the reality-smashing election of Donald Trump, America officially entered its “house on fire” GIF stage, and while the presidents have changed, the potential of everything turning to ash has not.

If Trump was the arsonist, setting all ablaze, then President Joe Biden should have been the firefighter. Instead, he has become the meme — the cartoon character who sits, engulfed in flames, seemingly blissfully in denial that the ceiling is about to cave in on him. 

This isn’t so much about Biden being an octogenarian. Well, it kind of is, but it’s not like Trump is any kind of spring chicken either. So our options in 2024 will likely still be one old white man with one foot in the grave versus another old white man with one foot in the grave and the other foot squarely in federal court, with a potential prison sentence looming over his head. 

Such great choices.

My concern is more about whether Biden has the ability to give this his all, whatever “all” there is that may be left. With nothing assured and a solid 33% of America convinced Trump is being persecuted for … um … *checks notes* … fomenting a coup, Biden is going to have to do something drastic to ensure a second term. He’s going to have to re-find Osama bin Laden, or perhaps collect all the money given to Ukraine and apply it to end student loan debt. Maybe his administration could repair the ozone layer or solve “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace” but unless he gets a signature game-changing, earth-shattering win, I don’t think not being Trump will be enough to ensure him another four years in office. 

So far, and it’s only July, the Supreme Court — which has turned out to be the real domestic threat to America’s freedoms — is doing its best to set the clock back to colored lunch counters and whites-only water fountains. The highest court in the land has effectively ended affirmative action, a women’s right to choose, and student loan relief, while creating a scenario where the LGBTQ+ community could face “no shirts, no shoes, no gays” signs in storefronts. And all of this started during the hellfire that was the Trump administration, or what I like to call the moment that the flux capacitor stopped working and we got stuck in a weird version of America that was nonsensical and unfamiliar. It was this Trump moment that solidified it:

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President Donald Trump speaks alongside fast food purchased for a ceremony honoring the 2018 College Football Playoff National Champion Clemson Tigers at the White House on Jan. 14, 2019.

During his four years in office, Trump nominated three Supreme Court justices — Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch — and those seeds have borne fruit. Despite playing the “settled law” semantics mumbo-jumbo game during their confirmation hearings, all three of Trump’s nominees voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. All three sided against Biden’s student loan relief plan and all three — yep, you guessed it — voted to end affirmative action in education. They even issued a very real judgment that allowed a fake web designer not to make a wedding website for a same-sex couple that never asked her to.  

And the Biden administration has done nothing. Well, that isn’t technically true. The Biden administration still believes there is an undecided voter who can be swayed by civility. It still believes there is a line drawn in the sand and has yet to recognize that line is set in stone. You are either for the betterment of the people, or you’re not. There is no middle ground.If Biden is America’s dad, why hasn’t he gone to school to speak with the principal? Why hasn’t he set up meetings with counselors to get America back to reading on grade level? Why hasn’t he knocked on the Supreme Court’s door and asked to speak to their parents?! At this point, and I hate to admit this out loud, Republicans (or the House of Hatred, Misogyny and Racism, as they would be called on “Game of Thrones”) are not just winning, they’re dominating. 

Not only have Republicans changed the rules, they have tipped the scale so far in their favor that it’s starting to look impossible for Democrats to right the ship. 

At some point, Biden has to realize he’s playing against spoiled children who keep moving the goal post when they are losing. Yet, for some reason, he won’t stoop to their level, which has actually become the floor. Why hasn’t he stacked the Supreme Court like a Jenga tower? Each day there is anotherreportabout a newly revealed relationship between a Supreme Court justice and a billionaire, which at the very least has ruined the impartiality that is essential to the court being, in many cases, the final word on the law. But Biden will only admit the court has made some “terrible decisions” — and then do nothing to try to make that right.

“That is something that the president does not agree with,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters when asked about expanding the court. “That is not something that he wants to do.”

Which leads me to another point: The president is using his press secretary as a shield because the president doesn’t do much talking to the press these days. He will recite a prepared speech, but when it comes to allowing the press to question his decision-making, well, I will let this headline from an April story in The New York Times explain it: “Biden Has Held the Fewest News Conferences Since Reagan. Any Questions?”

The Times notes that the White House claimed Biden had held “400 question-and-answer sessions with reporters since he took office” at that point, but his administration failed to note that most of those consisted of Biden walking somewhere and the press yelling over a gaggle of reporters trying to get in a question and Biden answering with a simple “yes” or “no.”

Like the time on Jan. 2 when Biden returned from his vacation in the Virgin Islands and was asked “whether the United States was discussing joint nuclear exercises with South Korea at the time.” He answered “no,” the Times notes. That’s it.

The job of the captain is not only to guide the ship but also to assure those aboard that he has everything under control. Remember when Howard Dean let out a grand ole wrestling yell during his run for the White House in 2004 and it destroyed his chances? Here, let me refresh your memory. It’s because the idea of instability in any form wouldn’t be tolerated. That yell from Dean was about as unpresidential as things had ever been, but that was clearly a different time.

If Biden is too difficult to handle on a hot mic, just remember that no one cares. We suffered through Trump’s countless gaffes and outrageous downright fictitious claims, so Biden needn’t worry. If the plan is to keep Biden out of sight and off the mic until who knows when, then that doesn’t sound like much of a plan at all. At this point, I would listen to a conspiracy theorist’s full rant on how the president is actually a hologram and not an actual person. It’s not that I’ve lost touch with reality, it’s that the White House isn’t giving me much to hold on to. 

And, get this: Instead of setting up the next Democratic leader to make a run for the White House (including his own vice president), Biden is going to run again.  Even though he finally fulfilled his dream of manning the fort, saving us from four more years of nonstop crisis and chaos, once is not enough for him. Not only could he be facing an emboldened Trump (assuming the former president is not in prison) but we don’t truthfully know what we’re getting with Biden. So far, his approval rating is trash. He’s struggled physically (see here, here, here and here) and he looked a bit lost during this TV interview exit. I don’t want to be ageist, but there may be a competency issue that needs to be addressed.

I’ll let a recent Brookings article about polling explain how Biden’s unique position as an octogenarian in office means that “67% of Americans, including 48% of Democrats, think that Biden is too old for another term,” according to findings from a Yahoo News/YouGov survey. Brookings continued: “By contrast, only 42% think that former President Donald Trump is too old to run again. In a recent NBC survey, 70% of the respondents said that Joe Biden should not run again, and about half of them said that Biden’s age was a ‘major factor.’”

I know I’m trudging up against liberal hallowed ground by mentioning this but the angel herself, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, stayed on the Supreme Court long after folks begged her to step down, and how did that play out?

“But the first calls for Ginsburg to retire for safe-replacement reasons came before the 2012 elections,” Politico notes. “Those early calls for retirement were met with Ginsburg’s very same, characteristically stubborn, refusal to heed people telling her to get out.”

Had RBG retired during the Obama administration, things might have played out a lot differently. Instead, she died while still on the court during Trump’s presidency, and all hell broke loose. 

Think about this. Lis Smith, a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, examined what a Biden reelection would look like and came up with this: He’s just not the other guy. Smith claimed the divisiveness of the Republican Party is working against the GOP candidates. No matter how you slice it, Biden is not Trump or wicked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and that’s a good thing. While this worked for Biden during the 2020 election — when America was facing Trump fatigue and a global pandemic — I don’t know if this “strategy” will work again.

Smith’s piece also noted the biggest problem with the last year of Biden’s presidency is that 62% of U.S. adults — including 66% of independents — believe Biden’s time in office has amounted to accomplishing “not very much” or “little or nothing,” a poll found.

And that’s the rub. Being president isn’t about not being the other guy. It’s about a résumé, a laundry list of accomplishments, and, yes — no matter how much we may hate this part — there is a showmanship and celebrity quality that helps sell tickets to the proverbial show. And Biden is a leading man who doesn’t really have a speaking part. He’s a leader who, if he has a presidential résumé, isn’t sharing it.

If the Biden administration has done something positive to change the ongoing rapids that are the Republican rollback of civility, then it hasn’t been loud enough about it. As for Trump, just think about this worst-case scenario: Let’s say that somehow the man who’s been screaming for years that he’s been unfairly targeted by an administration, or a secret governmental agency, or some band of unruly banditos that doesn’t want to see him win somehow weasels his way out of 37 counts related to his handling of classified documents to scamper to freedom, and he becomes unbeatable. It’s the perfect villain origin story, a Dickensian comeuppance that Trump will ride right back into the White House, and there will be nothing a feeble Biden and friends can do to stop him.