How Biden’s balderdash bests Trump’s tough talk

I’m truly bothered that tens of millions of Americans consider Joe Biden to be a “nice person” in contrast to Donald Trump, who is supposedly a loudmouth bully and the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.

Since I’m annoyed by Trump’s speaking style and name-calling, I am hardly a Trump zealot. But I doubt that Trump sounds more vituperative, dishonest, or malicious than Biden. Whether it’s a matter of hurling obscenities, accusing the opposition of being terrorists and wanting to put black people “back in chains,” or assuring us that “Trump hates Latinos,” Biden seems to be a nasty piece of work.

Biden’s admirers are not dismissing his mendacity or his nasty outbursts. They just don’t know about them.

More interesting, however, is why Biden’s foul-mouthed ragging gets a pass with so many people. And let’s not underestimate the widespread sympathy for this politician, no matter how egregiously he screws up. According to a recent Gallup poll, Biden’s popularity among Americans is at 57% and has only fallen four points from its all-time high of 61%. Although Trump is viewed as less “inept,” his likability is no higher than 37%.

Even more surprising, the Gallup poll shows that Biden beats Trump by six points on the question of “caring about people like you.” Given our overrun borders, inflated economy, and Biden’s periodic denunciations of white people in general and Republican voters in particular, why would I think he cares about ordinary people? In what ways has he benefited anyone other than far-left wokesters and Green New Deal crony capitalists?

A credible explanation for this disparity in likability and empathy is that the legacy media has done a stupendous job in building Biden’s public image. It has accomplished this even while his presidency has gone south.

Biden’s entire career in politics has been parasitic and has allowed him to acquire tens of millions of dollars, through means fair and foul. He has been able to get away with this, at least partly by mechanically and ungrammatically endorsing his party’s stands, whatever they happen to be at any given moment.

Biden lies compulsively, and some of his whoppers have been mind-boggling. My own favorite falsehood is his attack on Justice Samuel Alito, who was then being grilled by the Senate before being confirmed to the Supreme Court. Biden strongly considered filibustering Alito for, among other outrages, opposing racial and gender quotas. He reminded this nominee that both of them were Catholics and supposedly wouldn’t have been able to gain admission to prestigious law schools because of their religious associations.

In fact, Alito had graduated from Harvard Law School, while Joe barely made it into the law school of University of Syracuse and did so with help from well-connected family members. Despite Biden’s ridiculous bragging about his academic brilliance, according to a hardly hostile source, the New Republic, he was often at the point of flunking out of his law class.

Among the multitude of self-promoting lies that Biden almost mechanically repeats is one that he recently uttered for the umpteenth time, namely that he is the first in his family to have attended a university. Actually, both Biden’s father and grandfather graduated from college. But Joe’s narrative may have special meaning for him since he managed to steal it from British Labour Party politician Neil Kinnock.

Although this and Biden’s other persistent plagiarisms have been revealed in right-leaning news sources, the corporate press rarely bothers to bring them up. Why would the legacy media ever try to embarrass someone who, by his own telling, was arrested while looking for Nelson Mandela? Biden had supposedly gone to South Africa to pledge his support to Mandela in the AFC’s struggle against apartheid. One might expect no less from someone who had grown up with “close relations” to the Puerto Rican, black, Jewish, Greek, and Irish communities. (Did I miss any of these imaginary or vastly exaggerated connections?)

Sometimes when I talk to longtime friends, even the ones who are not well-disposed toward Biden politically, I hear about this father and husband grieving for dead family members, while heroically dealing with a “troubled son.” His participation in Hunter Biden’s illicit influence-peddling rarely comes up in these conversations, except to assure me that whatever Hunter and Joe were accused of doing has been blown out of proportion.

Media reports about Biden’s personal life often seem to have come from the staff of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) or from the ladies on “The View.” We learn here about Joe’s declining energy and gaffes but rarely about his shocking personal foibles. The interview with Joe and Dr. Jill in People magazine in 2021 stands out as the purest kitsch I’ve ever encountered. It was also fatefully read by many millions of Americans.

In an equally tasteless moment, TIME selected Joe and Kamala as joint “person of the year” for 2020 and showed this beaming duo on the magazine cover exulting in victory. If I were submerged in such hagiography, I too might be chirping about Joe’s niceness and his care for his fellow citizens. The Biden admirers I know are not dismissing his mendacity or his nasty outbursts. They just don’t know about either.