Like a platoon of Japanese soldiers stuck on a remote Pacific island, still maintaining their fortifications decades after the end of World War II, the Biden Truthers are fighting on.
The 46th president left office a failure.
After campaigning on a unity message in 2020, Biden governed from the far left, ran the federal budget into the ground and concealed his deteriorating mental condition — until he was forced to abandon his spot at the top of the Democratic ticket after turning in the most disastrous debate performance in American history.
He’s now reviled across the political spectrum: by the right for his divisive politics, by the middle for his incompetence, and by the left for laying the groundwork for Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office.
Still, the team complicit in his self-destruction beats on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
“Lots of people have terrible debates, right?” suggested Mike Donilon, the chief strategist for Biden’s 2024 campaign, at a Harvard University post-mortem last month.
“Usually the party doesn’t lose its mind,” continued Donilon, who insisted that Biden was still well-positioned to win the election in the weeks following the debate debacle — and only lost “the campaign about the campaign,” not the trust of the voters.
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is Donilon’s echo.
“It was a firing squad and I had never seen anything like it,” Jean-Pierre complained last week.
“It was hurtful and sad to see that happening,” she said. “A firing squad around a person who I believe was a true patriot, a person who I believe did everything that he can for this country.”
“Instead of coming together to really be unified and trying to figure out, ‘How do we save our democracy? How do we fight back?’ that’s what I was seeing.”
Biden himself has repeatedly argued that he would have ultimately prevailed had he been allowed to see his campaign through.
The only way to paper over the consequences of your hubris? Still more hubris.
In a rare departure for the Democrats, Michael LaRosa, Jill Biden’s ex-press secretary, has taken a more honest, honorable tack.
“There was a lot of denial of the polling,” within the White House and the campaign, LaRosa admitted.”And I will use the term gaslighting because that’s what they were doing, the campaign, former colleagues.”
Bingo.
What Biden and his team did was selfish to the point of being unpatriotic.
Wielding the power of the executive branch is an awesome responsibility.
To kick, bite, scratch and claw to hold on to that power while knowing you’re not up to it is to prioritize your own fragile ego over the interests of the nation you swore an oath to.
To do all that, get called on your bluff, and then go on a victim lap denying the plain truth of what happened is downright undignified — and reflective of a deep, insuppressible disdain for the American people.
It speaks to the Democratic Party’s fatal flaw: its arrogance.
For the better part of the last half-century, progressives have had the cultural winds at their back.
Democratic operatives and officeholders alike have by and large danced through their professional lives while being told by their professors, Hollywood and the media that they are on the right side of history.
That they were doing something important and just — and for proof, all they needed were the evil, ignorant bigots they count as their eternal opponents.
But the times are a-changin’.
Republicans have made massive gains with young people and minorities in recent years, as Trump has put together an improbable new Republican coalition capable of winning over the long term.
And while he deserves credit for that accomplishment, the Democrats themselves are most responsible for this realignment.
Time and time again, they have set aside common sense, decency and the interests of the country in a ruthless pursuit of power.
They smeared innocent men — like Brett Kavanaugh and the students from Covington Catholic — as gang rapists and racists.
They forced American women to accept men into their most intimate spaces.
They foisted unscientific COVID restrictions on the public and gleefully punished dissenters.
They covered up the mental deficiencies of a president until they realized he was an anchor tied around their ankles.
And they did it all while proclaiming that they were not just the unambiguous Good Guys, but members of a scrappy, heroic resistance movement.
To move forward, Democrats must do away with the Biden legacy on policy and own up to their cover-up of his condition.
More important, though, they must finally shake off the sense of entitlement that made them think they could get away with it.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.