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As Michael Kinsley defined it, a gaffe occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth.
Joe Biden passed the test when he explained why he was pushing a radical overhaul of the Supreme Court.
It’s because Donald Trump made him do it.
As Biden might say, “No joke, I’m serious!”
The cognitively challenged president has been shoved to the back of the bus after being driven out of the race by undemocratic Dems, which is perhaps why he admitted the truth.
Whatever the reason, Biden’s confession Monday at the LBJ Presidential Library perfectly captures the cause of the turmoil that has reshaped American public life in the last nine years.
Starting in 2015, Trump’s political rise set off a chain reaction of lunacy and hatred the likes of which we have not seen in modern times.
From politics to academia, from culture to media, and including even law enforcement and religion, the gatekeepers of the old order ripped away the guardrails they once treated as holy writ and that helped to keep the nation intact despite its differences.
A bogeyman is born
The gatekeepers-turned-destroyers cited Trump as the justification for giving themselves license to abolish limits on their own words and actions.
Claiming he would smash norms, they smashed norms.
And they haven’t stopped.
It’s as if they’ve adopted as a motto an infamous military line from the Vietnam War: We had to destroy the village to save it.
To the Trump haters, he is so uniquely bad and dangerous that any means necessary to stop him is acceptable.
Would-be assassin Thomas Crooks certainly got that message.
And so did the renegade media outlets that claimed Trump wasn’t actually hit with a bullet and that his ear bandage was all theater.
Once again, the tech companies did their underhanded part to distort public opinion.
Search engines at Google and Meta have been caught suppressing the facts and photos that don’t fit their politics.
Meta’s AI assistant went so far as to claim the attempt to murder Trump was “fictional,” according to The Post’s sensational Tuesday report.
Anybody who still doesn’t believe in Trump Derangement Syndrome and its destructive effects isn’t paying attention.
Consider the action of the Dem prosecutors who rewrote national history by using law enforcement and the courts to charge and try a former president.
It’s the stuff of banana republics, but they haven’t stopped even though he is now the opposition party’s presidential candidate.
Fearful he’ll win, they’re still trying to get one more trial in before the election.
Trump is no angel, but are there no limits to their jihad against him?
For my money, the gates to this particular hell were thrown open in the late summer of 2016 when The New York Times decided to abandon its legendary standards of fairness to make sure Trump didn’t win the White House.
The wheels started turning after the newspaper’s media writer, Jim Rutenberg, began a column with this question: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
All the bias fit to print
Under ethics guidelines of most major media, anyone with that bias would not be permitted to cover Trump.
But that’s not how the then-editor of the Times saw it.
As I have written, executive editor Dean Baquet said the Rutenberg column “nailed” his thinking and convinced him that the struggle for fairness was over.
“I think that Trump has ended that struggle,” Baquet claimed.
“I think we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it’s false.”
Baquet is too modest.
He, not Trump, ended the struggle over fairness.
He did it by letting every so-called reporter express an opinion.
Many of them openly called Trump a liar from that day forward.
Baquet is no longer the editor, but his decision shapes the Times we see today — every supposed news article drips with opinion.
From front to back, the Times is so opinionated that it can no longer be trusted as an unbiased source of news on anything.
It’s a reminder that once standards are eliminated, they’re not easy to restore.
Sadly, other outlets have followed the Times over the fairness cliff.
The widespread collapse of public trust in major media has been the inevitable result.
Nor is it a coincidence that the Obama-Biden administration also went down its own corrupt road in 2016 to block Trump.
Recall it used the CIA and FBI to spy on him and try to stop him from beating Hillary Clinton.
In 2020, the Biden campaign tapped its deep state contacts again to protect Joe by calling the disclosures on son Hunter’s laptop a Russian plant.
So now half the country doesn’t trust either of those essential institutions.
Nice work, Dems!
Yet the Trump haters haven’t backed off because their strategy works often enough.
Biden, for example, claimed in his Monday speech that he was forced to call for radical changes to the Supreme Court because the GOP has “weaponized” the confirmation process.
That would be hilarious if it weren’t backward.
What he really means is that the GOP under Trump had the votes to confirm three nominations.
See, when Republicans gain power, the rules have to change because Dems are always entitled to win.
Biden’s hypocrisy
If Biden were telling the whole story, he would admit that the confirmation requirements were first lowered under former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, when Biden was vice president.
Reid, working with the White House, did it to get more Dem nominees on the courts.
Republicans at the time warned Reid he would regret the power play.
Reid has since died, but his successors are escalating again by coming directly for the Supremes, proving they are still willing to tear down the nation’s most trusted institutions if they don’t get their way.
Thus Biden, after protesting that “I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers laid out in our Constitution,” claimed Monday that “Extremism is undermining the public confidence in the court’s decisions.”
Not surprisingly, that “extremism” amounts to Supreme Court rulings Democrats don’t like, including overturning Roe v. Wade and a more recent one on presidential immunity.
His remedy is to replace lifetime tenure with 18-year-term limits, a constitutional amendment to overrule the immunity finding and an enforceable code of conduct for the justices.
Biden’s plan is little more than a campaign device so Kamala Harris can run on something other than her awful record.
But the larger truth is that the plan is the latest example of Trump haters using him as an excuse to do the things they once said should never be done.
And managing to keep a straight face while accusing him of destroying American political life.