Biden the Liar

H ow nice it must be to be President Joe Biden, the man without blemish, transgression, or foible. His has been quite the hero’s journey. Having spent a lifetime popping up at every great juncture in modern history, like some recherché Forrest Gump, he took the country back for the Good Team in the winter of 2020 and he’s been racking up wins ever since.

It is rare that one can import the phrase “happily ever after” from its usual home in children’s fantasy, but here, it seems apposite. Look around this great land, from the purple mountain majesties to the fruited plain, and understand: Biden did that. Donald Trump branded his steaks, his hotels, and his universities; Joe Biden has left his imprimatur on any piece of news that could plausibly be spun in his favor. He orchestrates a $2 trillion stimulus, despite the dire warnings about impending inflation? That’s Bidenomics! That inflation comes, but his acolytes insist it’ll be transitory? That’s Bidenomics! That inflation turns out not to be transitory, after all? That’s also Bidenomics — without which things would have been much, much worse. Inflation is slowing, but still high? Bidenomics, Bidenomics, Bidenomics! Somehow, at the grand age of 81, Biden has invented the first economic model with a wholly unspoiled record. If you like it, it’s Bidenomics. If you don’t, Biden agrees — and, would you believe it, that’s Bidenomics, too.

For Biden, the mirrors move as required. He vanquished Covid-19, which had brought the country to its knees; and, at the same time, he created 13.5 million jobs, not one of which has anything to do with the country’s having been on its knees. He’s the savior of our democracy, and is willing to use any tool to that end, whether it be the abolition of the filibuster, the delegitimization and subversion of the Supreme Court, the usurpation of Congress’s constitutionally mandated powers, or the development of novel legal models that just happen to benefit his son. He has brought America “back” and made the world safer, and has been rudely interrupted in this endeavor by a Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Hamas incursion into Israel, and his debacle of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, all of which were the late-blooming fruits of his predecessor’s perfidy. No wonder that, less than a year before he runs for reelection, Biden is able to offer up inspiring defenses of his record, such as that this year’s “Thanksgiving dinner is the fourth-cheapest ever as a percentage of average earnings.” Ronald Reagan, eat your heart out.

Readers who suspect that there might be a soupçon of sarcasm embedded within my assessment are, of course, correct. As Mark Antony might have had it: Biden is an honorable man. But while I am certainly not fooled by his schtick, I do continue to be surprised by the approach that Biden’s team has taken toward his presidency. Politics is about contrast, distinction, separation. The aim of any candidate worth his salt ought to be the digging of a gulf between himself and his opponents. And yet, when faced with the lying demagogic child that is Donald Trump, Joe Biden has elected to emulate his foil. That the United States seems destined to be punished by another contest between two unpopular, incompetent, clownishly dishonest geriatrics is bad enough. That the contest seems doomed to be stained by farcical and outlandish lying makes one want to curl up into a ball and hope that, by some miracle, the American public elects a water buffalo or sea cucumber or catalytic convertor as its commander in chief instead. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once complained that “we know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.” If this could be squished onto a billboard, it’d make a solid slogan for next year’s stew.

For those who continue to insist that Biden’s habitual lying is the unfortunate byproduct of his ineloquence when speaking extemporaneously — or, perhaps, of his having turned over his social-media accounts to an intern — I would recommend a strong dose of the the Washington Post, in which one can find ample proof that the ruse is being presented to Biden for his acquiescence. “Biden aides,” the paper reported last week, “recently pitched the president on a plan to sharply rebuke firms for not lowering prices despite record profits.” Naturally, “the president liked the idea and quickly approved it.” This, the Post went onto to observe, is a problem — but not, alas, for the reasons you might expect. “The effort is not without its risks,” the outlet adjudged, given that “Republicans and even some Democratic economists, for instance, largely dispute that corporate ‘greed’ is responsible for any economy-wide price hikes.”

This is the sort of euphemistic language that the press only sees fit to deploy when it is writing about its friends. In their political coverage, outlets such as the Post have a bad habit of using what Yes, Minister famously termed “irregular verbs.” Republicans have their lies “exposed”; Democrats have their claims “disputed.” Republicans make “mistakes” that have “consequences”; Democrats make “choices” on which others “pounce.” Republicans cause problems in the world; Democrats have the misfortune of temporally coinciding with those problems. The Post’s caveat is an all-timer. The “effort” (which means “falsehood”) is “not without its risks” (which means “is brazen”) because it’s a lie. Economists from both parties “largely dispute” the claim because it’s preposterous nonsense. Biden “liked the idea and quickly approved it” because he’s an unprincipled demagogue who spends the small amount of time in which he is capable of working contriving fresh ways of convincing voters that they should not trust what is in front of their eyes. One half-wonders why Biden’s lies are so pedestrian. Having decided to escape the truth, he might as well have spiced it up a little and blamed the persistence of high prices on a colony of evil, invisible inflation-elves who live in the cold-water pipes in America’s largest factories.

The subtext of Biden’s pitch in 2020 was that it was time for the honorable adults to return to power. As president, he has spectacularly failed to deliver on that promise. Honorable adults tell the truth. They represent themselves sincerely. They level with their peers, even when doing so is tough. They do not hear political consultants suggest that they ought to use the bully pulpit to deceive voters, and respond by consenting enthusiastically to the plan. In Washington, D.C., at present, the conventional wisdom is that the president’s most pressing challenge is to persuade the electorate that the economy is, in fact, salutary. I dissent strongly from this view. The president’s most pressing challenge is to resemble in even fleeting form the character he sold the country on three years ago. We already have one cartoon character running for the highest office in the land — and that one, I’m afraid to say, is a great deal more entertaining than the incumbent.