There have been many highly irritating features of Joe Biden’s hapless presidency, but chief among them, undoubtedly, has been his apologists’ deep-seated need to turn the man into something that he is manifestly not.
The nature of partisan politics guarantees that flawed political candidates will be transmuted by their champions into saintly men of destiny. But the arrival of Donald Trump has pushed that tendency beyond its limits. Just as Trump’s many serious flaws have been exaggerated into cliché — Trump is not Hitler, and does not come close to being so — so his opponents’ virtues have been extrapolated into heaven. To the honest eye, Joe Biden was a midwit career politician from Delaware who had the chance to appear normal enough to unseat Trump from office. To the authors of our roiling morality play, he was Earth’s Last Honest Man. After he won the White House, this second characterization was foisted upon us with abandon.
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