The Unmitigated Gall of the Biden Campaign

Joe Biden’s reelection effort latched onto a particular moment in last night’s Republican presidential primary debate — a point of internecine tension between the GOP field’s more prudential candidates and its reformers who see more political upsides in profligacy — in one of the most shameless ways imaginable.

“Where’s Joe Biden? He’s completely missing in action from leadership,” said Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “And you know who else is missing in action? Donald Trump is missing in action. He should be on this stage tonight. He owes it to you to defend his record where they added $7.8 trillion to the debt. That set the stage for the inflation we have now.”

To this, Biden’s social-media team had the nerve to indicate that the president actually agrees with DeSantis’s attacks on Donald Trump:

Compounding this display of breathtaking audacity, the Biden team turned this moment into an online campaign spot:

It is only marginally heartening that, somewhere deep down, the Biden White House understands that frugality is a virtue. This ad can be understood only as the tribute Biden’s unwavering featly to vice demands.

The Biden administration has added at least $4.8 trillion to the national credit card, and that’s only because he couldn’t convince his own party in Congress to spend much more. This month, the national debt topped $33 trillion for the first time in its history — the interest payments on which are becoming vastly more expensive with increasing interest rates, which was a necessary response to a deficit spending spree the Biden White House was warned would be inflationary. As Roll Call recently noted, trillion-dollar deficits are Biden’s “new normal.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, Biden is going to match Trump’s addition to the national debt in just three years, reaching a total of $7.1 trillion over his four years,” the dispatch read. “That would be $1.5 trillion more than Trump contributed during his term, which included the 2020 one-time COVID emergency spending.”

The Trump administration wasn’t exactly a fiscally conservative White House prior to the pandemic, but much of the Trump-era’s deficit spending was a direct response to the pandemic. In that year, the budget ballooned by 47 percent amid a bipartisan consensus that such spending was necessary to stabilize the economy amid an engineered recession brought on by the imposed cessation of economic activity. By contrast, the Biden White House has raided the Treasury and hemorrhaged taxpayer dollars in pursuit of wild-eyed social engineering and efforts to reward loyal Democratic constituencies.

The shear brazenness of the Biden reelection team’s efforts to commandeer a conservative critique of the Trump years is hard to overstate. Their cynicism is matched only by their opportunism.