Joe Biden is president for a few more weeks. This is the calm before the storm, the eye of the hurricane, the waiting room before you go into an uncertain surgery that may kill you.
Joe has been a political presence for a long time in America. He is one of those moderate politicians from one of those tiny states in the Northeast where people live in painted wooden houses and shovel snow in the winter. He has that crooked smile. He used to ride the train to work, something everyone who can, should do. Doing so he could see the landscape and the backs of warehouses that the Amtrak always passes, no matter where you ride it. He could see the homeless in their crumpled heaps of cloth and trash, living another hopeless day.
Biden ended the first Trump nightmare with his welcome victory. We all worked hard for that. We went from bellicose to understated on that January day. The Capitol riot and the open corruption ended, and we thought America would never go back, that Biden would show everyone the goodness of moderation and normalcy again. It didn’t turn out that way.
From my perch on the side of a mountain out West, I watched Biden with satisfaction and disappointment. He did some good things, and he did some not so good things.
He was given the worst public health emergency of modern times, the pandemic, that Trump had mostly botched because of his ignorance and bad advice. Biden pulled the country together and the deaths tapered off. He was realistic. He understood science. But perhaps he went too far in stimulating the economy reeling from shutdowns and panic. Some say the stimulus set off inflation. Perhaps it did. But Biden believes in an active government with an open checkbook, and we can only speculate what would have happened if Trump had been reelected with the pandemic still aflame.
Biden was left with the war in Afghanistan, a mess that other presidents didn’t clean up. It was left from George Bush’s term. Remember George Bush Jr.? Biden pulled off a messy end to the war. I don’t think anyone thought it was done right. The republicans beat him up with that event in the 2024 campaign. We can only speculate what Trump would have done with that war. Probably something much worse.
And then there is Israel and Hamas. Old school Democrats (and many republicans) are fiercely loyal to Israel both because Israel needs to exist and because of domestic politics. But the October 7 attack opened a whole new world of Mideast politics that Biden seemed unable to contain. The October 7 attack was a horror show but many people wondered why the Israeli intelligence service, one of the best in the world, had completely missed Hamas’ preparations? They did and their population paid a big price. This failure should have sunk Benny Netanyahu politically, but he sheltered himself from domestic anger by starting a brutal war that continues to this day.
Netanyahu has killed 43,000 Palestinians. He bombs hospitals, he bombs UN facilities, he bombs apartment complexes with huge bombs that kill hundreds and ruin the infrastructure of a country. For example, suspected Hamas fighter was standing on the roof of a building earlier this month and rather than shooting the fighter, the Israeli military bombed the building, killing hundreds. This goes on and on and could for years.
Biden doesn’t flinch. He sends his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Jerusalem again and again to seek a cease fire and every time, Benny blows him off. Benny has shown Biden to be weak. Biden keeps sending bombs and the bombs kill civilians by the thousands. At home in the US, many people are extremely uneasy about the slaughter which is out of control. Benny has become a monster, a war criminal. Biden is helpless in the face of this horror.
The media says Arab Americans were angry at Biden for allowing Benny to go on a killing spree in Palestine and Lebanon. Millions of Americans were uneasy about Biden’s failure to impose effective constraints on the far right in Israel and force Arab states to reign in Hamas and Iran.
That was the bad in Biden. He did great work helping Ukraine fight off the agression of Vlad Putin, who has killed tens of thousands of people with his imperialistic goals. Half a million Russian young men have been killed and now Putin and Un are putting Korean men on the frontlines. Biden has led Europe in their fight against Putin. We can only speculate on what Donny Trump will do on the Ukraine front.
The good was his recognition that climate change is the most important issue of our time. He took major, historic steps to electrify the American automobile fleet. He paved the way for huge investments in wind and solar and new powerlines to carry renewable energy. He passed the CHIPS act, creating jobs and protecting our computer industry from China. His Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act were huge successes for rural America, fixing bridges and buildings and roads. But Biden didn’t toot his horn about these successes. Like Obama before him he didn’t make clear what he had done for our country. So, republicans took the money and the improvements and pretended they were responsible, even when they voted against the bills that produced the construction.
Biden did great things for public lands as well. He designated new national monuments, restored the two national monuments in Utah that Trump had illegally reduced. He ended vast amounts of oil drilling in Alaska, protected the Tongass National Forest from foreign loggers, and boosted funding for our national parks.
Yet even as he took these steps on the climate front, he oversaw record amounts of oil and gas drilling on public lands in the West. Naturally Trump says this was not enough and we must sacrifice the environment so people can drive oversized pickup trucks around America while they complain about gas prices. The oil industry has a death grip on the United States.
Finally, we must look at Biden’s historic failure to face his personal reality. By pretending he wasn’t well beyond retirement age, he ushered in a second Trump nightmare. What frail 81-year-old man in his right mind runs for reelection? Joe Biden. And he tarnished his historic record by hanging on to power too long. Just like Ruth Bader Ginsberg who held on too long and had her seat on the Supreme Court go to the far right, Biden hung on too long. History will remember him for that, his denial that he is elderly.
Ideally, Biden would have gathered top Democrats together at the beginning of his term and worked for 3 years to find the best candidate to run in 2024. But Democrats deferred to him as he clung to power.
Now we have a disaster unfolding in Donny Trump. Trump too is senile and confused and deeply ignorant. He is surrounding himself with extremists who share his anger and hatred of government. He has a congress full of MAGA republicans who may or may not constrain him. They must get reelected. Donny can’t. We’ll see how this goes.
It is hard to be sunny with a professed climate denialist at the helm of the federal government. Trump’s ignorance on the climate topic is set in concrete and permanent. He has access to the top experts on any topic, yet he spouts nonsense and his crowds cheer. He demands everyone step in and join his stupidity. Humanity doesn’t have time for this garbage. But Americans voted for it, so here we go.
