Please, Mr. President, Do the Right Thing
Here are three true things about President Biden: He has done an excellent job as president. He has been ludicrously mistreated — his every verbal or physical stumble dissected and analyzed to a degree far beyond any scrutiny applied to the incoherent torrent of lies and vileness routinely issuing from Donald Trump. And he should step aside as his party’s nominee for president, probably in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Anyone who has been following American politics and policy has to be aware just how remarkable Biden’s achievements have been. For decades, America seemed incapable of acting to secure its future. But Biden, despite having only a razor-thin legislative majority, enacted major investments in infrastructure, advanced technology and green energy.
He did all this while presiding over the best economic performance in the wealthy world. Yes, there was a burst of inflation as the world economy recovered from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic — but that happened almost everywhere, while growth in America, as the International Monetary Fund puts it, has been “remarkable vis-à-vis its peers,” and inflation has rapidly declined without a recession. Harsh attacks on Biden’s economic policies now look foolish.
The extent to which he has been denied credit for these achievements boggles the mind. Almost as many voters give credit for infrastructure to Trump — whose repeated promises to come up with a plan became a running joke — as to Biden, who got the job done. Everybody remembers when gas prices (over which presidents have little influence) hit $5 a gallon; far fewer took note that we just saw the lowest July 4 prices at the pump in three years.
At the same time, many Americans probably don’t have a full sense of just how bizarre and menacing Trump comes across these days. You have to watch clips from his rallies to appreciate just how disjointed and off-the-wall his speeches have become — did you hear his rant about electric boats and sharks? Until the actress Taraji P. Henson made a point of talking about the deeply un-American Project 2025 when she hosted the 2024 BET Awards, my guess is that few people knew about the project, whose leader promises a “second American Revolution,” which will remain bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Trump has recently tried to disassociate himself from the project, claiming that, somehow, he knows “nothing” about a plan devised by people very close to his campaign before declaring that he disagrees with “some of the things they’re saying” — a neat trick, given that he knows nothing about it — then wishing the plan’s authors luck anyway.
