Trump vs. Biden: A Rundown By Victor Davis Hanson ******
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/trump-vs-biden-a-rundown/
Foreign policy, domestic policy, character, transparency.
Biden so far has issued no substantive critique of Trump’s foreign policy other than banalities that Trump’s comportment and unpredictability have offended allies and tarnished America’s reputation.
But who exactly, according to Biden, is offended?
China? Russia? Iran? Turkey? And all those states that, given their records, should be offended?
Or are the aggrieved Arab World, Israel, Brazil, Poland, and India, angry at Trump’s outreach to them all?
Most likely, Biden believes that German-controlled Western Europe rightly loathes Trump.
It certainly may. But Europe tends to be fond of charismatic would-be-intellectual presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who wax eloquently about cooperation rather than upping Western defenses in the manner of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
But, more specifically, where exactly would Biden fault Trump’s record abroad?
Would Biden seek a reset or detente with China? Would he stop efforts to force China to adhere to international trading accords or make China come clean about its role in the origins and spread of COVID-19?
More specifically, might Biden fault Trump for selling lethal weapons to Ukraine when previously he apparently thought that move was too provocative? Would Biden have forgone killing Qasem Soleimani and Abu Baghdadi, given his own prior advice to not go after Osama bin Laden?
What exactly bothers Biden about current foreign policy? Restoring close relations with Israel after the Obama-administration ostracism?
Would Biden move the U.S. embassy back to Tel Aviv, restore American multimillion-dollar aid to the Palestinians, accept Bashar al-Assad’s claim to the Golan Heights, or caution moderate Gulf states not to ally with Israel?
Biden might well drop sanctions against Iran and reenter the Iran deal. But would he really think that outreach would prevent an Iranian bomb? Would a renewal of Obama-administration cash transfers not again empower Hezbollah?
Would Biden just accept that NATO members will never meet their financial obligations?
Or would he return to Obama’s tactic — petulance and empty chiding of the alliance? Would Biden drop the Trump sanctions on Russia or quit jawboning against the Russian-German gas deal?
Perhaps he abhors the Trump administration’s demolition of Russian mercenaries in Syria? Would he beef up an American 19-year presence in Afghanistan, or insert ground troops in the Middle East? Perhaps he would end fossil-fuel use, but wouldn’t that soon end U.S. independence from Middle East pressures?
How exactly would Biden reassure China’s neighbors — including Australia, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea — that his administration would be far more likely to aid them if China were to bully them or worse? Or more specifically, under whose watch did China militarily fortify the Spratly Islands? When exactly did North Korea develop intercontinental ballistic nuclear warheads?
Would Biden reopen America’s southern border and allow foreign nationals their old accustomed free access to enter the U.S. illegally? Would he perhaps stop the wall’s construction or even dynamite its soon to be completed 400 miles? Would he ask the Mexican president to withdraw the Mexican border troops that have radically curtailed illegal crossings? How many illegal aliens would be given blanket amnesty? Would he reinstate NAFTA and rid himself of the Trump substitute?
The point is that, for all of Biden’s chronic criticism of Trump’s dramatic recalibrations with China, NATO, Mexico, and the entire Middle East, he has not offered a substantial, concrete plan of correction — other than his boilerplate condemnation of Trump’s temperament.
Nor can Biden cite many past examples of his own strategic wisdom. When he left the vice presidency, Iran was funneling U.S.-transferred cash to Hezbollah and on a trajectory to get a bomb. Israel was isolated. The Arab states were confused about the idiotic American idea of an Iranian Shiite crescent counterweight. Russian-reset appeasement had gone full circle to paranoia about a Russian under every American bed. “Managing decline” was evidently envisioned as enriching China at America’s expense, in hopes that limitless lucre would coax Beijing to democratize its lethal Communist Party institutions.
Domestic Policy
Biden has demagogued about fossil fuels, adapting his rhetoric to either the primary or general election — or to his perceived status in the polls. He seems unaware that fracking has freed the U.S. from its half century of Middle East involvement, oil embargoes, and blackmail; has lowered consumer heating and gas bills; and has helped boom the U.S. economy in areas where it was weakest.
Biden might have deplored Trump’s deficits and called for a balanced budget. But so far, his proposed higher taxes are not part of any Biden deficit-reduction plan; indeed, higher taxes would likely fund crackpot trillion-dollar new green agendas, Bernie’s socialist medical plans, and “free” health care for illegal aliens.
Biden claims that he would temper Trump’s insensitivities. But he has always been suspect on women’s and racial issues. He has a disturbing and decades-long habit of generally forcing himself uninvited into the private space of females. He has been accused of sexual assault and harassment but oddly predicated his denial on the degree to which the media accused the accuser on his behalf.
When Biden speaks of race, it is usually mangled and sounds racist: “predators,” “you ain’t black,” “put y’all in chains,” the Corn Pop fantasies, labeling Obama the first “articulate” and “clean” black presidential candidate, asking a black journalist whether he was a “junkie” or coke head, the Indian doughnut-store stereotyping, and on and on, all while praising his prior segregationist mentors in the Senate. The point is that these realities do not support the idea that good ol’ Joe from Scranton is a man of superior morality.
Does anyone think that a Biden administration — through greater taxation, regulation, and subsidies for green energy — would lower unemployment for minority job seekers, to late 2019 levels? Given Biden’s Faustian bargain to get nominated, has he embraced — or now renounced, or both, or neither — his own party’s primary creed of a wealth tax, reparations, Medicare for all, blanket amnesties, far higher income taxes, an end to fossil fuels, and protections for late-term abortions?
Comportment
One argument is that even if Trump’s economic and foreign-policy record is substantial, it is vitiated by his conduct and behavior. The subtext is that Biden would not just unite us but restore integrity to the White House. Yet there is little in Biden’s career to suggest any such sobriety.
He has lied many times in the past about his life, sometimes slanderously and cruelly. He mythologized his educational career, from the hoaxes about winning three scholarships, about his stellar political-science undergraduate work, about his top-of-his-class law-school achievements. Again, all untruths.
He dropped out of the 1988 race not just for plagiarizing a speech from Neal Kinnock, the hard- left British Labour candidate, but because he had fabricated his own family ancestry to fit the details of his borrowed story, not entirely out of character given his past plagiarizing in law school.
His most regrettable fabrication was the smear that the truck driver who tragically collided with his first wife was inebriated, after a “liquid lunch,” and thus caused her death and that of his one-year-old daughter. Investigations found that the driver was not drinking, had the right-of-way during the terrible accident, and had done his best to swerve to avoid the Biden family, whose vehicle “drove into the path” of the tractor-trailer. Yet for years Joe Biden smeared the truck driver as a drunk and a veritable murderer and never publicly cleared the man’s name, despite pleas from the family.
He has honed bullying of questioners on the stump, calling them “liars” and “fat” and stranger things still (“lying dog-faced pony soldier”). Biden would be a 78-year-old president in his first president year. But whereas 74-year-old Trump acts 60, Biden moves, reasons, and talks as if he is 85.
Does a candidate who confines himself to a basement and puts a lid on his day at 10 a.m. really plan to work 16-hour presidential days? Does a candidate who uses scripts, prompts, and notes to do his telecommunicating really intend to speak five to six times a day, seven days a week, while avoiding the mental lapses, gaffes, and blank-outs that embarrass Biden when he ventures out from his hibernation?
Such questions matter, not just because the Left in the past has expressed ageist concern over the cognitive abilities of Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Donald Trump, but because it is widely believed that the AOC-Bernie Sanders–Elizabeth Warren new majority of the Democratic Party sees Biden as a vessel to transport an otherwise unpopular agenda over the November 3 finish line. And, if Biden wins, the vessel will have served its purpose and be cast aside, as the Left plows forward with its not-moderate agenda.
Vetting
Trump has been the most audited, scrutinized, examined, and vilified president in modern memory. From his first days in office, when his private phone calls to foreign leaders were illegally leaked, to the impeachment caper that ended this year, he has been demonized nonstop by the media.
Celebrities compete to come up with the best ways of shooting, stabbing, decapitating, incinerating, punching, and smashing him. Pollsters had rigged their surveys to assure in 2016 that he would not only lose but lose in a landslide. Later, when he was president, we were assured that he was among the least popular leaders in history — even as his rally crowds grew and his media critics destroyed their own careers.
It is hard to imagine any other president surviving the 25th Amendment hoax, the floated psychodramas of the Logan Act and the emoluments clause, the three-year-long Russian-collusion myth, the partisan, vindicative, and utterly failed Mueller witch hunt, the “whistleblower”-inspired impeachment — only to be more recently smeared as responsible for all the COVID-19 deaths in the land, an economy destroyer, and the architect of riot and arson.
Yet throughout it all, Trump seemed to grow stronger with each slander. In contrast, Trump enemies such as Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden enjoy toadyish coverage and yet humiliate their media minions if the latter dare inquire about the fate of stimulus legislation or if they ask Biden about his family’s grifting operations.
Joe Biden apparently cannot in a minute or two, just state the following:
“Here’s the deal.”
1) “That is not Hunter’s laptop.”
2) “Those alleged emails are all fabrications.”
3) “The Biden family has had no relations with a Devon Archer, Tony Bobulinski, or Bevan Cooney.”
4) “I stand by my earlier unqualified declaration that I have never discussed anything with Hunter about his business dealings. I’ve not met with foreign lobbyists, business people, or politicos as part of Biden family introductions. Emails to the contrary are inventions.”
5) “Hunter never wrote that I demanded 10 to 50 percent fees for the use of my name to enrich family members. Those accusations are entirely false.”
Had Biden just said that and then offered proof of forgery, fabrication, and Russian disinformation, the current scandal would vanish, if not boomerang on his accusers. Hunter Biden, after all, could have filed a lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani for character defamation and libel.
If Trump’s first four years were really failures, if Biden’s remedies for alleged Trump shortcomings were detailed and convincing, and if Biden’s past history and recent intrigues were proof of moral superiority over Trump, then there might be a case for his election.
But in truth, whereas the raw Trump lost lots of money to enter politics, the glad-hander Biden went into politics to make lots of money.
When Trump promised to do something, he either kept his promise or fought with the media and the Left to at least try.
When Biden has promised something, he either never delivered or expected some sort of political or material benefit for keeping his word.
Whereas we know nearly all, bad and good, that there is to know about Trump, the newcomer to politics, we are discovering after 47 years that we know very little about the lifelong insider Biden.
In the end, the supposedly illiberal and biased Trump has done more in four years for minorities and the muscular classes than the self-proclaimed liberal Biden has even attempted in five decades. In that context, Trump deserves another four years, and Biden should do what he does best and return to his lucrative retirement and family business.
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