Joe Biden’s ‘Iron Grip’ on His Party Republicans argued savagely about Trump’s deficiencies. Democrats treat Biden’s with omertà. Barton Swaim
From the moment Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, his critics on the left have bewailed the overwhelming support he receives from evangelical Christians. How could those who claim to esteem traditional moral values—monogamy chief among them—support a profane libertine like Mr. Trump? The implicit charge was that socially conservative Christians cared more about political ends than about moral values. But the charge was specious. Their political ends were perfectly consistent with the values they purported to hold, even if the agent through whom they sought to promote those values (Mr. Trump) didn’t exhibit them. And anyway I’m not sure what choice socially conservative religious voters had on Election Day in 2016. Were they supposed to vote for Hillary Clinton?
The idea that lust for power explains evangelical support for Mr. Trump is one form of a larger accusation leveled by liberals and progressives against Republicans in the Trump era. Every time a Republican praised the 45th president, it was an indication of the party’s “fealty” or “near-total fealty” or “total fealty” to the president. And every time a Republican candidate took Mr. Trump’s view on a subject, it was an instance of the president’s “grip” or “iron grip” or “death grip” on the GOP.
I gladly concede that many Republican candidates and officeholders aligned themselves in unseemly ways with Mr. Trump. Some sang his praises as president despite having scorned him as a candidate. Others took up his crotchets as their own—voter fraud, trade deficits—having never complained about those things before. And many—though far from all—remained silent about his erratic, frequently childish and vulgar personal behavior. Still, some form of “fealty” by Republicans to a sitting Republican president is unavoidable, and it was hardly surprising that the head of his party had a “grip” on it.
Whatever may be said about the GOP’s solicitous attitude to Mr. Trump during the years of his presidency, it compares favorably with the left’s omertà in the face of President Biden’s obvious mental infirmity, incompetence and what appears to be a history of self-enrichment.
Mr. Trump’s election occasioned some unlovely shifting of principles on the right, but it also precipitated fierce debate. Some Republicans refused to find fault with the new president for anything. Others made their peace with his election but remained critical when his conduct and decisions merited it. A few made it their mission to destroy him. Right-oriented policy organizations and conservative publications endured rancorous public schisms. Conservative religious leaders, including evangelical Christians, fell out with each other.
That is more than one can say for the Democratic Party and the mainstream left of the 2020s. The deficiencies of Mr. Trump are different from those of Mr. Biden, but the latter’s personal culpabilities and political liabilities are what any normal, uninvested person would call grave. Mr. Biden’s cringe-making decline is on display nearly every time he appears in public; examples are too many, and too painful, to describe. His diminished state might be funny in a novel or a movie, but in the real world it’s a continuing invitation to bad actors to engage in devilry and expect no consequence.
And yet with a tiny number of unremarkable exceptions, Democratic politicos say nothing.
The stupendously incompetent pullout from Afghanistan occurred early in Mr. Biden’s term, and the horrors it produced have destroyed any other presidency—a bomb killing 13 Marines; a retaliatory drone strike killing zero terrorists and 10 civilians, including seven children; a White House affecting unconcern for hundreds of Americans trapped inside the country; Afghan citizens pitifully clinging to a departing U.S. military plane, some of them falling to their deaths; former Afghan allies left at the mercies of the Taliban; billions of dollars worth of military equipment abandoned in the field; women and girls forced to drop out of school. Forgive the indecorousness, but it is undeniable that this calamity was a consequence of some combination of senility and incompetence. Yet the number of high-level Democrats who expressed more than vague “worry” and “concern” is somewhere between small and nonexistent.
You might have expected a credible Democrat, maybe a retired military officer, to challenge Mr. Biden in a primary. But no; the party rearranged its traditional primary schedule to begin with South Carolina and so make any primary challenge nearly impossible. I await the stream of articles in the
and Washington Post about Mr. Biden’s “iron grip” on his party.
The Hunter Biden revelations would have generated calls for resignation in a time of more sanity and less rancor. Text messages indicating the young Mr. Biden was selling access to his father, a maze of shell companies seemingly meant to hide transactions, strong evidence that the Justice Department monkey-wrenched an investigation into that activity—none of it provokes curiosity on the left. That one of the associates Hunter badgered for payment works for a company with ties to the Chinese government is also, for Democrats and the left’s pundit class, a matter of no interest.
This newspaper’s editorial page managed to provoke Mr. Trump into many all-caps condemnations. Has any center-left outlet provoked Mr. Biden into one of those fits of rage for which he is famous?
The leftist journalist Franklin Foer’s book “The Last Politician,” to be published Tuesday, relates some episodes that reflect poorly on President Biden. The passages I’ve been able to glean, however, look mild—mainly a lot of unflattering things said about Mr. Biden, anonymously, by allies and aides. That these rather gentle slights have attracted so much attention isn’t a measure of their severity. They remind us, rather, that for 2½ years no one on Mr. Biden’s side has dared to say anything disparaging of him.
Now that’s what I call fealty.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
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