Victor Davis Hanson
Biden’s favorability is now consistently below 40 percent. His brain and body freezes are routine.
Biden’s word salad and fantasy spins do not even merit the news. His lectures about the “convicted felon” Trump are over, along with his rants about the evil Second Amendment—given Hunter’s felony gun convictions.
If Hunter is convicted of an open-and-shut case of not filing on a huge million-dollar-plus tax obligation, Biden will also be told to stop the “make them pay their fair share” income-tax demagoguery.
So, we have reached the point where no one assumes Biden is cognitively fit to continue in office; no one believes that Biden’s family did not sell the Biden name for influence overseas, raking in millions of dollars by subordinating American interests to his own.
No one thinks that Biden has not weaponized the DOJ to go after political opponents. And no one denies that none of Biden’s political initiatives poll below 50 percent. And so panic sets in among the Left, about what to do with him—a man who is not able to handle almost any other job in America, apparently, except the presidency.
Leapfrog Kamala? She only seems enthused when virtue signaling her DEI dislike of Israel. Otherwise, it is the same old, same old: the cackles, the wash, rinse, spin cycle of word repetition, and odes to school buses. Her race and gender supposedly ensure her renomination, but the Democratic elite value power more than ideology and may also have to ease her out, if Joe looks hopeless after the debate. In an open convention, she would not win the delegate count.
The national polls show a tight race, but in the swing states and on issues, voters seem like they have had it with Biden. And the result is again rolling panic.
Sometimes the hysteria over losing power is expressed by shameless pandering for votes—asking Mexico suddenly to close the border, suddenly canceling more student loans, suddenly draining more from the petroleum reserve, suddenly leveraging the federal reserve to lower interest rates, suddenly ordering Ukrainians to refrain from hitting Russian refineries, suddenly turning on Israel for Michigan Islamic votes, and suddenly slapping tariffs on Chinese cars for Michigan UAW votes.
Sometimes there is poll panic (can Biden go below 30 percent?); Biden debility panic (can he even make it to the convention?); Harris panic (she makes Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle—the left’s old bugaboos—look like Socrates and Aristotle).
And sometimes there is just realization that the Faustian bargain of using the shill of good ol’ Joe from Scranton to mask the neo-Marxist agendas of his handlers is no longer viable without a replacement fix in sight.
So, without alternatives, the result of all the above is a new epidemic of projectionism. The Left obsessively is already accusing an elected Trump in 2025 of going after his enemies in a way the Left most certainly would have if it had suffered what it has dished out to Trump. The Left believes when they sought to kill the proverbial king, they only wounded him, and thus he will return the favor in the manner that they are sure they would too.
There are also more pragmatic aspects to the Left’s projection of their own sins onto Trump. One, the more they accuse Trump of planning to punish his enemies by destroying the Constitution (as they would), all the more the “moderate” Right begins to lecture on the need to turn the other cheek, to not fall into a tit-for-tat cycle, to remember they are the Marquis of Queensberry Rules party, and thus to avoid being libeled by the mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment Left. So, the Left then achieves deterrence by scaring off Trump from retaliating.
Two, by accusing another of precisely the crimes you are planning and committing, you become the prosecutor rather than the defendant. How can one be a criminal when he is always scanning the horizon to find criminals? And who knows the mind of the criminal and the nature of his crimes better than the master criminal himself?
The post <span class="ultra-flag"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>The Renewed Epidemic of Trump-Derangement Projectionism. Part One appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.