The sad end of Joe Biden
The president ended his political career the only way he knows how: with lies.
President Biden just gave one of his final speeches in office before finally retiring in January. In his remarks on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, he decided to end his presidency the same way he started it: by lying, repeating debunked hoaxes, and gaslighting us that somehow his departure meant “democracy has prevailed.”
He made several falsehoods to an audience that either believed them or simply didn’t care that he said them. Let’s take a look at some:
He repeated the “Bloodbath” hoax, a widely taken out-of-context comment by Trump to suggest he meant political violence instead of its definition of “a major economic disaster.”
He remembered the events during Charlottesville, which he suggested is what spurred him back into public life. Biden then repeated the “Fine People” hoax. This was so widely debunked that even Snopes was forced to edit its fact check seven years later.
Biden claimed that “violent crime has dropped to the lowest level in more than 50 years.” This figure is based on incomplete and missing FBI information as 32% of police agencies didn’t submit data in 2022.
According to the Marshall Project: “More than 6,000 law enforcement agencies were missing from the FBI’s national crime data last year, representing nearly one-third of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies. This means a quarter of the U.S. population wasn't represented in the federal crime data last year.”
He suggested that he and Kamala Harris helped cities get schools back open during the pandemic. In fact, he had largely slammed then-President Trump’s efforts to reopen schools and Biden subsequently kept them closed throughout 2021 due to pressure placed on him by Teachers’ unions.
Biden said Trump had killed the “bipartisan border deal”, even though the border crossings hit record levels under his administration.
Finally, he suggested that the Democrats “saved democracy” from Donald Trump, ignoring how the party embarked on an obvious and graceless coup to forcefully remove him from the top of the ticket because he was incapable of beating his opponent fairly.
It’s times like this that remind us that a media exists to supposedly hold leaders to account and debunk these lies. Ahead of the DNC, Politico had called Biden’s upcoming speech “a hero’s goodbye”, seemingly fulfilling a promise between him and Nancy Pelosi that he would be treated to an honorable legacy by the press if he did what she wanted and stepped aside.
But Joe Biden has signaled the formal end to his political career with a speech full of angry lies, falsehoods, and alternate realities. He did so by no choice of his own; only by a party that leaked embarrassing stories about him to the press and at the hands of rich donors who cut off campaign donations.
He could have taken the opportunity to leave the stage with grace and self-respect but chose not to. And that will always be his final legacy.