At the rate things are going, the impeachment of the president of the United States by the House of Representatives will become an annual exercise, like the adoption of the federal budget or the raising of the debt ceiling. Indeed, the opening of formal impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden by Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy on September 12 is the third in four years, following the two targeting Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021. By way of comparison, the first three impeachments in US history spanned more than a century, from 1868 to 1998.
But for the moment, this strategy of harassment levied by a radicalized Trumpist minority and a weakly elected house speaker is not the greatest peril facing President Biden. After months of investigations, House Republicans have failed to establish a link between the lucrative activities of prodigal son Hunter Biden, and his father's vice presidency from 2009 to 2017. As a candidate for re-election in 2024, what risks further weakening Joe Biden, is none other than Joe Biden himself.
At the age of 80, the oldest president in US history (the previous oldest, Ronald Reagan, left the White House before turning 80) knows that from now on, the slightest public slip-up will be the subject of exhaustive commentary. His latest press conference in Hanoi, where he appeared particularly exhausted in the wake of the G20 summit, was a foretaste.
At a time when the freeze-ups of Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the advanced senility of California's Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein underscore the perils of gerontocracy in Washington, Biden will shoulder his age like a burden. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, 73, pointed out precisely this factor on September 12. He was the first of his peers to publicly invite the sitting president to withdraw from the campaign, which could be one too many.
To explain the stark contrast between a solid legislative record, a strong showing by his supporters in the mid-term elections, the resilience of the US economy in spite of numerous cyclical ups and downs, and a rather mediocre popularity rating, we need to return to the misunderstanding that followed Biden's election.
Did the majority of US voters want to elect a peacemaker after Trump's four years of fire and fury, or a reformer the likes of Lyndon B. Johnson? Biden chose to embody both. He thought he could revive the culture of compromise practiced during his long tenure in the Senate, only to find that it would have to be limited essentially to the perimeter of the Democratic Party and the electoral calculations of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, given his narrow majority in the Senate.
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