Every challenger argues that the incumbent, or the party in power, has screwed things up and made things worse, and every incumbent or member of the party in power insists that things are, at minimum, improving and in some cases, outlandish hyperbole, such as “Joe Biden has given us the best economy ever,” as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research claimed.)
Donald Trump has no calibration, and thus everything he did was the best ever, and everything his rivals did was the worst ever. This past Saturday, at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., he said:
We’re a nation in decline. You know, we were talking about that before, my phrases are copied so much, right? I use the term, often times in closing, “We are a nation in decline. We are a failed nation,” and I think it’s a beautiful phrase, although I don’t like the topic very much. I don’t like what it represents, but there’s a certain beauty. All of a sudden all of these candidates, including Republicans, are saying, “We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation,” and I say, “You know, what the hell do they have to copy me for, right?” But they have a lot of words that they copy, many of our words.
To the Democrats, “we are a nation in decline. we are a failed nation,” is a soggy pinata just waiting to get whacked.
America has plenty of problems, and a lot of those problems got considerably worse under Joe Biden’s presidency – the situation at our insecure border, an insane backlog of asylum claims, we’ve experienced the worst inflation rates in four decades, household savings are near the all-time low, consumer debt is at its all-time high, math scores for U.S. students hit an all-time low, we’re falling behind China in the artificial intelligence race, the Biden team keeps begging Hamas for a ceasefire that the terrorist group will never grant, Taliban is running Afghanistan with the support of the U.S. taxpayer and al-Qaeda is thriving, Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro just took the Biden administration’s lunch money, and we’re losing the information war to Iran, Russia and China. I’m sure you can think of others.
Americans don’t mind a candidate for higher office talking about these problems; in fact, they ought to demand that a candidate discuss those problems and lay out plans to fix them.
But a whole lot of Americans probably resent the suggestion that they are in decline, or that they are failures. In their minds, they didn’t vote for any of this mess, even if they voted for Joe Biden four years ago, and many of these problems are predictable consequences of Biden’s policies.
Last night, Joe Biden took whacks at that soggy pinata.
Everybody. Donald Trump calls America a failing nation.
[Crowd boos]
No, I’m serious. Think about this. Think about this.
He publicly, he says to the whole world.
I’m going to say something outrageous, I know more foreign leaders by their first names than and know them well than anybody alive just because I’m so damn old.
And I’m not joking.
Think of the message he sends around the world, when he talks about America being a failing nation. He says we’re losing. He’s the loser. He’s dead wrong. Many of you are very successful people who travel the world. Name me a country in the world that doesn’t think we’re the leading nation in the world.
This morning, the crowd at Morning Joe is raving about this portion of Biden’s nearly 50-minute speech. Part of this is because so much of the rest of the speech was microwave-reheated leftovers from Biden’s greatest hits. But part of it is because Democrats love a contrasting message where Trump is calling the United States a “failed nation” and Kamala Harris gets to say, “no, we aren’t.”