Millions of people cogently believe former President Donald Trump is a danger to the republic itself, but a large number of us also believe another four years of the Biden-Harris administration would be, in different ways, an equal menace.
Start with the most basic test of whether a presidency actually endangers the nation: Can he handle a major crisis? The one and only time a president is the essential American, perhaps at an existential level, is when a sudden challenge emerges that could carry catastrophic consequences. Think of the sustained stress that 45-year-old John F. Kennedy had to endure during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis Then ask yourself if President Joe Biden could, even right now, bear that load.
Highly doubtful. And two years from now, at the rate he appears to be declining? No way.
Even when Biden was far more vigorous than now, his judgment alone made him a risk in crises. He has spent a career being wrong on foreign affairs, from trashing former President Ronald Reagan’s “tear down the wall” speech to opposing what should have been an easy decision to raid Osama bin Laden’s hideout. And in the biggest, entirely plannable, foreign policy decision of his presidency so far, Biden’s inept and deadly bug-out from Afghanistan was one of the worst fiascoes in the history of U.S. engagements abroad. By this time next year, Biden’s decrepitude will be four years more advanced than then, while surely not improving his awful judgment one bit.
And it surely doesn’t help that even as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea become increasingly dangerous, Biden keeps trying to cut the military while acting so fecklessly that he “weakens America’s global clout.” This is profoundly dangerous, even if the president had full energy and use of his faculties.
Meanwhile, the radicalism of Biden’s administration on domestic issues has made him not just someone pushing wrongful policies still within ordinary bounds of American politics but policies and procedures that threaten bedrock, foundational principles. Even more than his former boss Barack Obama, Biden is living up to his expressed desire to be the “most progressive” president in history, with even socialist Bernie Sanders praising him for being “much more progressive” than Sanders expected.
Almost every agency in the Biden administration is waging war on parents, on people of traditional faith, on property rights, or on judicial independence. Administration officials and Biden-appointed judges have either proposed or implemented rules supporting schools and health providers that refuse to share medical or psychological information with parents, that target parents as “domestic terrorists,” that crack down on schools or parents who dare put age restrictions on the availability of radically pornographic books for young children, or even to know about and comment on the policies, budgets, and curricula of their schools. Bidenites try to force foster-care providers out of business merely for catering to parents of traditionalist faiths, and even support taking biological children away from their parents merely because the parents insist on using biologically correct pronouns.
Top White House and Justice Department officials refuse to condemn or penalize protesters who violate the law by harassing Supreme Court justices and their families. They refuse to apologize for trying to prosecute peaceful pro-life protesters who manifestly were wrongfully charged, and they lie about FBI attempts to assume traditionalist Catholics are violent extremists.
When the full weight of government, with sanctioning power or threats of arrest, is used or threatened this way against parents and people of faith, we all should be frightened. The truth, though, is that it’s not just in the cultural realm that the Biden administration is waging a regulatory reign of terror. Any innocent person who has had a life turned upside down by the vindictive, unchecked, unresponsive administrative state knows exactly how damaging the experience can be.
Columnist Allysia Finley earlier this month provided numerous examples of Biden rulemaking whose real-life consequences could be devastating for millions of people. The Food and Drug Administration is finalizing a requirement for tens of thousands of diagnostic tests, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for each, to be submitted to it for approval. For some reason the Securities and Exchange Commission is promulgating climate rules that could roil thousands of public companies with class-action lawsuits. Even liberal universities are furious about a Commerce Department rule that could deprive their researchers of patents. And on and on the examples could go in agency after agency, with the effect of massive job kills, energy and medicine shortages, and the death of research and development.
The evasions of ordinary legislative procedures or judicial review, often in open defiance of court decisions, combined with power of government enforcement mechanisms, makes this administrative aggressiveness into an undemocratic, authoritarian grab of power in multitudinous realms of daily life.
When all this is combined with Biden’s deliberate, astonishing, defiant importation of illegal immigrants by the millions, with hundreds of thousands released indefinitely (or forever) into the U.S. interior, the scope of Biden’s radicalism becomes clear. Even for those who join me in being only moderate restrictionists on border issues, Biden’s crime-inducing, fentanyl-smuggling, human-trafficking, terrorist-enabling encouragement of illegal immigration appears to be barely less than an existential threat to American sovereignty and safety. Because of the border laxness, definitely including laxness toward potential jihadists, we should be amazed if the U.S. does not suffer a simultaneous, multiple-site set of terrorist attacks straight out of a Tom Clancy novel.
Biden’s profoundly dangerous, morally inexplicable border policies alone should disqualify him from reelection.
And all of the above arguments assume that Biden himself will remain president. The greater likelihood — that at some point in his 80s, he will become incapacitated — is even worse because the prospect of President Kamala Harris should frighten everyone. Whereas Biden has migrated from major liberalism to fairly extreme progressivism, Harris began and remains even more radical. At least Biden had the constitutional decency to oppose killing the legislative filibuster or packing the Supreme Court, but Harris would have no such compunction. Harris combined with Democratic House and Senate majorities could unleash woke-identity vindictiveness, backed by abusive administrative authoritarianism, of a sort this nation has never seen, unchecked by court or custom.
As columnist Dan McLaughlin has noted, Harris literally laughed out loud at the idea that the president can’t ban guns by executive fiat, badly violated the First Amendment by demanding that non-profit organizations disclose their donor lists, has suggested that mere membership in the Knights of Columbus is disqualifying for a judicial nominee, showed no compunction against smearing nominee Brett Kavanaugh with the most ludicrous of train-rape allegations, and arguably abused her prosecutorial powers in California in multiple ways.
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Also, rather than admonish urban rioters, Harris threatened many months more of riots, raised money for a group posting bail for murderers, and established a Senate record more radical-leftist even than the socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Both an extremist and embarrassingly incompetent, Harris’s position being a single heartbeat from Biden’s decrepit presidency provides ample reason, alone, to oppose the reelection of her boss as this nation’s chief executive.
In sum, opposition to a Biden-Harris reelection is not based on mere policy disputes within the ordinary American tradition. Instead, it stems from legitimate concerns that the ticket could irretrievably undermine the American constitutional design. Between its threat and the potential for Trump to upend American (small-“r”) republican traditions, voters face a nearly terrifying Sophie’s choice. It remains an open question as to which option is more survivable.