Miranda Devine: Joe Biden’s bizarre presidency is like The Truman Show
Joe Biden sits at a fake Oval Office desk in a fake White House while his Vice President makes weird YouTube videos and schemes for the top job, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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Joe Biden has taken to staging media events at a fake White House set across the road from the real White House. He sits in a fake Oval Office behind a tiny desk in front of an ersatz window framing an outdated digital image of the Rose Garden in full spring bloom.
Former Trump aide Stephen Miller claims the imitation White House setup is designed so the President can read a script from a special monitor without being detected. But the charade has led to charges that Biden is running a “Truman Show presidency”, all smoke and mirrors and no substance.
To add to the inauthentic atmosphere, Vice President Kamala Harris released a bizarre YouTube video of herself last week with a group of young teens in which she gushes with patently fake enthusiasm about space exploration. The well-behaved kids, who turned out to be child actors, watch mutely as she waves her arms around in exaggerated fashion and uses a weird baby voice in the “Get Curious with Vice President Harris” video made to celebrate World Space Week.
“You guys are gonna see, you’re gonna literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes,” she enthused, pointing at her bulging eyes as if she were talking to retarded toddlers. It’s hard to describe just how cringe-worthy the performance was but it sums up the awkwardness of her vice presidency, in which she has shirked jobs assigned her by Biden in favour of low-risk humanising roles to remedy her unpopularity before she takes a run at the top job.
As Biden’s polls numbers plummet and multiple crises erupt, Americans are growing alarmed at the curious passivity of a White House which seems focused exclusively on optics.
Every weekend at college games and other sporting events, crowds now chant “F--k Joe Biden”. At the NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway a couple of weeks ago, the crowd took up that chant as winner Brandon Brown was being interviewed. NBC reporter Kelli Stavast misheard the obscenity as “Let’s go Brandon!” and a meme was born.
Now “Let’s Go Brandon” chants and banners are popping up everywhere as a euphemism to express frustration at the president.
Biden seems oblivious. He just took another three-day weekend at his Delaware mansion and isn’t expected to address the supply chain problem that threatens Christmas supplies until Wednesday.
Illegal migration at the southern border is exploding, inflation is on the rise, petrol prices are up, the latest jobs numbers fell well below expectations, food shortages are setting in and shop shelves are half empty, cargo ships are piling up off the coast, and truck drivers are in short supply.
Biden won a wafer-thin victory last November, with an evenly split Senate and a tight majority in the House but is governing as if he had a massive mandate, pushing multi-trillion spending bills which can’t make it past squabbling members of his own party.
He inherited a stable border, vaccines already being rolled out at the rate of 1.5 million jabs a day, and a recovering economy but squandered it all with a spiteful determination to undo all things Trump.
As Donald Trump said at his rally in Iowa on the weekend: “If Biden would have just gone to the beach, just take it easy, enjoy the surf, he’d have a great border today.”
Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine mandates are another self-created crisis, as workers quit or are fired for refusing to get vaccinated, throwing hospitals, transportation and other sectors of the economy into chaos.
On the weekend, Southwest Airlines cancelled as many as 2000 flights, using the official excuse of bad weather and staffing issues with air traffic controllers.
But the real reason reportedly was that large numbers of pilots, flight attendants and other staff had called in sick to protest the airline’s threat to fire them. Biden couldn’t care less about the pointless mayhem he’s unleashed in a country in which almost 70 per cent of adults are fully vaccinated and an estimated 115 million people have natural immunity to Covid, according to a report in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Last week in a speech in Chicago he gave a shout out to United Airlines for raising its vaccination rate for employees from 59 per cent to 99 per cent.
He didn’t mention that the miraculous figure was achieved by firing people who refused to get vaccinated in order to comply with his December 8 deadline.
“When you see headlines and reports of mass firings, and hundreds of people losing their jobs, look at the bigger story,” he prattled blithely. “United went from 59 per cent of their employees [vaccinated] to 99 per cent”. No wonder he’s now more unpopular than Donald Trump, despite his sycophantic media.
A recent Quinnipiac poll had his approval rating at 38 per cent and disapproval at 53 per cent. A majority of voters disapprove of his handling of the economy (55 per cent), the military (58 per cent), taxes (54 per cent), foreign policy (58 per cent), immigration (67 per cent).
Even on Covid he is under water with 50 per cent disapproval versus 48 per cent approval.
Worse still, a majority of voters have savagely marked him down on personality traits such as honesty, leadership skills and whether he cares about the average American.
More than half of Americans (55 per cent) say his administration is not competent.
“Battered on trust, doubted on leadership, and challenged on overall competency, President Biden is being hammered on all sides as his approval rating continues its downward slide to a number not seen since the tough scrutiny of the Trump administration,” said Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy.
As well, last month, a Fox News poll found fewer than half of Americans think Biden is “mentally stable” enough to hold his job.
Disproportionately it is independents who have turned on him. Their eyes were opened by the Afghanistan debacle in which 13 young American service members were killed in the botched withdrawal from Kabul airport and American citizens and Afghan allies were abandoned a few days after Biden vowed he would leave no one behind.
Last week his attorney-general Merrick Garland sicced the FBI onto parents protesting at school board meetings about left wing propaganda in the classroom – from critical race theory and gender ideology to racial quotas excluding Asian students and pandemic scare campaigns requiring kids to be masked and vaccinated without regard to their wellbeing.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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