Miranda Devine: Joe Biden’s polls plummet after ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ chant goes viral
Growing enthusiasm for a new chant making a mockery of President Joe Biden shows the parlous state of the US presidency, Miranda Devine writes.
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A Southwest Air pilot who said “Let’s Go Brandon!” over the intercom during a flight from Texas to New Mexico this week has been branded a domestic terrorist and akin to ISIS by enraged lefties who are trying to get him fired.
Let’s Go Brandon has become the polite substitute for “F**k Joe Biden” – the chant rocking sports stadiums across the country every weekend for the past two months.
The euphemism came about at a NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama on October 2, after the crowd started chanting “F**k Joe Biden!” while the winner, Brandon Brown, was being interviewed.
The NBC reporter either misheard or tried to cover up the obscenity, because she told Brown: “You can hear the chants from the crowd. Let’s go Brandon!”
This caused much public mirth and soon a new chant was born.
“Let’s Go, Brandon!”, which started off as gentle mockery of media distortion, now is deployed also as an all-purpose Biden insult and, really, a safe way to blow off steam.
You fill your car with petrol at inflated prices and say “Let’s Go Brandon!”
Can’t get a package delivered because of supply chain snarls? Let’s Go Brandon.
Read that the Biden administration is considering paying $450,000 a person to illegal migrants separated from their children during the Trump era. Let’s Go Brandon.
Find out twice as many Americans were left behind in Afghanistan as Biden said. Let’s go Brandon.
American Airlines cancels 1000 flights over Halloween weekend due to a staffing shortage likely related to the Biden mandate. Let’s Go Brandon.
More than 2000 New York City firefighters chuck sickies as Biden’s vaccine mandate deadline looms. Let’s Go Brandon.
The slogan is on billboards outside diners and gas stations, on T-shirts and hats, on signs at every Biden event. It trends on social media.
A Republican congressman added it to the end of a speech the other day.
Rapper Bryson Gray has topped the music charts with his Let’s Go Brandon ditty, beating even Adele. He made four of the top eight slots on iTunes last week.
Putting aside the fact insulting the president with every profanity known to man during the Trump years was practically mandatory, Democrats and their media boosters are up in arms about the mockery of Biden.
Biden’s polls have plummeted in inverse proportions to Brandon’s popularity.
The president’s job approval rating was down to 42 per cent in a new NBC Newspoll, with disapproval at 54 per cent. That’s down seven points since the Afghanistan debacle in August.
Just 37 per cent of voters say he’s competent and effective as president, and only 28 per cent think he’s uniting the country.
On the economy, 57 per cent disapprove. On which party is better to handle border protection, inflation, crime and national security, Republicans are between 21 and 27 points ahead of Democrats.
Perhaps most ominously for Biden, 71 per cent of Americans say they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, and that includes 70 per cent of independents.
Approval ratings over his handling of Covid, the only issue in which he managed to score a bare majority of 51 per cent (down from 69 per cent in April) is set for more bruising this week.
America has lost faith in Anthony Fauci, as a new Hill-HarrisX poll finds most voters think he should resign.
And a new book out this week from former Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro reveals new details of misdeeds by the president’s medical adviser during the pandemic.
In Trump Time, A Journal of America’s Plague Year is a rollicking personal diary studded with insider confidences, and it sets its sights squarely on Fauci.
He did “more damage to this nation, President Trump and the world than anyone else this side of the Bat Lady of Wuhan,” writes Navarro.
The Harvard PhD holds Fauci accountable for “everything from the Wuhan lab gain-of-function catastrophe and suppression of low-cost therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to the political, partisan and deadly delay in delivering the Trump vaccines to the American people”.
Fauci’s sins included not telling the president Donald Trump or the coronavirus task force he knew the Wuhan lab was conducting risky gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, or that he had helped fund it.
It was Fauci who “went behind the back of the Trump White House in 2017 to lift the ban on dangerous ‘gain-of-function’ experiments. It was Fauci’s agency … that helped fund and orchestrate such … experiments at a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic almost certainly originated. And it was Fauci who, as we now know from a trove of (his) emails, was being told as early as January 31, 2020, that the virus was likely engineered”.
Navarro also says Fauci opposed imposing travel bans on China during a heated argument in the Situation Room on January 27, 2020.
Days earlier, Fauci told WABC radio’s John Catsimatidis the Wuhan virus was “a very, very low risk”. In the Situation Room, he “echoed that sentiment”.
“I’ve studied travel restrictions many, many times and (they) don’t work,” he kept telling Navarro, who was pushing for the bans.
In the end, Navarro prevailed. Trump imposed the travel ban on January 31 and Australia and New Zealand followed suit. Lives were doubtless saved by that action.
The book comes as Fauci is under fire over cruel medical experiments on dogs. He faces a new grilling in Congress this week about funding of the Wuhan lab, amid calls from some Republicans to have him charged with perjury over previous testimony.
Just more bad news for Biden who flew off to Glasgow this week with a motorcade of 85 vehicles and an entourage reportedly numbering 800, hoping to turn climate alarm into a winner.
But he had to arrive in Glasgow empty-handed after squabbling Democrats failed to agree on his multi-trillion dollar social spending package, which was supposed to include gigantic green boondoggles.
Falling asleep at the climate fest under the gaze of the world’s cameras didn’t help the image of a presidency adrift.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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