President Joe Biden’s news conference at the conclusion of the NATO summit tonight wasn’t the train wreck of his debate two weeks ago, but it did nothing to assuage his friends who believe he should not run for reelection.
What we saw and heard tonight was an old white man defending his legacy and believing he alone can save America from disaster. That’s the same modus operandi of his rival, Donald Trump, who was afflicted with grandiosity from his golden spoon birth.
While Biden’s own supporters sound alarms about his apparent frailty, Trump’s supporters gleefully extol his detachment from reality and even his gibberish rants. What’s seen as a liability in an honorable candidate is celebrated as a desirable trait in a lunatic candidate.
Mark Wingfield
Sadly, Trump gets a pass on his delusions of grandeur and Biden does not. Truthfully, neither man should be running for president this year.
We do not oppose Trump because he is a Republican. We oppose the Republican candidate because he is a menace to society. We lament the capitulation of a once-great political party to the meanness and madness of Trumpism.
Every American who has not fallen under the cultic thrall of Trumpism has one job to do this year: Ensure Donald Trump never returns to any elected position anywhere. Trump is a clear and present danger to democracy itself. As I have previously written, Trump is an antichrist — the opposite of every virtue and value taught by Jesus Christ.
There are dozens of reasons the incumbent president should not run for reelection, beginning with the old adage that “perception is reality.” Whatever Biden’s mental or physical condition really is no longer matters. The perception that he is frail and confused is all that matters. It is a liability he cannot overcome.
Neither Biden nor his loyal handlers have been able to undo what Americans see with their eyes and hear with their ears.
No amount of inside-the-beltway spin can reverse that perception. It may be unfortunate, but it is reality. It is crushing. It is damning. It is life.
People with healthy egos understand such things and often withdraw themselves from leadership for the greater good. For reasons I’m not fit to diagnose, Biden’s ego appears to be keeping him deluded to believe he’s the only person who can do this job.
Last year, I wrote about preachers and politicians who cannot quit when they should. This has been a problem of epidemic proportions in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Few people want to voluntarily give up power.
Many pastors have killed the very churches they built up because they didn’t know their own limits, didn’t know when to step aside. And too many politicians have harmed their own parties by becoming lepers rather than leaders.
“This is not about him. It is about us.”
What Joe Biden wants for himself does not matter. This is not about him. It is about us.
The bottom line is that Trump must be defeated. Forever defeated. And both the polls and the people now believe Biden is not the candidate who can do that. Fears are mounting for disastrous down-ballot thumpings for Democratic candidates. Yes, the same should be true for any candidate who endorses Trump, but remember MAGA world is like living in an alternate reality.
Among the many reasons Biden must step down for the sake of allowing someone else to defeat Trump and Trumpism, let us focus here on just one: Religious liberty.
Trump and Trumpism threaten not only democracy but the kind of religious liberty made possible only in a democracy. Trump’s evangelical supporters define religious liberty as something they alone are worthy of benefitting from — liberty for me but not for thee.
They want the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment to apply only to evangelical Christians, and they want the No Establishment clause to apply to every other religion but theirs. This is not liberty; it is license.
In our two-party system, to oppose one candidate and platform is, by default, to endorse the other. The stakes this year are so high it is not acceptable to tell people to stay home and not vote if they dislike both candidates. Again, every effort must be made to defeat Donald Trump and his sick vision for our world.
“The voters who will decide this race — and the fate of religious liberty — are begging for a candidate who will excite them and not just sell them fire insurance.”
What’s now apparent is there are candidates other than Biden who would ensure Trump’s defeat. In fact, there are candidates who would fare better against Trump than Biden would.
This should not be a close race. The threat of dictatorship should not be hard to shut down. Yet Biden is so weak as a candidate that he cannot rally undecided voters in key states to stand against tyranny.
At the NATO news conference — held not long after Biden had called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Vladimir Putin’s name — Biden answered questions about his viability as a candidate by not talking about his viability as a candidate. To every question, he spoke about past accomplishments and asked — like a cantankerous old grandfather lecturing his grandchildren — who could object to that great record?
The optics were not good.
There are millions of us who will vote for anyone on the ballot against Donald Trump. But the voters who will decide this race — and the fate of religious liberty — are begging for a candidate who will excite them and not just sell them fire insurance.
For the sake of the nation, for the sake of democracy, for the sake of religious liberty, we need better presidential candidates than we have right now. One of them is too egomaniacal to step down; let’s hope the other isn’t as well.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality. His brand-new book is Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.
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