Joe Biden has “shattered the moral pretensions of his presidency, his party, and arguably his entire class”
Indeed, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was a far greater blow than even that of 2016, following as it did on January 6; two impeachments; and a slew of legal actions, both civil and criminal, state and federal. In short, voters in 2024 could not say they did not know what they were getting in Donald Trump. His victory therefore demonstrates the degree to which voters have come to doubt the basic competence of the expert class.
School closures pushed by teachers’ unions during a pandemic, calls to defund the police during a crime wave, and a racial “reckoning” amid a pandemic are a few of the disasters Silver mentions. He emphasizes that voters were not swayed by “misinformation,” but by a correct perception of institutional decline and policy failures of the expert class: overstimulating the economy leading to inflation, opening the border to nearly ten million illegal immigrants, and trying to run a doddering Biden again. Perhaps the biggest recent failure of the technocratic elite cited by Silver was the handling of the Covid epidemic, which managed to combine economically ruinous lockdowns, disastrous school closures, and seven million deaths worldwide.
The one thing left to the elites after Trump’s victory was their unshakeable faith in their own moral superiority. And one of their favorite proofs was President Biden’s oft-repeated promise that he would abide by the jury determinations in his son Hunter’s trials and not pardon him. Brendan O’Neill writing in Spiked describes how the establishment media fawned over the president as a moral icon, whose acceptance of the jury verdict in Hunter’s trial for lying on a federal gun permit form contrasted so sharply to Donald Trump’s rants about a “rigged” justice system.
“Over and over and over” the media and Democratic politicians celebrated their own high-mindedness and morally spotless characters. Veteran D.C. journalist John Harwood, for instance, posted, “People who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves; they can’t imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.”
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