In The Washington Post’s self-righteous telling, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It says so every day, right there below the paper’s masthead.
But democracy also dies in historical revisionism, of the sort found Dec. 29 in the Post’s front-page lead story, directly below the masthead and across five columns, titled plaintively: “Joe Biden’s lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy.”
Tyler Pager’s fourth installment in a four-part Post series dubbed “How Biden Leads” reads like a cross between a postmortem defense of Joe Biden’s failed (my adjective, not his) presidency and a sycophantic hagiography.
There are so many “what might have beens” in Pager’s 2,349-word magnum opus, it’s hard to know where to begin in dissecting and dismantling all of the historical revisionism.
The article begins anecdotally with Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who was instrumental in getting Biden nominated in 2020, recounting a meeting with the president early last year as Biden prepared to run for reelection. A lachrymose Clyburn lamented that Biden’s supposed campaigning on “substance” was no longer a good fit in an era—a scant four years later—where style now supposedly trumps (pun intended) substance.
(Just as an aside, it was as if Clyburn had conveniently memory-holed Barack Obama’s performative “hope and change” candidacies, which were nothing if not style over substance.)
“After Donald Trump’s ascent, Biden believed that he just needed to show Americans that traditional democracy still worked—by listening to experts, working with Republicans, passing popular policies—and voters would rally around him,” Pager wrote, claiming with scant evidence that Biden “had succeeded in Phase One of his plan.”
When you begin with such a dubious—if not demonstrably false—premise, however, much of what follows is likely to be wrong as well.
“[P]hase Two never happened,” Pager wrote. “The truth of Biden’s presidency is that he failed in what was, by his own account, his most important mission: making Trump’s presidency seem like an aberration.”
Biden and Pager might regard Trump’s presidency as “an aberration,” but an American electorate that gave Trump 11.2 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016 clearly didn’t see it that way. Moreover, voters doubled down in 2024, giving Trump nearly 3.2 million additional votes on top of that. (For the record: Just under 63 million in 2016; 74.2 million in 2020; and 77.3 million in 2024.)
Biden’s governing “through traditional processes and institutions,” Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer is quoted as lamenting, “ … didn’t do anything to end the very intense polarization that exists in this country.”
To the contrary, the Biden administration’s unabashedly far-left policies—open borders allowing the country to be flooded with unvetted illegal immigrants and having taxpayers support them, trillions of dollars in deficit spending that spawned 45-year-high inflation and interest rates, and unswerving fealty to a pro-abortion, pro-transgender, and pro-DEI agenda—only served to exacerbate that polarization.
The only thing surprising about the “intense polarization” is that Zelizer (and by extension, Biden and Pager) were surprised by it.
In Zelizer’s case, however, it could be because of the clueless crowd that he runs with. “Some Biden allies point to a recent survey of historians that ranked Biden the 14th-best president in American history, while putting Trump last,” Pager notes. But those historians have about as much credibility as the “felonious 51” intelligence officials who knowingly lied at the height of the 2020 presidential election when they asserted that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop had all the “hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”
Those historians notwithstanding, after Biden’s four years in the White House, Jimmy Carter—who died at age 100 on the same day the Post article appeared in print—can rest in peace knowing that his presidency is no longer the worst of my lifetime.
(Donald J. Trump for President 2024 Inc.)
Pager wrote that Biden argued “that he did not get enough credit for his accomplishments, especially on the economy.” That raises the question: What part of the aforementioned 45-year-high inflation driving up food and fuel prices—to say nothing of soaring housing prices that have made homeownership increasingly unaffordable for more Americans—does the lame-duck president not understand?
In the same vein, Pager credited Biden with “avoid[ing] a recession that many economists considered inevitable,” when he surely knows that Biden avoided a recession, but in name only, because liberal economists brushed aside the long-standing definition of recession as being two or more consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product. That’s a whopper for which Pager’s Post “fact-checker” colleague, Glenn Kessler, should award both of them three Pinocchios.
“Substantively, few analysts deny Biden’s accomplishments,” Pager further swoons, citing as one of those accomplishments “mobiliz[ing] the government to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19, bringing the country out of a devastating pandemic.”
He might want to get second opinions on that “substantive accomplishment,” however, from the thousands of service members Biden’s Pentagon drummed out of the military for refusing to take those largely experimental vaccines or from the millions of elementary and secondary school students whose educations were irreparably harmed by unduly long school closures pushed on Biden by left-wing teachers unions, or from the thousands of mom-and-pop enterprises driven out of business by unnecessary restrictions on their operations.
Pager also credits Biden as having “rebuilt the trans-Atlantic alliance,” with the implication being that Trump had shattered it. But the latter is true only if you think that insisting that NATO’s 30 European members “pay their fair share” (to use one of Biden’s and the Left’s pet phrases) for their own defense—or Ukraine’s—is unreasonable.
And any discussion of Biden’s foreign policies would be incomplete without mentioning the catastrophic August 2021 pullout from Afghanistan. But leaving tens of billions of dollars in military hardware behind for the Taliban gets no mention in Pager’s detailing of “how Biden leads.”
And the fallback explanation for the failure of Biden’s “lonely battle to sell his vision of American democracy” is the Democrats’ reflexive excuse whenever they lose an election: “We didn’t get our message out.”
“Previous articles in this series … showed that Biden, even at the peak of his power, struggled mightily to communicate his decisions and vision.”
Au contraire: The American people were all too well aware of Biden’s “decisions and vision” when they went to the polls on Nov. 5. Voters correctly surmised that they would continue unabated if Vice President Kamala Harris were to succeed Biden and cast their ballots accordingly.
Pager devotes four lengthy paragraphs to how Biden and “some Democrats” in hindsight have faulted his attorney general, Merrick Garland, for adopting what they considered a go-slow approach to prosecuting Trump.
“Had the Justice Department moved faster to prosecute Trump for allegedly seeking to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents,” those Democrats say, the former president might have faced a politically damaging trial before the election,” Pager wrote.
Could it be that Garland recognized that those trumped-up (again, pun intended) charges were a baseless, nakedly political “weaponization” of the justice system and that he wasn’t comfortable pursuing a corrupt gambit just to win an election for the Democrats?
It must have pained many in the newsroom of The Washington Post when it had to report that then-President Donald Trump had been acquitted by the Senate on two trumped-up, baseless articles of impeachment on Feb. 6, 2020. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Even with all that said, there was much more to take issue with in Pager’s historical revisionist hagiography of Biden and his soon-to-end shambolic presidency, but why further belabor the point?
Suffice it say that Pager should offer to be the ghost writer for Biden’s postpresidency memoir. But libraries would have to shelve it under “fiction.”
Originally published by The Washington Times
