President Joe Biden seems not to care about how his words and actions will impact his own party as he leaves the Oval Office.
As Jan. 20 approaches, Biden has taken drastic actions that will likely harm the Democrats long-term. He has suggested that he was wrong to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, set ignominious precedents on pardons, and revealed how the woke elites call the shots on the Left.
These moves may help him achieve his goals, but they demonstrate political recklessness.
1. Trashing Kamala Harris
This week, Biden told USA Today that he would have defeated Donald Trump, while his own vice president, Kamala Harris, historically fell short.
“It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think, yes,” Biden told USA Today, citing polling he had reviewed. He did express doubt about whether he had the vigor to serve for another four years in office, however.
Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race kicking and screaming. While conservatives had rightly raised concerns about Biden’s health even before he won the 2020 presidential election, much of the legacy media and the White House had repeatedly brushed aside any concerns. The denials reached a fever pitch early last year, when White House staff tried to make Americans think Biden was secretly doing cartwheels between his doddering public appearances.
When the president froze and stumbled through a debate with Trump in late June, the jig was up. The legacy media turned on a dime, letting loose the floodgates of concern about the health of a man they had recently sworn was vigorous and spry.
Even so, Biden insisted he would remain in the race. He said so over and over again. He wasn’t going anywhere. So quit asking, OK?
Only after former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leaked the news that they had personally pressured the president to drop out of the race did Biden belatedly do so. He didn’t bother to hold a press conference or explain why. Instead, he posted the news on X, almost as if it were an afterthought.
Would Biden have beaten Trump?
CNN polling analyst Harry Enten rightly called Biden’s statement “flat-out bonkers.” Biden had already been losing ground in the polls when he dropped out, and Harris did not run on a platform that different from Biden’s policies. Furthermore, The Wall Street Journal has recently published a series of articles revealing that White House aides knew the limitations caused by Biden’s age and had to compensate to keep the gears turning.
Even if it were true that Biden might have beaten Trump, the president does damage to his party by saying it. That keeps the party focused on recriminations, rather than charting its path forward.
2. The Ignominious Pardon of Hunter
Biden also weakened his own party by pardoning his son Hunter.
The president didn’t just pardon his son, however. He issued a blanket pardon not only for crimes Hunter Biden had been found guilty of, but also for “offenses against the United States which he … may have committed or taken part in” during a nearly 11-year period.
This pardon didn’t just enable the first son to avoid prison time; it also aimed to prevent the incoming Trump Justice Department from bringing any other case against Hunter Biden during the time in question. That time period began shortly before Hunter Biden started his infamous and lucrative stint on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father served as President Obama’s point man on Ukraine.
Biden made history in the worst way with an overbroad pardon, but in doing so, he also managed to highlight the serious corruption questions involving Hunter Biden—and some of those questions also implicate Joe Biden himself.
For a party that claims to care about democracy and the rule of law, defending all of that is a horrible look.
3. Honoring George Soros
The Democrats touted Biden as the moderate option in 2020, but it is no secret that the president has governed as a hard-left ideologue.
The Biden-Harris administration’s woke record was arguably the major factor in alienating voters last year. Biden launched “whole of government” efforts to push transgender orthodoxy, climate alarmism, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” His administration pressured Big Tech to stifle dissent on COVID-19, prosecuted pro-life protesters while turning a blind eye to pro-abortion vandals, and spent lavishly on “green” initiatives while Americans struggled to make ends meet amid inflation.
That record helped Trump defeat Harris in November, and Biden is doubling down on it.
Last weekend, Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the highest civilian honor—to none other than George Soros. Soros, a Hungarian American billionaire, notoriously funded the “rogue prosecutor” movement, supporting soft-on-crime district attorneys who have emboldened criminals by refusing to charge certain crimes.
Soros has also bankrolled much of the activist Left through his Open Society Foundations, which his son Alex now runs. Fittingly, Alex Soros received the medal on behalf of his father.
The Open Society Foundations is featured prominently in my forthcoming book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” which exposes how donors like Soros prop up a system of woke nonprofits that infiltrate and advise the federal bureaucracy.
By awarding Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Biden was making clear what many Americans already suspected—that Soros is one of the ones really calling the shots in Washington.
Biden has also taken extreme measures on his way out the door, seemingly without concern for how they could damage his party’s prospects in the future.
On Monday, the president banned offshore drilling across more than 600 million acres of water. The activist groups that benefit from Soros’ largesse lobbied for such a ban.
After Trump’s decisive victory in November, Democrats are engaging in soul-searching, attempting to chart a new path toward electoral success. Some brave souls like Reps. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., have warned that Democrats need to stop their efforts to enforce transgender orthodoxy, especially when it comes to men in women’s sports.
Biden is making it harder for the party to reconsider its trajectory, however. Donors like Alex Soros will continue to play a massive role in the left-wing nonprofits that advise and direct the party, and Biden just emboldened them with two massive moves this week.
While Biden may have reasons to seek revenge, it’s far from clear that the president is intentionally undermining his own party. Special counsel Robert Hur put it well when he declined to press charges in the classified documents case because a jury might be sympathetic to an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
Regardless of his intentions, the president’s final month in office is making life more difficult for his party.
