Opinion | Trump’s Conviction and Biden’s Worst Decision
The Wall Street Journal Opinion by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Thursday’s conviction was more than a gift to the Biden campaign. It was a self-gift.
Joe Biden told Michigan voters in 2020, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.” It quickly turned out, on being elected, that he saw his first term as a bridge to a second.
For a laugh, read the New York Times’s supposedly searching account of the Justice Department’s decision to pursue Mr. Trump for Jan. 6 crimes. After failing to find the expected financial or other ties between the Trump circle and Jan. 6 rioters, “the department’s leadership had no alternative but to steer the investigation into choppy, uncharted waters: They shifted focus to election fraud.”
Notice the words “had no alternative.” Actually the department had an alternative, which any agency has when an investigation doesn’t pan out: End the investigation. But as the Times fails to point out, the department was soon laboring under an implicit direct order, delivered on the front page of the Times itself, via a contrived leak from Mr. Biden disparaging his attorney general for failing to develop a case against Mr. Trump.
Also getting the message was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had just been slurred in the liberal media for dropping his own office’s flimsy pursuit of Mr. Trump, which he promptly thereupon revived. It eventually delivered Thursday’s highly dubious outcome.
Next up are Hunter Biden’s trials on gun and tax charges, which may have millions of voters thinking of the political system: They’re all bums, now which one is my bum?
Let us stop and remind ourselves that Joe Biden’s candidacy is viable only because his opponent is Mr. Trump.
Mr. Biden deliberately courted a Trump restoration to get a second term. He and allies deliberately court the mayhem that may result no matter who wins.
Mr. Biden delivers us to this moment, recall, to extend a presidency that he hardly earned and was largely accidental.
He was rescued from his third and failing run for the White House by a convocation of middle-aged Democratic officeholders who sought to thwart Bernie Sanders, in a year when they calculated a ham sandwich should be able to prevail against a reviled incumbent Mr. Trump.
Mr. Biden campaigned from his basement when he campaigned at all. His turnout and Mr. Trump’s represented the two greatest turnouts in presidential history, and nobody believes this was even slightly Mr. Biden’s doing. If anyone voted for Mr. Biden because he’s Mr. Biden, that person lives in Delaware and is a relative.
We’re deep in counterfactual territory now, but a passel of younger Democrats would have stood up and contested among themselves for the future of their party if Mr. Biden had kept his implied promise of a one-term presidency.
Republicans might well have gotten a message that history’s page is turning and the Trump moment had passed.
Democratic underlings like Mr. Bragg, Georgia’s Fani Willis and the Justice Department’s Jack Smith wouldn’t have received an unmistakable signal, as they did from Mr. Biden, or even known where to look for it, urging them to pile on charges against Mr. Trump.
Ron DeSantis seems in little doubt about what derailed his heir apparency. The Bragg indictments closed the window for the non-Trumps.
Mr. Biden may be on his last legs cognitively but everything I’m saying he knows too. He knows how his decision to run looks in light of polls showing even Democrats don’t believe he’s up to the job.
He knows that any hope of his re-election being a true validation is blown up in advance by the campaign he’s being forced to run. His very strategy shrieks that Mr. Biden knows he’s unelectable if the race isn’t another Trump referendum, aided by 34 convictions and three more pending criminal trials.
The damning age issue doesn’t get fleshed out enough. Mr. Biden isn’t FDR, whom his party could just barely justify nominating, given his D-Day success and wartime prestige, while hiding from voters that he probably wouldn’t last out his term. How idiotic—how disingenuous, given everything Democrats say is at stake in the election—to require voters to weigh, practically before any other consideration, whether the candidate might be alive and lucid on Inauguration Day.
In my book, the verdict already is final: One of the worst decisions by any president in history is Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term. This decision is so terrible it may not be redeemable in the eyes of history even if his roll of the dice succeeds and he blocks Trump’s return to the presidency rather than being the vehicle for Mr. Trump’s restoration.
In spirit, his decision is hardly different from raiding mom’s purse for drug money. Now add to the price his unleashing of the dogs of lawfare into our politics. The consequences may be repulsively incalculable for decades to come.
Trump explaining why candidates under felony investigation shouldn't be running:
“We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial,” Trump said at the rally. “It would grind government to a halt.” “If she were to win, it would create an unprecedented Constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government,” he said. “She is likely to be under investigation for many years, and also it will probably end up – in my opinion – in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way.” “She has no right to be running, you know that,” -- Donald Trump, Nov 3 2016, North Carolina rally
