Republicans don’t seem to realize how deep of a hole they’re in when it comes to Joe Biden
Any one of Donald Trump’s almost countless number of scandals and gaffes would have dealt an unrecoverable blow to just about any other politician, Democratic ones especially. But thanks to being in the party of depraved enablers, Trump got away with every single one of the scandals, including the January 6 Insurrection, which will surely go down as one of the worst scandals in US history. Now Republicans are trying to latch onto anything President Joe Biden does and call it a scandal. It’s a sign of their undoing.
This last week, Republicans, Fox News in particular, tried making a scandal out of the fact that President Biden takes detailed notes and comes prepared to conferences. No, really. In a way, this makes sense. For four years the GOP held Trump as a demigod and he wouldn’t have ever dreamed of taking notes or showing up prepared for anything. Nope. Just extemporaneous, stream-of-consciousness, racist word salads for him. Considering that’s what they valued, they at least seem to be consistent in criticizing President Biden for doing the opposite.
But what this comically idiotic non-scandal really shows is two things: (1) Republicans really don’t have much of anything on which to nail President Biden, and (2) their desperation to make their shit-slinging work is some evidence that nothing else is working for them.
First, President Biden is, by any reasonable metric, doing a great job so far. No, the nation’s many problems haven’t all been fixed overnight, obviously, nor will they all be fixed by the time he’s finished out his time as president because that’s impossible. But he’s doing a damn good job. And Republicans are having a hard time “getting” President Biden on, well, anything really. The worst thing that’s come out of the White House so far is that the President’s dog might have bitten someone. Hardly a scandal.
Second, by “getting” President Biden on insignificant, or in this case, nonexistent foibles of his presidency, they’re only working to further delegitimize themselves. Republicans don’t seem to realize how many independents and moderate Republicans they lost to President Biden in the 2020 election by being fanatical self-parodies. By continuing this behavior now that Biden is President, they’re only working to cement their fate for 2021. None of this is even to consider how demographics are changing in the US, with more young people voting and more non-whites voting. With those added factors, it makes the Republican strategy look all the more absurd.
Democracy thrives in snarkiness