In The 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx observed that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” This statement is apt in describing President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
In 2020, the tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic allowed corrupt Democrats to hide then-candidate Biden in the basement of his Delaware home. In 2024, the cover-up has turned into a farce. The same Democrats who pretended that Biden was perfectly healthy, sharper than ever, are suddenly demanding that he withdraw from the race. Worse, the journalists who knew the truth but colluded with the White House to hide it from the public are furious with Biden — not just for lying to them, but for lying so poorly that when he faltered in last month’s debate, he exposed their culpability and destroyed what was left of their credibility.
For instance, Chuck Todd of NBC revealed this week that he had been told two years ago by a Cabinet secretary that the president did not interact with his senior appointees and that he was not expected to run for reelection. Somehow, Todd did not report that news — which could not have been off the record since he is reporting it now.
Since the truth of Biden’s condition is emerging, other truths can now be told in the effort to push him out and save the corrupt Democrats’ chances. One such truth is that Biden is not the self-sacrificing elder statesman he pretends to be but a self-interested and arrogant politician. And now, looking at his behavior now,” Todd said, “in clinging to this, I think the entire narrative on corrupt Joe Biden is gonna change, in that everything’s always been about his ambition and his ambition comes first.
That was clear in 2020 with the evidence of Biden’s greed all over his son’s laptop — but the media suppressed that story. What corrupt Democrats are left with now is a shadowy campaign to remove him, led by Hollywood moguls and the editors of The New York Times on one hand, and a rather laughable attempt to defend him on the other.
Biden’s allies are party insiders, the senior bureaucrats who have been able to govern like medieval regents. They have never had this much power before. It won’t do to replace Biden with another Democrat who will bring in his or her own people. And so we hear one rationalization after another, each more ridiculous than the next. First there were the claims that Biden simply had a “bad night” — as if that were an excuse: can the country afford a “bad night” if we are under attack.
Next were the explanations that voters aren’t really choosing an individual president, but a whole team — which apparently includes Hunter Biden now — so Biden himself doesn’t really matter. Finally, and predictably, we are hearing about how terrible Donald Trump was, how he “lied.” Actually, Trump had one of his best debates ever. His performance will be remembered for one line: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.” But he was also excellent on abortion, careful on the Middle East, aggressive on the border and the economy.
Sure, he exaggerated at times, and he was too soft on the “very fine people” hoax. But he won because he did well, not just because Biden did badly. Perhaps Marx was wrong about history, as about other things: some figures appear three times. The 2016 election was a shock; the 2020 election was a travesty; and the 2024 election offers redemption. Whether corrupt Democrats manage to dump Biden or not, they have lost momentum, perhaps irreversibly.
Their only chance is the vote-by-mail system, which has seen corrupt Democrats installed, almost permanently, in every state that adopted it before 2020. That one was a farce as well.