President Biden Was Never Ike

Source: White House Albums, National Park Service (Abbie Rowe): Photographs

How to Explain a Sad Presidency

Victor Davis Hanson confesses that there are many things to say about Joe Biden’s farewell address, but, for the present, VDH is limiting himself to three items:

First, President Joe Biden was copycatting the “warnings of outgoing president and iconic war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

About 64 years earlier, President Eisenhower was warning of a new “military-industrial complex” threat to the republic that had grown out of World War II and was cresting during the ongoing Cold War of the 1950s.

Overregulated, Overtaxed Vulnerable Citizens

Eisenhower feared that a new small tech-corporate elite would sell the country on all sorts of “expensive weapons and programs to ensure a near-permanent condition of hyper-military readiness and national insolvency.”

This resulting “garrison state” would make the arms merchants and technocrats rich but also exhaust the U.S. treasury in the process. What would follow for the American people was a government octopus that demanded ever higher taxes while spending money in ways increasingly unknown or irrelevant to the public interest.

Would the grandees, wonder’s VDH, of the military-industrial complex—ex-generals revolving into defense contractor lobbyists and board members—redefine the ancient laws of war and peace in terms of mumbo-jumbo techno-jargon?

The resulting esoterica was designed to justify budget-busting defense expenditures, without enough care that the federal government would expand while the now overtaxed and overregulated citizen would be at their mercy.

Apparently, a departing Biden sought to graft his won “oligarchy” speech onto Eisenhower’s earlier blueprint.

Biden Left America in Shambles 

VDH reminds reader to not that Ike was speaking as a successful two-term president, a war hero, the architect of the successful American role in defeating Hitler—from the beaches of Normandy to the occupation of the defeated German homeland.

The postwar president Eisenhower was worried about a new world in which new nuclear-tipped missiles threatened to turn any conventional war between superpowers into nuclear Armageddon. In other words, Americans listened to Eisenhower, given his probity, gravitas, and experience—and the dangers of the new corporate-government fusion. But they have no reason to listen to Biden.

… Biden was removed by his own party insiders from the Democratic ticket before he did further damage to his party as he was finishing his failing one-term presidency.

He left the country in shambles, at home with hyperinflation, 12 million illegal entries, a nonexistent border, spiking crime, and destroyed deterrence abroad. He humiliated the armed forces in Afghanistan, encouraging enemies that prompted two theater-wide wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Biden’s Lack of Credibility 

Desperate to sabotage his successor, Biden extended even to the pettiest detail, such as selling off critical steel panels essential to the construction of the border wall that he suspended. Again, Ike had credibility, not so with Biden.

Second, continues VDH, Biden, until November 2024, had no trouble with oligarchs.

In fact, he courted and used them. And they, in turn, eagerly donated lavishly to his agenda. Multibillionaire George Soros nearly wrecked the criminal justice system by pouring millions of dollars into big-city big-city radical district attorney races to ensure the election of left-wing ideologues who would not arrest, indict, jail, convict or incarcerate thousands of dangerous violent felons—all in pursuit of bankrupt progressive ideas like “critical legal theory” and “critical race theory.”

Joe Biden rewarded Soros’s for his nihilistic multimillion-dollar work and his lavish contributions to Biden’s two presidential runs with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Meta/Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, after being pressured by the Biden administration, did the bidding of the Biden campaign team by pouring $419 million into Biden-related PACs and voting groups to change voting laws and absorb the work of the registrars in key states.

Also remember, on the eve of the last 2020 presidential debate, it was Facebook, under pressure from Biden lackeys, that began censoring accurate news stories about the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop, in hopes of arming Biden with a credible lie. Then President Joe Biden, mumbling “censorship” and lack of “fact checkers,” had no problem with the oligarchs running Apple, Facebook, and Google who decided to conspire to destroy upstart conservative social media platform Parler in 2021.

There’s been no criticism from Joe Biden on the oligarchic-government strangulation of the market.

When “Oligarchs,” like Elon Musk, David Sachs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Andreesen, all realized that the new Democratic dream was to fuse their social media and high-tech companies with the government—but under the control of left-wing anticapitalism activists to help the obsequious and punish the free-thinking—they revolted.

Trump Leverages Support from Billionaires

Yes? Please be still in the back. I can’t help but seeing you bounce about like a Mexican jumping bean. I find it distracting. Go ahead, ask your question.

Isn’t Donald Trump leveraging support from billionaires?

Third, many of these tech oligarchs have not donated to Trump’s campaign, explains VDH. Like Franklin Roosevelt (1941-1942) these tech oligarchs are reaching out to his other party’s millionaire captains of industry to fuel a Depression-era-recovering economy to produce the type and number of weapons to defeat Germany and Japan, who had a near decade head start. Roosevelt essentially gave these “oligarchs” and “multimillionaires” wide latitude to produce as much as they could to win the war.

Roosevelt staffed his “war production board” with arch-conservative capitalists (which Biden terms “oligarchs”) like Charles E. Wilson, the head of General Electric; William Murphy of Campbell Soup; Matthew Fox of Universal Pictures; and others, to create a national marriage of labor, capital, media, and advisors to radically reboot the nascent war effort.

The result by 1945 was that a once stagnant and virtually unarmed nation that was surprised at Pearl Harbor, in a short four years, built a navy larger than all the ships of the major combatants combined. America’s capitalists eventually fueled a GDP larger than all our major allies and enemies together. By the end of the war, they were supplying much of the entire Allied effort with everything from aviation and trucks to fuel, radios, and rations.

(President Trump) knows that the current multitrillion-dollar annual deficits and $36 trillion debt are unsustainable—while high taxes, Draconian regulation, and profligate spending are strangulating the economy.

Reasons to Fear China 

China’s goal is to absorb Taiwan, coerce our friends in the Pacific like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and steal our technology. To counter this, Trump realizes that the US “must master emerging technologies and services—such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cyberwarfare, cryptocurrency, drones, emerging fuels like small nuclear plants, hydrogen, and mega-batteries, and deadly new weaponry from lasers to hypersonic missiles.”

In that regard, (Donald Trump) knows that the talent that created and mastered these technologies and new services are not greedy billionaires and “oligarchs,” but, if enlisted in a common cause for their fellow citizens, could become the modern successors to Kaiser, Knudson, Ford, and Wilson.

(Joe) Biden’s hypocritical parting shot at “oligarchs” should be filed with his eleventh-hour crazy pardons, his final lies about pardoning his son, and the bizarre edict that unconstitutionally, as some dictator, he could pass a 28th Amendment by fiat: all the sad end of a sadder presidency.