Biden Has Accomplished More In Fifty Days Than Trump Did In Four Years

[Celerity]

If you want to understand why MAGAs hate Joe Biden, look no further than his astonishing track record over the past seven weeks.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/biden-has-accomplished-more-in-fifty

President Joe Biden

Because it’s never a good idea to live inside an echo chamber, I regularly engage with MAGA supporters even though it’s terrible for my blood pressure and peace of mind. Some of the MAGAs I talk to are recurring conversations and others are transients but all of them are filled with incoherent rage. Part of that rage is, naturally, Fox, OAN, AM Hate Radio, and right wing hate sites pumping out white nationalist propaganda 24/7. Another part is Trump spewing hate speech and his Big Lie, and another the uppity women, Blacks, and LGBTQ people daring to tell the vaunted White man “No”. But a key component of the MAGA rage is that Joe Biden is everything Donald Trump isn’t. Aside from being president. Put aside the reflexive “I hate Democrats!” reaction of your typical MAGA. We’re all aware, or should be by now, that MAGAs despise every Democrat for the crime of existing. That’s a given. What’s a little less clear is why they hate Biden so much. He’s just...a guy. And kind of a nice guy at that. Biden has been in the public eye just as long as Trump and people just like him. They don’t always agree with what he does or says but the closest he’s ever been to cruel or malicious was during the Anita Hill hearings. He’s...Joe. His personality and lack of artifice led to the right’s total inability to smear Biden during the campaign. Not for lack of trying, mind you.

They tried every single page in their big bad playbook of scumbag politics. Biden is corrupt. Biden is incompetent. Biden is too old. He’s sick and frail. He’s racist. He’s a rapist. He’s a paedophile. The right’s smear machine went into overdrive and still came up short. All the bile poured on Biden just sluiced off of him, leaving rank and file Republican voters not loving Biden but certainly not hating him. The press commented on this regularly as they also couldn’t seem to generate any scandals that lasted long enough to make a difference. It must have been infuriating for journalists (Chuck Todd) whose entire business model is predicated on creating false equivalences. What was so simple to do in 2016 turned out to be nigh impossible in 2020. Now that Biden is president, the same dynamic continues to play out (so far). Even though Biden just signed the American Rescue Plan (ARP), a massive bill more progressive than anything the country has seen since LBJ and FDR before him, it is simply impossible to label Biden as some kind of radical or extremist. He’s Joe Biden. Who are you kidding? Biden is even refusing to crawl down into the mud to accommodate the right’s culture war nonsense. The White House is refusing to engage with Trump, won’t get into twitter fights, and won’t take the bait from Fox or OAN. The discipline is astonishing. It’s nice to have adults in charge again. Now compare that to Trump’s four years and you can start to see why MAGAs hate Biden so much.

Trump: The Shit Sandwich Presidency

The entire Trump presidency was shaped by Trump’s pathetic need (and abject failure) to destroy his vastly more competent predecessor: Barack Obama. Trump’s entire post-presidency will be defined by the ease with which his successor, Joe Biden, outshines Trump. It’s been less than two months and it’s already painfully clear that Trump is going to be remembered as four years of crap between two historically superior administrations. He’s a ‘shit-sandwich’ president and everyone knows it. By this point in Trump’s presidency, he had already been forced to fire his compromised national security advisor, disgraced former General Michael Flynn. That was after firing acting AG Sally Yates, informally for exposing Flynn and formally for refusing to defend an unconstitutional ban on Muslims; a ban which sparked massive nationwide protests. It all went significantly downhill from there. I can’t list everything Trump ruined during his four years because I’m not writing a book. I expect there will be several on the shelves by next Christmas and the more definitive versions to be multi-volume affairs. But just to pick a few lowlights that have an apples to apples comparison to Biden:

When Covid first started to spread, and for months afterwards, Trump lied to the public about how dangerous it was. He said it was just like a flu and it wasn’t going to be a problem. Biden, on the other hand, has been upfront and honest that Covid is a killer to be taken seriously by everyone. Trump and his regime of soulless monsters deliberately withheld a government-led plan to deal with the spread of Covid, with the explicit intent of letting it hurt blue states and Demcratic governors. This directly led to over 500,000 dead Americans. Biden has begun to implement a national strategy. Many Republican governors are going to fight it tooth and nail in but not all of them. And even in red states, there will be large swathes that respond to a coherent message from the federal government on what to do and how. Trump let the economy implode and didn’t lift a finger to stop it. As long as the stock market was doing well, he really didn’t give a damn about the rest of us. Republicans begrudgingly passed the Cares Act but they larded it up with billions for their corporate donors and then Trump’s cronies abused the programs to “disappear” billions more. Biden and the Democrats put together and passed the $1.9 Trillion American Rescue Plan in 50 days. The ARP is crammed with dozens of different ways to help the poor, the middle class, small businesses, schools, and more. By way of further comparison, Republicans took 12 months to pass their $1.9 Trillion tax scam, the overwhelming amount of which went to making the rich richer. Trump had so many “infrastructure weeks” he could fill a calendar with them. Nothing was ever done and it's a humiliating punchline now.

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[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Excellent, detailed article, my dear Celerity! Thank you for posting it.

And it is right on. With details and all that!

It pulls no punches.

I hope it gets widely read!

[Celerity]

2. YW my dear Peggy. There is a lot more at think but it is subscription only.

Hope you are staying safe as houses!

Hugzzzz

Cel

[Johnny2X2X]

3. Joe has been stunningly successful so far

I don't think people fully appreciate the depth of his achievements so far, not even people here.

[dawg day]

4. Great points. Trump can be feared-- but never respected or liked.

And even some Trumpers realize that.

Reminds me of when my very elderly GOP and genteely racist aunt very slowly got used to the idea of a Black man as president. She started saying things like, "Well, he does look like a good father."

Very grudging. "I can see that he is a man of faith."

And then when Trump won, and on inauguration day, she said, "Okay. Obama-- he's a real gentleman. Trump just isn't."

(And of course she'd voted for Trump. But she recognized finally the difference.)

Now she's saying that some of her retirement home neighbors "think that Biden is a good man. I don't know. But they are saying that."

If I could just get her to VOTE for the decent human beings next time!

[LetMyPeopleVote]

5. Joe is going to be an amazing POTUS

[FoxNewsSucks]

6. Republicons held all three branches for MF45's first two years.

That massive tax cut is the only legislation they accomplished.

That wasn't a failure, it's just that that's all they wanted to accomplish.