The line Joe Biden used to put into nearly every big speech — “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future” — is a long way from what he says in private now.The line Joe Biden used to put into nearly every big speech — “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future” — is a long way from what he says in private now.
These days, multiple people who’ve spoken to him over the last year say, Biden often punctuates conversations with: “You think we can actually come back from this?”
The 83-year-old Biden continues to feel out a post-presidency that may prove to be one of the shortest in history and is already one of the most complicated.
There are days when Biden is heartbroken, indignant or in disbelief about what is happening as President Donald Trump — the man he defeated in 2020 — returned and moved not just to tear down his accomplishments, but to dig in with petty insults like the autopen photograph he put in Biden’s spot in the “Presidential Walk of Fame” installed at the White House.
To be fair the voters and non-voters have a large share of the responsibility for this situation that’s how a democracy works.
Yes and we voted in people to represent us by upholding the law and following their oaths to office and they failed at representing our interests miserably.
We voted in Trump and his gang with majorities in the house and senate.
After voting in Obama, who didn’t want anything to do with prosecuting Bush & Cheney for warcrimes, and then Biden, who didn’t want anything to do with prosecuting Trump, obviously. But I guess those times don’t count for whatever fucking reason??
American reluctance to hold powerful figures accountable isn’t a good thing and we’ve literally just left the question of whether you can prosecute a President at all dangling since we allowed Nixon to resign and fly away. That’s qualitatively a bad thing. We have had decades of chances to fix this problem and it doesn’t matter who we vote in, no one is dismantling the horrific things that are created in the meantime.
For example, instead of questioning why the TSA and it’s security theater exists or whether or not the DHS was a good idea at all, we have people going “Oh but the TSA agents aren’t getting paid!” They miss something like 60% of illicit items anyway, and if someone wanted to kill a mass amount of people they would just have to set off a bomb in the long security lines leading up to the airports. It’s been security theater since the fucking Bush era, but it’s become so normalized we’re whining about people who are violating the fourth amendment against unlawful search and seizure by choosing us at random for an unlawful search of our bags not getting paid! Boo hoo! These people who helped throw the fourth amendment out the window two decades ago now aren’t getting paid! Cry me a fucking river.
We voted, numerous times, as a country, to hold this kind of corruption to account and numerous times the people in charge failed us miserably, all the way back to Nixon.
That’s one hell of a detour away from the conversation we were having.
Holding Presidents accountable is a detour? Violation of constitutional norms is a detour? No wonder we’re in this position, because apparently history and things that lead to this outcome don’t matter!