It’s important not to read too much into the words Joe Biden speaks in public. Any objective observer can tell the president is not in full control of his facilities, his facts or his delivery.
Even if Biden manages to stumble through a teleprompter reading without some kind of major gaffe, it’s not like the speeches explain Biden’s ideas or positions. He is a puppet, just an ineffectual mouthpiece for the covert handlers running the White House behind the scenes.
But every now and then, when Biden improvises, some truth of his situation might accidentally slip out.
When he describes Donald Trump as a once and potential future president, and then is compelled to make a mock prayer about it, it suggests the idea is active in whatever remains of Biden’s mind. Not only is he thinking it, but it might scare him, too.
Biden was discussing his potentially illegal scheme to cancel $400 billion in student loan debt at the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia on Wednesday. The debt cancellation case is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court.
Recalling debt issues discussed during the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said, “You may remember — I was running for office at the time, but you all might remember that the — I had a big fight with the former president and maybe future president.”
Biden, who is nominally Catholic despite supporting extremist policies on abortion and LGBT issues, made the gesture of the cross and said, “Bless me father,” as if praying, or confessing.
The small audience in attendance, identified as Democrats and union members by Mediaite, responded with a smattering of boos and other sounds of distress.
The president then tried to wave it off as a joke.
“Anyway, now, all kidding aside,” he said before going back to rambling about the administration’s radical budget priorities.
This is no laughing matter for Biden.
Even though the next presidential election is over a year away, preferences are already solidifying.
A Morning Consult poll released Tuesday showed Trump’s lead over other announced and potential GOP candidates had increased. He received 53 percent support, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 28 percent. All others were in the single digits.
Not only is Trump leading the other Republicans, but an Emerson College Polling survey of registered voters released Feb. 28 said Trump was the only GOP contender leading Biden head to head.
The former president had 46 percent to 42 percent for Biden, with 7 percent opting for a third possibility and 5 percent undecided.
Both DeSantis and Haley trailed Biden in the poll.
It’s a very real scenario that the president could end up facing Trump again, without the cover of the widespread mail-in balloting of the pandemic in 2020.
It was foolish for Biden to inject Trump’s surging polling into his speech, especially when surveys show only 37 percent of Democrat voters want Biden to run again.
Pondering the former president’s prospects only starts comparisons and competition stories much earlier, and Biden doesn’t seem to be up for a marathon campaign.
He might want to get serious about practicing his prayers if he faces a rematch with Trump.
Facts First: This claim is false. More debt was added in the eight years under President Barack Obama, with Biden as vice president, than in the four years under Trump. The Trump era set the record for most debt added in a single four-year presidential term, but Biden made it sound here like the Trump era set the record even when you include two-term presidents like Obama. (Biden correctly said in his State of the Union address last week that he was referring to a record for debt added in a four-year period.) Also, while Biden mentioned “record deficits,” plural, under Trump, only one Trump-era deficit, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020, was actually a record; the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 were all lower than every deficit in Obama’s first term, when the country was emerging from a major recession and Obama approved some policies that increased deficits.
There are various ways to measure the debt. Using the basic headline measure, total public debt, the debt increased about $9.3 trillion over Obama’s eight years, from about $10.6 trillion on the day he was inaugurated in 2009 to about $19.9 trillion on the day Trump took office in 2017. The debt increased by about $7.8 trillion over Trump’s four years, to about $27.8 trillion when Biden replaced him in 2021.
It’s also important to note that it is an oversimplification to blame presidents alone for debt incurred during their tenures.
A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors – such as the creation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid decades ago – and by circumstances out of a president’s control, such as an inherited recession for Obama and the global Covid-19 pandemic for Trump.
And while some debt can fairly be attributed to a single party – Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, unanimously opposed by congressional Democrats, were a significant contributor – other debt is bipartisan. Notably, the debt spiked in 2020 after Trump approved trillions in emergency pandemic relief spending that Congress had passed with overwhelming Democratic and Republican support.
Biden was right when he said that the deficit increased every year under Trump. But the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 under Trump were all below $1 trillion – lower than the deficits in fiscal 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 under the Obama-Biden administration. The deficit then roughly tripled, to a record level of about $3.1 trillion, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020.