Joe Biden is awful at predictions.
Back in the 1980s, then-Senator Biden believed that President Ronald Reagan was nuts for his rollback strategy of Soviet communism, refusing to believe that Reagan’s argument that the USSR would collapse during his presidency.
Then, in 1991, he opposed Desert Storm because he thought it was a doomed war.
But in 2003, Sen. Biden voted to authorize the use of military force against Iraq because he believed that President George W. Bush had an effective strategy for victory against Saddam Hussein.
Back in 1991, Biden made another troubling prediction.
According to a speech he gave at the Detroit College of Law, the future forty-sixth president asserted that he’d be dead-and-buried by the year 2020.
Well, Biden was wrong about that, too.
Not only is Biden still kicking but he’s running the country (right into the ground). Yet, there is an undercurrent to Biden’s premonitions that should not be ignored. It’s not simply that Biden should be ignored because he’s so often wrong in his prognostications.
It’s because, in being wrong, Biden betrays a deeper truth about America’s circumstances at the time in which he makes these predictions.
During the 2020 presidential race, for example, Mr. Biden ran around telling voters that he was merely a “transition candidate.” His remarks back then heavily implied that, even if he won the White House, at some future date, Joe Biden would not be president—not because he lost an election, but because he would be made to stand aside and allow for a newer, younger leader to arise.
What’s Really Happening
The greater question we must ask ourselves is whether Joe Biden was wrong in his predictions or if he was simply inaccurate about the timing?
Werner von Braun is believed to have once quipped to a colleague during the creation of the V2 Rocket that “The rocket works brilliantly. It’s just landing on the wrong planet!”
Similarly, Joe Biden’s prognostications might not be as wrong as they seem, they’re just getting the timing wrong.
Go back to his Iraq decisions.
His initial conclusion about Iraq being a doomed war from the start in 1991 was accurate. It’s just that he got the years wrong. After all, when historians look back at that conflict, they will not separate Desert Storm in 1991 from the Iraq War in 2003.
Instead, they will likely view these as being part of a continuous conflict against Saddam Hussein. After President George H.W. Bush ultimately refused to remove Saddam Hussein from power in 1991 after successfully liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, many Washington elites spent the next decade plotting how they’d rid the region of Saddam.
The Iraq War of 2003 was the apotheosis of the movement began in 1991 to oust Saddam. So, Biden gets the timing wrong often. He doesn’t get the end wrong always, though.
Joe Biden is Slipping
Consider this: Joe Biden’s health is clearly slipping. He might not have cancer or some other life-threatening illness that will take him away from his duties right now. But, at the ripe age of 80, even with access to the best healthcare in the world, Joe Biden is nowhere near as healthy as he was in 1991.
Age is the greatest thief of health in the long-run.
Joe Biden is still alive, yes. Although, between his various slips and verbal gaffes in public, it is obvious that the man isn’t quite all there. Whether Biden has actual dementia or is simply suffering through age-related cognitive decline, his best days are likely behind him. This will impact his ability to lead the country.
And just what was Biden talking about in 2020 when he described himself as a “transition candidate”? Was that just another one of those unfortunate, Bidenisms resulting from his advanced age and constantly being made to speak in public? Or was there something deeper at play?
Obama’s Third Term (No, Really)
The current joke on the Right is that Joe Biden is nothing more than Barack Obama’s third term in office. In many respects, this is a truism. Biden has hired mostly former Obama Administration staffers. His foreign policy and economic programs look like glorified versions of that which Mr. Obama had championed while in office.
Biden was the greatest beneficiary of the Administrative State’s war on former President Donald J. Trump. Thanks to what many on the right consider the interference of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI, as a candidate during the contentious 2020 Presidential Election cycle, Biden never actually had to account for his wayward son, Hunter Biden’s alleged illicit international influence peddling scheme.
Now, as president, the FBI and DOJ are pursuing Donald Trump to great effect by smothering him in a series of indictments for a bunch of alleged crimes that could ultimately derail Trump’s reelection campaign in 2024.
But, who put the DOJ and FBI in the position of behaving as actors policing the domestic political scene on behalf of the Democratic Party?
That was Obama. It was the Obama era leaders of the FBI and DOJ who pursued Trump on erroneous claims that he was a Russian spy. They were the ones who lied on applications for warrants in the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts.
Biden himself had dutifully served as Obama’s right-hand man for both terms that Obama was in office.
Former President Obama is on the record as lamenting that he wished he could have the power of the presidency without having to be president publicly. Well, Biden allowed for that to occur. We know that Biden routinely communicates with his old boss, too.
It’s not just to catch up with the forty-fourth president.
For Obama’s purposes, his influence is felt everywhere in Washington—and has been since he left office in January of 2017. Remember, Obama was the first former president since Woodrow Wilson to remain living in Washington, D.C. While encamped just up the road from Donald Trump’s White House, Obama’s mansion in the posh Kalorama neighborhood of northwest D.C. was a revolving door of former Obama Administration advisers.
These advisers were not simply hanging out with their old boss. They were plotting. And undermining the forty-fifth president. These individuals are now working for the nominal forty-sixth president. Biden’s age and declining health were perfect tools for Obama, in terms of being able to manipulate the current president into doing Obama’s bidding.
Joe Biden Isn’t the Best Puppet for Obama Anymore
Alas, Biden is now becoming a liability.
In 2020, before he endorsed Biden, Barack Obama was a great fan of Kamala Harris. The former California senator’s presidential campaign that year collapsed early during the Democratic Party’s primary. But she remained a favorite of Mr. Obama’s. She cannot win a national election if her life depends on it.
Harris could easily scoot into the Oval Office if—and when—President Biden opts to remove himself from power.
Already the whisper campaign is on. But it’s not to replace him with California’s Governor Gavin Newsom. Instead, it’s to push Biden over the finish line on November 5, 2024, and then have him step down—thereby becoming the “transition candidate” that Biden had described himself as in 2020.
Biden’s predictions, therefore, are not entirely wrong. And they often highlight something deeper at play. Americans everywhere should be deeply disturbed by the fact that we are effectively being run by a shadow government. Unless we recognize this fact, and we can do so just by listening to the president’s own comments over the years, we’ll never get our republic back.
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (Encounter Books), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
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