Transcript for The Biden Legacy

0:00:00 Marc

[Music] This is "Extemporaneously" presented by Jacobin Brothers, I am Marc Jacobin. [Music] America loves a two-term president. The incumbent president's electoral advantage is so strong that until 2020, only three presidents had not been elected to a second term in the modern era.

And Joe Biden is only the second Democrat president to be denied a second bite at the apple.

Facing economy-crippling inflation, a stagnant economy, record bankruptcies, job laws, manufacturing competition from the far east, Russian expansion, an inept and demoralized military, religious violence in the Middle East, and record low approval ratings, Democrat president Jimmy Carter was trounced by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, who carried 44 states, including California and New York. Although many of the country's woes were beyond the control of a single political office, Jimmy's "awe, shucks" personality did not inspire confidence in the electorate.

The situation was not better for an aging Joe Biden, who faced the same problems as Jimmy Carter. And like Carter, compounded many of them by his own actions or lack thereof. Starting with a disastrous withdrawal of military support from Afghanistan in the early months of his presidency, to a career-ending debate with a revitalized Donald Trump in 2024. Joe Biden has become a case study in how not to be a president, and how to sabotage your own re-election campaign.

00:01:51 Marc

Joe Biden will be remembered by history, but not as the Democrat stalwart who ascended from senator to vice president, and finally to president, championing the policies of his own party until the bitter end. But as a frail man who was the victim of his own party's lust for power, who plied him with lies and deceptions all while making decisions on his behalf, that would bring another devastating loss to the Democrat party, and tarnish forever the Biden legacy.

I am Marc Jacobin, along with my brother James, and this is "Extemporaneously." James, whose fault is it that Donald Trump is president?

00:02:29 James

Joe Biden's, the Democrat party, the Democratic allied establishment, especially media and law enforcement.

00:02:36 Marc

So all of these people conspired to get Donald Trump re-elected?

00:02:41 James

Indirectly, yes.  

00:02:45 James

The fear of Donald Trump created an irresistible and irrational need to destroy Donald Trump's person and reputation. This made Trump into a martyr and manifested the victimhood that Trump had claimed since 2020.

00:03:00 Marc

And what about this red wave that I keep hearing about?  

00:03:03 James

Well, as I've said before, that was coming with or without Donald Trump. If the Democrat war machine doesn't resurrect Trump, it would have been a different Republican in office, perhaps Nikki Haley.

00:03:14 Marc

For an episode titled "The Biden Legacy" we're talking about Trump a lot.

00:03:17 James

Well, brace yourselves, everyone brace yourselves because here it comes. Donald Trump, your 47th president, is indeed Joe Biden's legacy. By attempting to destroy the man, by destroying Trump, they made him more powerful than ever, not unlike when Darth Vader killed Obi-Wan Kenobi.

00:03:40 Marc

So that makes Joe Biden Darth Vader and Hunter Biden Luke Skywalker.

00:03:46 James

Yeah, sure. I guess - if Luke Skywalker was a crack-smoking, gun-wielding felon.

00:03:51 Marc

Well, he did kiss his sister, but he didn't get her hooked on crack. James, the first Donald Trump presidency collapsed in 2020 under the strain of an escaped bio-weapon from a laboratory in China and Donald's uncontrollable mouth, culminating with the occupation of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. His Stop the Steal campaign filed 60 lawsuits in various jurisdictions, winning only one. Politically, Donald Trump was a dead duck. What happened to bring him back to life?

00:04:26 James

God, I miss the COVID era. A few things. The incessant lawfare. They brought felony charges against Trump in the last year and a half across four jurisdictions. Some of those cases have been dismissed. He was found guilty on falsifying business records, I guess, somehow related to the Stormy Daniels situation. The sentencing has been permanently delayed. There's still kind of the pending racketeering case down in Georgia. The Biden campaign, Biden historically bad debate before him is against Trump on June 27th of this last year. By the way, televised on CNN. The downfall of Trump are, excuse me, of Biden was televised on his favorite network.

00:05:06 Marc

Who needs, who needs enemies, right? Yeah, well, because you  

00:05:09 James

can't have a sitting president incoherent on television for the whole entire world to see most importantly, the voting electorate, most importantly, moderate to independent voters. They're in the upper Midwest. Didn't seem to affect George W. Bush's popularity. In which regard?

00:05:26 Marc

An incoherent president on national television. I think there's a difference between someone who's

00:05:32 James

not a fancy polished public speaker, such as George W. Bush, and someone who was showing signs of pick your poison on whatever form of mental deterioration Joe Biden may or may not have had. He clearly had one which has now been admitted by everyone around him and making that man president

00:05:47 Marc

of the United States. The incessant attacks on Donald Trump after he left office seemed to revitalize his base. Donald Trump was playing very much the victim and in fact had been the victim of a number of salacious and fallacious accusations against him starting with the Russia-Gate thing that happened even before he took office in 2017. And Donald Trump made that part of his tune, right? Donald Trump is being unfairly targeted by his political opponents. Okay, fine. But the longer time marched on, the more

00:06:27 James

and more that became reality. Well, it became reality for him personally and for his Trump 45 presidency. But what it did to the American public, especially the moderate voters, was they became tone-deaf and tuned out to the constant – Marc, 95% of all television media segments done on Trump is negative. And so it just got tuned out like an old record that you never get tired of listening to.

00:06:51 Marc

And what channel would I tune in to find positive comments on Donald Trump, just out of morbid curiosity?

00:06:57 James

From what I've heard, it's, uh, the old Fox News television network. Fox News, all right.

00:07:02 Marc

So, on Fox News you have a 5% chance of hearing something positive about Donald Trump. And that's probably most likely when he's on the program.

00:07:11 James

Well, really what it comes down to, they just wouldn't leave Donald Trump alone. The fear of Trump, the fear of an orange planet became the only public policy statement, the Democratic Party and the left wing of the American populist, especially the media. The only issue they ran on for nine years is "we're not Donald Trump". And they misread, not the tea leaves, misread the blinking billboard that said, the American public doesn't care what you think. If they just would have left him alone, when he left office, he'd still be out there wandering in the

00:07:41 Marc

wilderness shouting into the darkness that the 2020 election  

00:07:44 James

will stolen from him. Now at this point, whether or not Trump believes it was stolen from him, whether or not it actually was, is irrelevant, because the way they conducted themselves, the entire Democratic Party apparatus, and their co-conspirators in the media and the big television networks called corporate media, legacy media, whatever, they conspired to keep him in the public eye. And the very thing they tried to destroy slung shot back on them. And they made Trump bigger and more powerful and more popular, by the way, than ever. Because when Trump first came nine years ago, he really didn't have a platform. It was just him and some quasi ideas about immigration at the southern border, building some wall. Nine years later, he has a platform, he has an agenda, he has political allies, he has the popular vote, he has a record number amount in the raw vote for a Republican candidate. They built him into a mythological figure who now will take office on January 20th. It's their own fault. Whether you like Trump or not, whether

00:08:44 Marc

you want to admit it or not, Trump is a figure of historical proportions. We have the first presidential candidate who has run three times in a row and increased his vote count each time he ran. Not only is that a historical first, it should be a historical impossibility. Losers are generally regarded as old news in the American political system. You have one, maybe two chances to get a bite at the Oval Office. And Donald Trump was given three chances and the people gave it to him. Three consecutive campaigns in the post-World War II era, in

00:09:24 James

the television era, and that's all that really matters because that's what we're talking about. Hillary Clinton got two chances. In '08, 2016, Joe Biden got chances, kind of, in the 80s and then was kind of handed the presidency because of COVID and Donald Trump himself back in 2020. But usually, Marc, when you lose a presidential election, you're toast. Your political career is not just over, you just disappear. Has anyone seen Al Gore lately. Where's Mitt Romney? Mitt Romney most recently said, "No one's going to remember Mitt Romney." And for the first time in my adult life, I agree with Mitt Romney.

00:10:00 Marc

Who?  

00:10:02 James

Exactly. Stay on track, here, James. For this part of the conversation, as far as the Biden legacy in part, the biggest thing he'll be remembered for is Donald Trump. Biden got the presidency because of Donald Trump and Biden lost the presidency, the House, the Senate, the majority of the American public, the political mandate, the political vision, and control of the country for Democrats for a generation. That would be his legacy and the name of that is

00:10:31 Marc

Trump. And it's Joe Biden and company. This didn't happen in a vacuum. This didn't happen by itself. In fact, the level of actual conscious involvement by Joe Biden would be debatable. This happened because of the Joe Biden/Democrat machine, which is the political machine that is the Democrat party and all of their allies and apparatchik across private industry and across entertainment media.

All of the people who got together and said, "Implicitly or explicitly, Orange Man Bad, Orange Man Die." And that was their mantra, especially for the last four years. To the point that in the two weeks leading up to the election, Donald Trump was compared to Adolf Hitler more than 5,000 times in print and television media. 5,000 times they tried to tell us that if you elect Trump, you will get Adolf Hitler in the Oval Office. And to your point, the people had tuned out. Nobody cared. They got tired of the of the Cry Wolf syndrome.

Okay, we've heard it all before. Trump bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, give us a break. Alternatively, I think they made a huge mistake of not providing the voters with someone that they viewed as a viable alternative.

00:11:51 James

Not just that. I think you said it a minute ago when Orange Man die, and he almost did die. And I think the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which came within a quarter an inch of ending Trump's life live on national TV. For the first time, I think a lot of people outside of Trump's base and just casual political observers and citizens and possible voters saw Trump as human for the first time in a real human interaction when he stands up after being shot, overpowers his secret service detail, thrusts his fist in the air with blood on his face and says, ""Fight! fight! fight!".

This got the attention of everybody, because everyone thinks about their own mortality. And for a 78 year old man to stand up in the moment and say, "Fight!", he now becomes human. He's not just an Orange Man, a figure to be pilloried and mocked and made fun of and lay the problems for the entirety of humanity upon his shoulders. He now becomes human.

And right around the same time, Joe Biden had to drop out of the race because he was fired by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and George Clooney. And like I said in a show we did on July 27th. It doesn't matter who replaces Joe Biden. I said it would be Kamala Harris and she would lose significantly. And this all happened. And this was easy to predict. And I'm going to say this again and again, the Democrats and specifically Joe Biden and the inner circle around him that was actually running the country and not him did this to themselves. They want to say it's racism and sexism. We didn't get our message across.

So instead of Orange Man bad, what the American people voted on was inflation bad, wokism bad, the border bad, international wars bad, a $30 trillion debt bad. The Democratic elite is having the minority groups on their head and saying vote for us because we're good. Well, those groups thought that bad. So they wanted to say Orange Man bad and the American voters looked at their lives in the state of America for an independent said, no, that's bad and you all have to go.

00:13:49 Marc

It comes back to it's the economy stupid.  

00:13:53 James

That's a part of it. I'd add to the great legendary ragin' Cajun James Carvill though and I'd say this, not just the economy bad, the culture bad, foreign wars bad, debt bad, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. The Democratic party became the party of stupid. All the things that they had projected coming out of the COVID era were all stupid and I hate to say it so bluntly for political comment, but it is. Their campaign was stupid, their candidate behaved stupidly. They ran on no issues.

They destroyed the southern border and they thought the American people would just buy into "Well, Trump's Hitler". So we'll put up with being bankrupt. We'll put up with $5 gallons of gas and $6 cartons of eggs. And we'll put up that because the alternative is Hitler. That was so dumb from the very get-go and I said it over

00:14:47 Marc

and over and I'll say it again here. Once you declare someone  

00:14:50 James

Hitler and you put that on the cover of magazines with Trump with the little Hitler mustache, what exactly do you do after that, especially when you lose the popular vote, 30 states, the electoral college, the Senate and the House. What's your campaign slogan next time? There is not one. This just becomes your legacy. Since this show is called the Biden legacy and it's not a final thought, it's an interim thought on this show. There is no Biden legacy.

00:15:18 Marc

No, because if you rewind history, there are certain inevitabilities, things that wouldn't change. The one thing that wouldn't change is that Joe Biden is mentally incapable of running a campaign. We now know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he was mentally incapable of actually being president for his term. With or without Trump, you're going to see a Republican in office in 2025. The reason that it is Trump is a direct result of the actions of the Joe Biden political machine and their insistence that Trump be destroyed.

00:15:57 James

Yeah. Whoever was actually running the country was it first Lady Jill Biden, was it his chief of staff, was it his cabinet, was it the close group of advisors around him? We don't know. And another part of the Biden legacy.

00:16:09 Marc

Well, James, we haven't seen Cousin Eddie around lately.  

00:16:12 James

Cousin Eddie could do better than old President Joe. Marc, a lot of times in life and a personal relationship, the first impression is the most important thing in a job interview, romantic relationship, an interaction. People remember you by the first interaction, but for a politician and a president, they remember your last actions.

And on his way out the door, Joe Biden will be remembered for partying 37 mass murders and rapists at the federal level, not partying the community and their death sentences. Be remembered for partying his son. Be remembered for trying to start a nuclear war with Russia. Be remembered for trying to jam up the world, the people and the incoming Trump 47 administration. These are the things he'll be remembered for.

He'll be remembered for the horrendous withdrawal of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. And when we look up and see on the news media, Afghani people falling off of that American military cargo plane. And the next day, someone asked Joe Biden, what about all the people dying? Joe Biden says, well, no, no people dying today. To the point where he never said the names in public of the 13 service members that perished at the Abbey gate in that bombing or the hundreds of Afghans that died that day. And then when he met with the families, he just wanted to talk about his son Beau.

So Joe Biden was the equivalent of Donald Trump in ego, narcissism, arrogance, but the difference when we were promised in 2020 is that he knew how to run the country, that the adults were back in charge, that the Obama people were back. Joe Biden's a career 50 year politician. He'll guide us through COVID. He'll pick up the pieces out of the ashes of George Floyd and heal race relations. The economy will be better. Things will get back to normal. 2016 was a blip on the radar. These are all the things that we were promised. Joseph Biden's a moderate. He's reasonable. He's rational. He knows how to run the government.

Well, it turns out four years later, not only was none of that true, they were all lies from the get-go. Every single one of them. They governed from the far left. They destroyed the Afghan people. Weekened our political image on the national stage so much that the first thing Putin did was invade the Ukraine. He couldn't keep the Middle East under wraps like Trump did. He couldn't keep Putin in the box like Trump did. And he couldn't handle inflation. And here's the other thing, Marc. Inflation was probably inevitable, as we said in our show of May of 2020. It's how you lead through it as a president.

What you don't do is what Joe Biden did in the Oval Office a couple years ago come out and say, well, sometimes the people just don't know how good they have it. He actually said that. In the small room he was in, when they were given him stacks of paper and telling him how great he was and oh, you've passed the most legislation since LBJ and FDR.

Well, that'd be great if you were running for president in 1970 or maybe even 1996 back when the American people believed in the two-party system and the cohesive branches of government where you could pass legislation and the president could sign it into law and enforce that as law. And then it could be administered through the executive branch and down to the states. And that the American people could benefit from this legislation. So when you name something, the Build Back Better Act or the Inflation Reduction Act, it does nothing but hurt the country's infrastructure. Put us into more debt, raise the prices through the roof and then you and your people come out and say, oh, the American people don't know how good they've got it. So if you coupled that with everything they tried to do and destroy their political opponent, which was Donald Trump and the fact that they ran the country into the ground both foreign and domestically.

And again, these same people were surprised on election night when Donald Trump beat the living hell out of them on every level and you're really surprised by this. The populous movement you were trying to hold back by destroying Donald's Donald Trump came in the form of a red wave. It's unbelievable to me that the Democrats can see this coming.

00:20:12 Marc

So based on that point-by-point breakdown you've given us of all of the failures of the Biden administration and virtual, if not actual crimes against the people, it seems that when that's stacked up against, oh, say, covering up a crime committed by some second rate criminals in a hotel across the river, this would seem to be so much worse than that.

00:20:35 James

And worse than a man who was attempting to cover up an affair with a porn star by maybe possibly routing funds from the campaign to pay her off or something like that. It would be so much worse than that. The American people suffered greatly in the last four years. And the pain is still not over. Inflation is still hovering too high. The supply chain got all screwed up because of COVID and the way the Biden administration handled that.

That's to say nothing for the fact, and I mean nothing for the fact that when they sent everybody home for COVID, and that's how Joe Biden got elected, and they realized that people are willing to give up their civil rights for a couple of $1,200 checks from the inflation government, and that people just don't care and that people aren't paying attention. They figured out, well, what would they care if we did this? What would they care if we had boys play girl sports? What would they care if we actually opened the border and let every single person who could make it through the southern and northern border in? And then let's say they get here, and if anyone raises their hand and says, "Excuse me, what's going on? Let's just call them racist."

00:21:38 Marc

So, what we've heard from the Trump opposition since his election is that, oh, Trump is going to overplay his hand. That sounds like what the Democrats did.

00:21:46 James

They overplayed their hand. They were in power, they were going to get his way with as much as they could get away with while they had power, and now it's come back to bite them. They misread their slim presidential victory in 2020. They won the presidency in 2020 on the strength of 43,000 votes in the blue wall area. They've now lost that by a quarter million.

So they got their very narrow victory because Biden's inflated raw vote, popular vote, because no states had proper mechanisms in place to count authenticate mail-in ballots. The 2020 election wasn't stolen, but the raw vote numbers were pumped up because of the inadequacies of the mail-in system at the time. So all the states had four years to figure out how to do mail-in votes, how to count them, how to authenticate the voter, and the Republicans got on board and decided that they would start encouraging their people to vote early as well.

So the 2020 election wasn't stolen. What happened was the popular vote of Joe Biden was inflated in a couple of big states that gave him that appearance of that massive popular vote victory, but the electoral vote wasn't as big as Trump's in 2016, and he won the blue wall with half as many votes as Trump did in total as far as the victory margins. And they just assumed that they won 47 states and that that popular vote was Reagan in '84, but it wasn't. It was just a reaction to COVID, Donald Trump's big mouth, as you say, and the confusion of trying to have a national election during a once in a hundred year pandemic, and the far left decided that the American people wanted to be governed like this is China.

00:23:28 Marc

And so Biden didn't win in 2020 as much as Trump lost, which is the story very often in elections. They weren't voting in Biden because they loved Biden. They were voting out Trump because they were tired of Trump. They thought maybe someone else could do a better job. Maybe that someone was Joe Biden, but it wasn't because they were excited about it.

00:23:49 James

Nobody voted for Joe Biden. They voted for what they thought would be normalcy in 2020, and they voted against Donald Trump. No one voted for Joe Biden. And four years later, the reason they thought they could replace Biden, Marc, with anybody, is because they were running polls, and in every poll it said, "Unnamed Democratic candidate would beat Trump by four points." The problem is when you name the Democratic candidate, and the name is VP Harris. The VP Harris still got 48 percent of the popular vote, but they weren't voting for VP Harris.

Again, those people were voting against Trump, but the difference this time, and you're the one that called this out, about 3 million people who voted for Biden switched to vote for Trump in 2024. Plus he brought the base back. Plus he bought the moderates and the working class unions from the blue wall with him. Plus he bought young men with him. He increased the Latino vote, the black vote, his female percentage of the vote. He increased in every single demographic, but the most important demographic he increased was the demographic called the American people, because you can subsection people down into this group, or that group, or this group, or that group, but in the end, they're all American voters, and the American voting majority went with Donald Trump.

They voted for Donald Trump. They didn't vote against Kamala Harris, and that's why he won so significantly. People asked four years ago, how did Joe Biden get 82 million votes? Well, that's no longer the question. The question is, how did Vice President Harris drop 6.3 million votes with Hitler running on the other end of the ballot, with democracy on the ballot?

00:25:25 Marc

How do you lose running against Hitler? That's a very good question.  

00:25:30 James

Yeah, especially with the historical context of Hitler. In Germany, in the 30s, people didn't know what Hitler was. Well, in that historic, we know what Hitler was, and when you make the comparison to a sitting, not sitting, but a former American president running again for president, people know exactly what you're saying. And so, either NBC is lying or they're vastly wrong. On election night, the NBC election polls showed early in the night. The number one issue the voters they talked to allegedly at the NBC exit poll was this.

Democracy was on the ballot. Oh, really? It was. So if you claim democracy was on the ballot across all your media platforms, if Joe Biden said it, if VP Harris said it, if the entire Harris campaign said it, Democracy's on the ballot, if the NBC exit poll is correct, the democracy is on the ballot, then the American people thought Democracy's on the ballot and they thought Democracy would be in better hands with Donald J. Trump, then vice president Harris. They lost with their own campaign slogan, Marc. They put democracy on the ballot and they got their ass kicked.

00:26:36 Marc

We've been talking Extemporaneously.  

00:26:43 Announcer

This has been "Extemporaneously" presented by Jacobin Brothers™. For more episodes and content,

00:26:51 Announcer

visit JacobinBrothers.com.