Joe Biden’s presidency ends on January 20, 2025. There will likely be a media stampede to hallow his reign and trumpet his virtues. But Biden perpetually trampled his January 20, 2021, oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden declared, “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they keep moving.” And he kept moving until his own political party dumped him. Later in 2022, President Biden proclaimed that “liberty is under assault.” But he was referring solely to a few court rulings of which he disapproved, not to the federal supremacy he championed for almost 50 years in the Senate and the White House.
The absurdity of the Biden reign was epitomized in July when he was browbeaten into ending his reelection campaign. In Biden’s 11-minute speech announcing that decision, everything was sacred — including the Oval Office (“this sacred space”), “the sacred cause of this country,” “the “sacred task of perfecting our Union,” and the “sacred idea” of America. Biden announced that “I revere this office” — a hint that viewers should revere him, too. Biden has worshiped political power his entire life — and so it was no surprise that religiosity suffused his valedictory address.
Biden asked: “Does character in public life still matter?” That signaled that most of the cover-ups of his abuses and potential kickbacks will continue at least until January. No wonder Hunter Biden had a big smile as he sat just outside of the video sweep in the Oval Office. But Biden never permitted his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to release the audiotape of Biden’s bumbling interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur — perhaps the single biggest step toward Biden’s expulsion from American political life.
Biden told viewers of that July spiel: “Nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.” So Democratic Party bosses had no choice but to nullify 15 million primary ballots cast for Biden and jam a replacement candidate down the nation’s throat. For years, the Democratic Party has equated vanquishing or destroying Trump with saving democracy, justifying any tactic — fair or foul — to thwart him. Ginning up bogus criminal charges to get Trump locked away from voters? Check. Using the FBI and other federal agencies to target anyone who is too enthusiastic about MAGA? Check.
Perhaps Biden’s biggest innovation was his doctrine that preserving democracy requires destroying freedom of speech. His appointees launched the Disinformation Governance Board to police Americans’ criticisms of government and plenty of other topics. The Orwellian name helped torpedo that board, but that was not even the tip of the iceberg of federal abuses. A federal appeals court slammed the Biden administration for conducting an unconstitutional censorship “pressure campaign designed to coerce social-media companies into suppressing speakers, viewpoints, and content disfavored by the government.” That same court found that censors especially targeted speech by conservatives and Republicans.
For at least 15 years, Biden has relied on a two-step routine — ruthlessly vilifying his opponents and then appealing to “our better angels,” a phrase recycled from Lincoln’s first inaugural address. Biden lulled listeners into assuming he is personally one of those “better angels” as he flailed anyone in the way of his latest power grab.
From portraying any Republican who wanted to cut domestic spending as a “terrorist” in 2011, to claiming that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people back “in chains” in the 2012 presidential campaign, to endlessly misrepresenting the 2017 violence at a Charlottesville protest, Biden out-Nixoned Nixon. The media has sainted Biden on civil rights despite his championing crime legislation in the Senate that vastly increased the number of black and Hispanic citizens sent to prison. In a 2019 piece headlined “Joe Biden and the Era of Mass Incarceration,” the New York Times hyped Biden’s favorite fix: “Lock the S.O.B.s up!”
In his final full month before being demoted to lame-duck status, Biden made one last lunge to portray himself as a savior of the Constitution. After a Supreme Court decision blocked rigged political prosecutions of former President Trump, an outraged Biden condemned the decision. Seemingly speaking down from Mount Olympus, Biden declared that presidents “face moments where you need the wisdom to respect the limits of the power of the office of the presidency.” But then he claimed, “I know I will respect the limits of the presidential power, as I have for 3½ years.” That line obliterated all the president’s lofty pretenses.
While Biden piously invoked the “rule of law” in that brief statement, he consistently behaved as if his good intentions entitled him to dictatorial power. Biden speedily followed up by proposing a “No One Is Above the Law” constitutional amendment. But Biden would have been more honest if he labeled his pitch the “No One Is Above the Law Except Me” amendment.
In the same week that Biden trumpeted his proposed amendment, he announced new schemes to avoid complying with the Supreme Court ruling forbidding him from illegally and unilaterally forgiving hundreds of billions of dollars of federal student debt owed by 30 million people. Biden then openly bragged that the decision striking down his program “didn’t stop me” from canceling student-loan debt with one new scheme after another. No wonder almost half of student-loan debtors are not bothering to pay what they owe Uncle Sam.
The Biden administration presumed that federal policymakers are an elite automatically entitled to domineer other Americans. For example, Biden championed Covid vaccines as panaceas for the pandemic, promising that people who got injections would not get Covid. After vaccines massively failed to prevent Covid infections, the White House strong-armed the Food and Drug Administration to speedily bestow full approval on the Pfizer vax regardless of myocarditis problems. Biden then dictated that 100 million American adults must get those vaccines.
In January 2022, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s vaccine mandate for 84 million employees of large private companies. The Supreme Court also struck down Biden’s illegal extension of a Covid-era eviction moratorium, scoffing at the administration’s attempt to justify the edict via an old law dealing with “fumigation and pest extermination.” But the president’s team perpetuated the Covid emergency and all the additional powers for the White House as long as possible. Team Biden even dictated that two-year-old children in Head Start must wear masks all day. But that wasn’t dictatorial because children were permitted to briefly remove the masks when they ate meals.
Americans have long groused about TSA agents browbeating them to “show your papers” prior to groin-grabbing “enhanced pat-downs.” The Biden administration solved the paperwork problem by permitting illegal aliens to board domestic flights merely by showing their arrest warrants from the Department of Homeland Security. Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) growled: “If an Idahoan gets a speeding ticket, they can’t use the ticket to board a plane, so why does the president seem to think an illegal immigrant’s arrest warrant is a valid form of identification to board a plane?”
TSA wizards recently launched a social media campaign to ridicule their victims, demeaning any American who does not approach a TSA checkpoint practically stripped down like a convict entering a prison shower. The failures of TSA’s Whole Body Scanners are legendary, but that didn’t deter Biden TSA policymakers from launching a vast facial-recognition system that even the Washington Post condemned.
Biden weaponized federal law at the same time he exempted himself and his appointees from the statute book. FBI agents conducted a heavily televised raid in August 2022 on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, seizing 33 boxes of evidence and documents. Five months later, the Justice Department announced that Biden may have also wrongfully stored or possessed numerous classified documents in his home and offices. Trump was swiftly indicted for his alleged offenses, while Biden was effectively absolved because jurors would likely see him as an elderly man with a bad memory. Although Biden was unfit to prosecute, he remained fit to possess almost boundless power over America and much of the world — at least until Democratic Party poohbahs and billionaire donors carried out a de facto coup ending his reelection campaign.
Biden is seeking to portray himself as the patron saint of the Rule of Law. The president spoke in July 2024 as if he worshipped legal procedures, but his devotion is selective.
Biden has stretched executive power far beyond reason — from his attempt to use the school-lunch program to force public schools to permit mixed-gender showers and bathrooms to his perversion of Title IX to risk crippling girls’ sports. To complement those power grabs, the Biden White House continually expanded the target list for federal investigations and surveillance — including angry parents at school board meetings and frustrated young guys supposedly prone to “involuntary celibate violent extremism.”
The FBI has illegally wiretapped more than 3 million Americans in recent years, but the Biden administration recently torpedoed Congressional efforts to curb that surveillance crime spree. The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.” Multiple FBI offices across the nation may have secretly infiltrated church services to “identify the bad Catholics” (those who prefer traditional church services), according to FBI memos and whistleblowers. An FBI analysis justifying the targeting of Catholics portrayed rosaries as extremist symbols that helped justify federal targeting. The FBI aided Team Biden in portraying “white supremacy” as the nation’s greatest terror threat by arresting legions of people who were guilty of “parading without a permit” during the January 6 protest at the Capitol. The FBI classified all 1,000 people arrested on charges linked to January 6 as domestic terrorists — including peaceful grandmothers. No wonder people joke that FBI now stands for “Following Biden’s Instructions.”
In a spiel last summer before Democratic Party leaders labeled him mentally unfit, Biden invoked “the character of George Washington,” which he said “defined the presidency” with his belief that “power was limited, not absolute.” Biden claimed that “character” was the only restraint on White House power — suggesting that Americans were luckier than ever to have him in the Oval Office. Biden pirouetting as a constitutional vestal virgin is on par with Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize after ravaging Southeast Asia — an award that spurred Tom Lehrer to proclaim that satire was dead.
Biden did not permit his victory laps to interfere with his ongoing cover-ups designed to assure that Americans remained ignorant of Biden administration scandals till after Election Day. Americans did not learn the hard facts (despite a Congressional investigation) about allegations of Tim Walz’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, the full details on the Secret Service’s failure to protect Trump, or the White House string-pulling for the federal censors muzzling countless Americans to safeguard the Biden administration’s reputation. And the Biden White House continued deluging Americans with phony claims of progress in Ukraine’s war against Russia while refusing to disclose almost any details on exactly how the US was intervening and risking World War Three.
Rather than pound the White House for belated disclosures that could change the outcome of the election, much of the media simply continued reciting “Orange Man Bad.” If The Wizard of Oz was a contemporary political campaign story, the media would overwhelmingly side with the guy behind the curtain. Nowadays, withholding evidence is the only proof of innocence required in Washington.
At a 2023 Juneteenth celebration, Biden proclaimed that he would need a second term to “literally redeem the soul of America.” Biden missed that train. He also missed the chance to satisfy his gender-fluid supporters by publicly coming out and personally identifying as “nondictator.”
Biden helped turn Washington into an Impunity Democracy in which government officials pay no price for their crimes. Thanks in part to Biden’s efforts stretching back to the Nixon era, Americans today are more likely to believe in witches, ghosts, and astrology than to trust the federal government. But Biden’s apologists will seek to redeem his name in the history books by defining down ‘dictator’. Instead of designating a ruler who tramples the law and Constitution, “dictatorship” will only refer to presidents who publicly proclaim their plans to do bad things to good people.
James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government.
