President Joe Biden sends a message, albeit a convoluted one, to GOP front-runner Donald Trump and the nation: Mess with America under his watch, and you risk losing out.
Did you catch that?
This proclamation comes from our 81-year-old commander-in-chief, speaking just hours before polls closed in New Hampshire during a speech in Manassas, Virginia. Let’s generously assume the choice of location isn’t a testament to his map-reading skills, which may not be as sharp as his teleprompter reading. Biden and the Democratic National Committee seem eager to downplay the importance of the New Hampshire primary, having shifted the “official” start of the primary season to South Carolina. They only started actively pushing a write-in campaign for the president in the Granite State when it became apparent that Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, his primary opposition, wouldn’t pose a significant challenge (which he didn’t).
Rather than focusing on New Hampshire, the Manassas rally aimed to celebrate the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made legal abortion the law of the land. Biden pledged to uphold this decision and vowed to veto any national abortion ban that might come across his desk. In the current political landscape, such a promise might be likened to pledging to negotiate a peace treaty with Superman if he were proven to be real.
Regrettably, the official transcript of the event wasn’t available on the White House’s website as of early Wednesday morning. Consequently, we’re left to speculate or take bets on how his spin artists will interpret this somewhat confusing message.
“Don’t mess with uhhiminauhwemerica unless you want to get the benefit.” – Cognitively Impaired Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/K1OMxyihnv
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) January 23, 2024
“We’ll teach Donald Trump a valuable lesson: Don’t mess with uhhiminauhwemerica unless you want to get the benefit,” Biden said.
Now, I’m giving 3-1 odds on “the women of America,” although the statement doesn’t make much more sense then. (The benefit of what? Their vote? He could just say that, you know.) However, I’m also offering 10-1 odds on “the limit of America” and 65-1 odds on “the a-wim-o-we a-wim-o-we in the jungle unless you want to get the benefit.” The point is that he tried to own Trump, and he ended up with a self-own. Nice work.
It’s worth noting that the mush-mouthed remark came during the same speech in which Biden engaged in what the media, in other circumstances, calls “election denial:”
“Hello Virginia! And the real governor, Terry McAuliffe,” Biden began, either forgetting or just bulldozing through the fact that McAuliffe lost rather convincingly to GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin in 2021.
I’m fairly certain that somewhere in the vast realm of social media, former Harvard president Claudine Gay expressed the idea that “election denial” is contingent on the context. There’s also a reasonable likelihood that, an hour or two later, the said social media post vanished into the digital abyss, promptly deleted as someone discerned that Gay had lifted it verbatim from former University of Pennsylvania president Liz McGill’s musings on the subject.
But, let’s steer back to the main narrative. Despite some avoidable slip-ups, Biden managed to salvage an overall positive day. Phillips’ attempt to challenge Biden in New Hampshire appears to have fallen below expectations, with the Minnesota representative hovering just shy of 20 percent as of midnight Wednesday, according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, write-ins for Biden and unprocessed write-ins, which are also presumably for Biden, command nearly 70 percent of the total. In essence, Phillips’ endeavor to emulate Eugene McCarthy and send a sitting president packing back home to wither away has met an unsuccessful fate.