Biden regrets ending re-election campaign and says he’d have easily defeated Trump!

[army judge]

Biden reportedly regrets ending re-election campaign and says he'd have defeated Trump

President also regrets picking Merrick Garland for attorney general, as he was slow to prosecute Trump for January 6

Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year's presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month's election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.

The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden's son Hunter.


With just more than three weeks of his single-term presidency remaining, Biden's reported rueful reflections are revealed in a Washington Post profile that contains the clearest signs yet that he thinks he erred in withdrawing his candidacy in July after a woeful debate performance against his rival for the White House, Trump, the previous month.

The president stepped aside – to be replaced as his party's nominee by the US vice-president, Kamala Harris – after mounting pressure from fellow Democrats, who cited polling evidence that appeared to show him heading for a near-certain election drubbing from Trump, who was seeking a historic return to the White House as the Republicans' nominee.

Harris's ascent to the top of the ticket led to a surge of enthusiasm and improved poll numbers but ultimately ended in a decisive electoral college and popular vote defeat.

While Biden and his aides have been careful not to blame Harris, they apparently believe the result would have been different if he had stood his ground, according to the Washington Post's reporting.

It is a view disputed by many Harris supporters, who blame the president for waiting too long before withdrawing, thus leaving the vice-president with little time to mount an effective campaign.

They also point out that Biden's determination to seek a second term violated his 2020 campaign vow to be a "transitional" figure, who would pass the torch after one term after steering the country away from Trump's presidency.

"Biden ran on the promise that he was going to be a transitional president, and in effect, have one term before handing it off to another generation," Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator for Connecticut told the Post.

"I think his running again broke that concept – the conceptual underpinning of the theory that he would end the Trump appeal, he would defeat Trumpism and enable a new era."

The outgoing president's misgivings over Garland are poignant given that he announced him as his attorney general nominee the day after a Trump-incited mob attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an effort that ultimately failed to overturn Biden's 2020 presidential election victory.

At the time, Biden said Garland would restore "the honor, the integrity, the independence" of the justice department after years of perceived politicisation under Trump.

"Your loyalty is not to me. It's to the law, to the constitution, to the people of this nation," Biden told Garland at his official unveiling.
But according to the Post, Biden had to be persuaded by his chief of staff, Ron Klain, to choose Garland – at the time best known as Barack Obama's failed choice to succeed the conservative justice Antonin Scalia on the US supreme court before his nomination was derailed by a Republican-led Senate.

Biden's political allies had pressed the case for Doug Jones, then a Democratic senator for Alabama, arguing that he would be better equipped to navigate Washington's bitterly partisan atmosphere. Klain, instead, argued that Garland, reputed for fairness, would send a more reassuring message of justice department independence after Trump.

As events transpired, Biden still faced false accusations by Trump of "weaponising" the department as it pursued criminal investigations over his January 6 role and for hoarding classified White House documents – even while also investigating Hunter Biden and the president himself, the latter for also illegally retaining classified documents.

Biden now believes he should have chosen someone else, the Post reported, a view consistent with many Democrats, who believe Garland was too slow to investigate and eventually prosecute Trump for January 6 and related activities to reverse his defeat.

The deliberate pace of the investigation, which eventually resulted in the appointment of a special counsel, Jack Smith, meant Trump was ultimately able to avoid the spectacle of a politically damaging trial before this year's election.

Smith last month formally applied for his two criminal cases against Trump to be wound up in view of his election victory, in effect ending them.

Biden reportedly regrets ending re-election campaign and says he’d have defeated Trump

President also regrets picking Merrick Garland for attorney general, as he was slow to prosecute Trump for January 6

www.theguardian.com

 

[adjusterjack]

What good does it do for Biden to lament his mistakes? He's a doddering old fool, done and dusted.

 

[Tax Counsel]

It's not surprising he feels that way. When an election is lost, the losing campaign looks back to see what mistakes were made, and often the key figures look to find a reason to blame someone other than themselves for the loss. The whole reason that Biden was pushed aside was that he was not, in fact, running a great campaign. He looked old and tired and that worked against him.

There was not a whole lot of real excitement for Biden. I think he would have lost as well. It wasn't pulling Biden that was the mistake the party made. The Democratic party needed to do at least three things differently to win: (1) nominate a younger, more energetic candidate, (2) make the nomination well in advance of the election to allow the candidate to build as strong a campaign as possible, and (3) nominate someone not connected to the Biden administration so the candidate would not be hobbled by Biden's record and would be free to criticize unpopular Biden decisions.

Trump's win was not inevitable. Trump may well have lost had the Democrats freed themselves from running an octogenarian who was showing obvious signs of decline well before they finally woke up to the fact that they didn't have a strong candidate. Whether the Democrats will learn the right lessons from the loss remains to be seen. History indicates that parties don't often do a great job of self reflection and correction.

I've said it before. Both parties have an age problem and as the death rate of boomers goes up that generation will no longer be a major demographic for candidates to chase in the years to come. They have to start looking to their younger up and coming members to start moving into higher positions. Washington is a town in which seniority is a such a big factor in power that it encourages people to stay in office long after they should have left.

 

[Mark_A]

The election was ultimately decided on the issues, not the personalities. Those issues were:

1. Illegal immigration (on a massive scale designed to subvert democracy by turning red states blue)
2. Inflation and budget deficits, national debt
3. Foreign policy that has resulted in dangerous wars in Ukraine and Middle East
4. Presidential abuse of power (Biden illegally cancelling student loan debt and trying to force private employers to require their employees to have COVID vaccine shots, and many other administrative abuses of the Deep State without congressional approval).

At some point, even though a lot of people don't like Trump as a person, the issues became the deciding factor.

The Democrats tried to make abortion an issue, but Trump specifically excluded abortion from the Republican Platform at the convention, and said he does not support federal legislation on the subject. In several red states, the voters approved binding referendums to legalize abortion (at least to some degree), even though that particular state went for Trump in the election, and there is nothing inconsistent with that.

 

[stealthy1]

The election was ultimately decided on the issues, not the personalities. Those issues were:

1. Illegal immigration (on a massive scale designed to subvert democracy by turning red states blue)
2. Inflation and budget deficits, national debt
3. Foreign policy that has resulted in dangerous wars in Ukraine and Middle East
4. Presidential abuse of power (Biden illegally cancelling student loan debt and trying to force private employers to require their employees to have COVID vaccine shots, and many other administrative abuses of the Deep State without congressional approval).

At some point, even though a lot of people don't like Trump as a person, the issues became the deciding factor.

The Democrats tried to make abortion an issue, but Trump specifically excluded abortion from the Republican Platform at the convention, and said he does not support federal legislation on the subject. In several red states, the voters approved binding referendums to legalize abortion (at least to some degree), even though that particular state went for Trump in the election, and there is nothing inconsistent with that.

And all of those issues will not be addressed as MAGA had hoped.

 

[Tax Counsel]

The election was ultimately decided on the issues, not the personalities.

I don't entirely agree with that. While a lot of people don't like Trump, there are a quite a few Republicans who love him and believe pretty much everything he says and support anything he does. A big part of the reason for that is his large celebrity status and tough guy persona. Most of the Trump true believers I talked to before the election couldn't explain what Trump would actually do about the problems he said he'd solve. They weren't keen to discuss issues in any detail and preferred to talk about Trump the person and how great he is.

When Trump legislation proposals and appointments land in Congress, expect to see some significant resistance to some of them, even among Republicans who voted for him. Some of his stated positions are just odd and a few of his actions since winning the election are troubling, especially in foreign policy. A lot of people liked his campaign rhetoric, but he was pretty vague on exactly how he'd achieve what he promised. As often happens to presidents once the details of their plans are made known support starts to slip. Trump won't be any different if his first term is any indicator of what we'll get this time around. As things stand today, I expect little of anything significant will pass Congress while Trump is in office and Congress is so evenly split.

 

[Mark_A]

And all of those issues will not be addressed as MAGA had hoped.

No politician can solve all the issues, but some people vote based on what the think the politician is in favor of, especially if the opponent has clearly different views. In our system, the president is not a dictator, and in fact our system was designed so that Congress has more power than the president (except when president abuses power by usurping powers given to Congress in the constitution).

Also, referring to everyone who voted for Trump as MAGA is not helpful, because it is often (and especially in this election) the independents who decide the election.

 

[Mark_A]

I don't entirely agree with that. While a lot of people don't like Trump, there are a quite a few Republicans who love him and believe pretty much everything he says and support anything he does. A big part of the reason for that is his large celebrity status and tough guy persona. Most of the Trump true believers I talked to before the election couldn't explain what Trump would actually do about the problems he said he'd solve. They weren't keen to discuss issues in any detail and preferred to talk about Trump the person and how great he is.

When Trump legislation proposals and appointments land in Congress, expect to see some significant resistance to some of them, even among Republicans who voted for him. Some of his stated positions are just odd and a few of his actions since winning the election are troubling, especially in foreign policy. A lot of people liked his campaign rhetoric, but he was pretty vague on exactly how he'd achieve what he promised. As often happens to presidents once the details of their plans are made known support starts to slip. Trump won't be any different if his first term is any indicator of what we'll get this time around. As things stand today, I expect little of anything significant will pass Congress while Trump is in office and Congress is so evenly split.

Asking a voter to explain the details of exactly how a candidate will solve a problem is not a fair question. Clearly Joe Biden has different ideas about illegal immigration than Trump, and Biden deliberately ignored existing US immigration law in an attempt (very successfully) to allow illegal immigration, and Trump doesn't support that. Harris was in fact involved in immigration policy and she was quoted many times as saying that she couldn't think of anything different she would have done compared to what Biden did as president. If a voter doesn't like Biden's immigration polices, and Harris never criticized Biden on this, and Trump did criticize Biden on this, that is enough for many voters to vote on this issue, even if there are a lot of complicated factors involved in actually implementing any changes.

The same is true of the other major issues. There aren't many who voted for Harris who can explain how she would reduce inflation and reduce prices, even though she promised to do so, with no real explanation of how to do it. Even if Harris could come up with some explanation (like price controls), I can say with relative certainty that would not work and was just political rhetoric. There are just as many Harris supporters who had no idea how Harris would accomplish the things she promised.

I am not saying that Trump will be able to fix all the problems he promised to fix. I don't know if he can fix any of them. But I was just saying that it is a false narrative to say he was elected strictly based on his personality, or because Trump voters didn't want to vote for a women, or whatever other excuse people make, since the swing independent voters who determined this election voted mostly on the issues, even if they didn't like Trump as a person. There are probably a lot more people who voted for Harris because she was a woman, than those who voted for Trump because they didn't want a woman president.

There are true believers on both sides. But the people in the "middle" who decided this election voted mostly on the issues. Some of those in the "middle" who voted for Trump based on the issues don't want to admit they voted for him, and so your just talking to the true believers is not very insightful as to what happened in the election.

 

[stealthy1]

Also, referring to everyone who voted for Trump as MAGA is not helpful, because it is often (and especially in this election) the independents who decide the election.

I don't believe I did so. However, T***p blatantly lied wrt several issues. And his supporters seem shocked.

 

[Redemptionman]

I don't believe I did so. However, T***p blatantly lied wrt several issues. And his supporters seem shocked.

all politicians lie, your political emotions are showing.

The mass deportation, I doubt happens too many people on opposition side in the Senate/ House. MSM has also already started their separated families BS.