Sleepy Joe: the next unfit President

If President Trump's allegations of voter fraud are dismissed, in less than two months Joe Biden will be inaugurated into The White House. The next four years will bring greater uncertainty from a man who is not fit to be President, writes Donald Forbes.

Once upon a time – until 2016 for example – people worried whether a president could be trusted to have his finger on the nuclear button. No more.

Whether Joe Biden in the White House could answer the famous 3 a.m. telephone call announcing an international crisis was never asked during the election campaign. Dr Strangelove has been put to rest even as bad actors like North Korea and Iran either reinforce their nuclear capability or get close to possessing it.

The world is a no less dangerous place. Yet it is doubtful any previous president – and Biden at 78 will be the oldest to take office – has been so obviously unfitted because of age and mental decline. This is true no matter how hard the Democrats and the media work to portray him as a normal president.

President Joe Biden! On inauguration day, everyone cheers a new president – unless he's called Trump – just for being new. A new start. A new four-year hope and change adventure into the future. This is America, folks. Cheering is part of the razzmatazz of newness.

But really, Joe Biden; previously twice a reject? He's still the same Joe he was before almost 80 million Americans, a record number, voted for him on election day: a little confused a lot of the time, prone to tire early in the day and chosen out of desperation by his party because he wasn't Bernie Sanders. It's like waking from a bad dream to discover it's a worse reality.

The core of the Democratic case against Trump in 2016 was that he was unfit to be president; in 2020, the same party has secured the election of a candidate who is also disqualified although for different reasons. How consistent with good government is that?

No doubt the government of America will be in safe hands. They just won't be Joe's, which is wrong. The man or woman elected president should be the president, commander-in-chief and custodian of the nuclear button. Who trust's Joe to deal one-on-one, as he will have to do with Russia's Putin or China's Xi?

The United States has its first figurehead president. He could well not finish his term and would hand over to vice-President Kamala Harris who unlike centre-left Joe is well to the left of most Americans. Harris is a California lawyer by trade. Did anyone check her military and diplomatic credentials beforehand? (She has none; Biden got five draft deferments to avoid the Vietnam war.)

To paraphrase William Ross Wallace's poem about the cradle and push it little, in this administration it will be the hand that pushes the wheelchair that rules the world.

The Democratic Party has failed in its duty of seriousness to the national interest in foisting Biden and Harris on the country. Biden's situation will be managed by competent but unelected aides as Ronald Reagan's was towards the end of his presidency when he was affected by the onset of Alzheimer's.

But that was at the end; this is the beginning and it is not how it should be. Democrats – the party, its voters and Biden himself – have joined together to shut their eyes to the damage they are doing to the institution of the presidency, and all because of a hatred of Trump that has bordered on the irrational.

Last year, when Biden was still floundering in the early primaries, an op-ed headed "Does America Actually Want Joe Biden to be President" appeared in the New York Times. It said the "Democratic Party of 2019 does not look much like" Biden.

In 2020, for all his flaws and the party's bank breaking, multi-trillion dollar social agenda, it turns out it did, if the alternative was four more years of Trump.

Leaving aside his doomed claims of massive voter fraud, Trump lost what was a referendum on him personally. But his record in office shows he's not a failure. There is genuine tragedy about this man whose natural gifts as an achiever were squandered by an almost adolescent lack of self-control.

Andrew McCarthy summing him up at National Review said: Trump was a successful president but did not rise to the level of gravitas that Americans want from their leader. So they chose a different kind of uncertainty with Biden.

Knowing Trump as we've learned to do these last four years, he may be out of office but there is no guarantee he will leave the stage quietly like other past presidents. Barack Obama is counting on Biden to protect what he can of his legacy from Trump's policy reversals.

Trump will surely vigorously protect his own which is far superior to Obama's. Over the next four years, he may decide to be his own defence counsel in the court of public opinion, especially since he won't be able to count on his pseudo-allies in the barely-conservative Republican Party.

If Trump had been Bob Dole, bow tie Republicans would have loved him to bits. He also would never have been president.

Trump's flamboyance and Biden's infirmities have likely changed the rules of eligibility for future presidential nominees. Democrats huffed about Trump's but, terrified of Sanders and stuck with a lacklustre field, they hawked their own nomination among some weird candidates before settling on Biden.

Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey were mentioned as possible candidates and CNN was giddy about buccaneering lawyer Michael Avanetti for a while until the law caught up with him. Not much in the way of presidential credentials there.