Joe Biden’s Final Grand Delusions

His inability to grasp reality leaves him with a tattered legacy.

Function in disaster, finish in style. It’s one of the mottoes of the Madeira School, a prestigious school for girls in Virginia. But as the Oval Office door prepares to hit Joe Biden on his way out of the White House, it summarizes all that he was unable to accomplish in his four dismal years as the nation’s chief executive. While we could spill endless verbiage cataloging his well-documented failures and his denial of such, Biden’s primetime speech from the Oval Office on Wednesday effectively encapsulated most of it.

In a grim and delusional farewell address, five days before he finally leaves the job he sought for half a century, Biden attempted to recover – or, more precisely, rewrite – a legacy in tatters. In a 17-minute speech carried by all the major networks and cable channels, he spent most of his time spinning a record marked by weakness and indecision in crisis and utter incapacity to grasp reality as his days as the leader of the free world dwindled down to a precious few. Despite his use of soaring, platitudinous rhetoric tying himself to the Declaration of Independence, the Statue of Liberty, and “the soul of America” – again – he presented as an embittered loser lashing out at tech moguls long controlled by him and his party who have moved on to the camp of incoming president Donald Trump.

But before he got to attacking the wealthy in a fashion he had never before hinted at in his four years as president, he began the speech by taking a premature victory lap over the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, now in limbo. It was oh-so-predictable that he would boast of an accord in which everyone involved knew was brought about by the intervention of Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. It was Trump who finally forced the two sides to come to an agreement after Biden and his feckless Secretary of State Antony Blinken had failed to produce any progress for months on end, typifying this president’s futility on the international stage.

Biden’s Bitterness

The bulk of Biden’s address was spent warning about the dangers of oligarchical forces akin to the robber barons of old. Channeling President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his warning about the “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address, Biden attempted to stoke fear of a burgeoning “tech-industrial complex.” Likely related to his bitterness about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and others who no longer serve as his praetorian guard on social media, he explicitly warned that “oligarchy is taking shape in America.” He was presumably targeting Trump and his allies, though not by name, but was again engaging in rank denial – the wealthiest Americans voted in the highest numbers for his Vice President, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election.

He spoke of a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people … that threatens our entire democracy.” One wonders how he might have responded to a question about whether “ultra-wealthy” George Soros, who has poured billions of dollars into progressive causes with enormous consequences, would be included on his list of bad actors. Twice, he called on the wealthy to pay their “fair share” of taxes – a still-annoyingly undefined number used ad nauseam by Biden and his fellow travelers on the left.

The Rank Hypocrisy of Joe Biden

Arguably, the most maddening part of Biden’s address was his bragging about being a “president for all Americans,” even after calling Trump supporters garbage in the heat of the presidential campaign, typifying his entire term in office. Few will forget his infamous address at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 2022 when he demonized half the country in front of a menacing blood-red backdrop: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

After trying to imprison his political opponent, it was particularly rich of him to warn of an “abuse of power.” And in speaking of the need for a “free and independent press,” equally rich was his lament that social media has “given up on fact-checking,” the oxymoronic procedure equating to censorship by the left that long prevented open discussion of anything that threatened his administration.

He spoke of “an economic crisis that we inherited” when the record shows that the country was already well down the road to recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic when he assumed office. He boasted about the “hiring of American workers, using American products” when everyone is well aware that it was Donald Trump who re-introduced that concept long ignored by Biden and his Democratic party predecessors.

Biden and the “Climate Crisis”

Biden predictably blamed the hurricanes of late 2024 and the ongoing wildfire crisis in California on climate change, which he later elevated to a “climate crisis.” But in bragging about signing “the most significant climate and clean energy law ever in the history of the world,” he left out the fact that the legislation was passed under false pretenses – namely, titling it as the ”Inflation Reduction Act” when in reality it had nothing to do with reducing the worst inflation in 40 years on his watch. Finally, he called for an 18-year limit for Supreme Court justices, a not-very-well-disguised call for packing the high court, something he never supported until conservatives came to dominate it.

Republicans were quick to deliver sharp criticism of the speech, but it was a member of Biden’s own party, former Democratic adviser Dan Turrentine, whose post on X really hit home and effectively summarized Biden’s entire time in office: “I’m no historian, but, I don’t recall a more dark Presidential farewell address … It’s more a cry to the DNC than accentuating the positive to the country. This is sad.”

Sad indeed. From his botched and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and his refusal to take action to prevent war in Ukraine and the Middle East to his refusal to stop the influx of illegal aliens to his inflationary stewardship of the economy, Joe Biden was never equal to functioning in disaster. And between pardoning his convicted son, his last-minute restrictions on drilling, selling off the steel that had been acquired to build the wall along the border, and finally, his delusional farewell address, he proved equally unable to finish in style.