Winning by Losing, Losing by Winning

... Biden could have set modest goals and retired after one term (as had been expected). With no disastrous debate with Trump, he would be remembered as a Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, Calvin Coolidge, or Gerald Ford—a brief but calming bridge over troubled waters. Democrats would have been free to conduct an orderly search for his replacement.

But anyone expecting such from Biden ignored or knew nothing of his half-century as a lucky lightweight, laden with vindictiveness and hubris. His enormous power as chair of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees came from seniority, not from the esteem of fellow Democrats, who never seriously considered him for a leadership position.

Once president, Biden’s elephantine ego persuaded him to be transformational, rather than transitional—another FDR or LBJ, rather than the fortunate and brief-lived beneficiary of Trump Fatigue. He and his minions hoisted scimitars aloft and slashed wildly at the Supreme Court, fiscal discipline, free speech, internal combustion engines, petroleum production, gas stoves, equality of opportunity, border control, parental rights, student loans, and—in ways as numberless as the stars—Donald Trump. Biden saddled Democrats with Kamala Harris as VP and then as would-be successor. After Harris’s ignominious defeat, Democrats are enraged by the fact that as president, Biden behaved like … Biden.