George F. Will: Biden might exit, but rising distrust of institutions seems here to stay

The leakage of trustworthiness from American institutions began with the lies that enveloped Watergate and Vietnam. It accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis, when cynicism (“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste”) fueled the government’s indiscriminate and lawless response: The law restricted bailouts to financial institutions? Declare automobile manufacturers to be such. The leakage became a cataract during the pandemic because of the public health establishment’s plucked-from-the-ether edicts (about masks, social distancing, which political gatherings should be exempt from social distancing, etc.) and the sacrifice-the-children opportunism of the most powerful segment of organized labor (teachers unions).

Now the world’s oldest political party and its media accomplices have effected a gigantic subtraction from trust: Leaders of the former lied about President Biden’s condition until, on June 27, continuing to do so became untenable. The latter had allowed the lying because they believe Donald Trump’s many mendacities are an excuse for theirs.

One example: The bleating sheep on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” reminiscent of a chorus of quadrupeds in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” were vehemently wrong in denouncing (“so tilted,” “shocking,” “a classic hit piece,” etc.) the Wall Street Journal’s meticulously reported June 4 catalogue of the abundant evidence of Biden’s decline. That the sheep are still on the air, dispensing undiminished certitudes, is evidence of two things. That — outside of a few bastions of meritocracy and accountability, such as professional sports — there is no penalty for failure in contemporary America. And that many prominent people have the scary strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment.

A dismaying fact: Six months — one-eighth of a presidential term — remain before Jan. 20, 2025. The collapse of Biden’s reelection campaign, under the weight of accumulating evidence of his vanishing acuity, suggests a question: If he is unfit to continue as a candidate, is he not dangerous as commander in chief in an increasingly ominous world? Cold-eyed men in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang might not believe that good sportsmanship requires international crises to unfold between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern time, Biden’s reported (by some of his people) interval of adequate alertness.

Biden is the only plausible Democratic candidate whom Trump would today be favored to defeat. And Biden is Trump’s opponent only because Democrats assured themselves that Trump is the only opponent that Biden could plausibly hope to defeat. Which is why various Democratic prosecutors took steps that they should have known might facilitate Trump’s nomination by making him a martyr. If the Democratic Party would now present dispirited Americans with even a merely plausible choice, the result might be akin to a gust of pure oxygen on smoldering embers: an eruption of gratitude.

The compassion owed to someone apparently in the cruel grip of an inexorably advancing disease that destroys selfhood should not obscure this fact: Biden’s malady is not robbing the nation of either an impressive political talent or a singularly public-spirited official. Biden was a mediocrity in his 1980s prime, when his first lunge for the presidency quickly collapsed, as his second would in 2008, and as his third almost did after he finished fifth in New Hampshire’s primary in 2020. In the office he eventually attained, he has chosen his defining legacy: the self-absorption of his refusal to leave the public stage gracefully.

Progressives think the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. almost got it right. He said the arc of the universe bends toward justice. They agree that the universe has an arc (whatever that might mean) but declare that it bends toward them. Hence their constant praise of themselves for being on “the right side of history”: They are right, and the universe ratifies this.

Biden whisperers among his progressive keepers convinced him that history — not, Lord knows, the electorate — had anointed him the next Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Minus the 1932 landslide election, and minus the Depression and World War II, but oh, those electric vehicles!) There is a possible resemblance.

On Oct. 21, 1944, 17 days before Election Day, President Roosevelt, his pallor as gray as the skies, embarked bareheaded in a cold, hard autumn rain, in an open Packard, on a four-hour tour of four of New York City’s five boroughs. This event was undertaken (as was Biden’s “make my day” debate challenge to Trump) to prove his continuing fitness for office. When FDR’s day ended with a rally at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field, he had 173 days to live.

There ends the comparison between Biden’s and FDR’s situations. FDR’s vice president was Harry S. Truman.