There seems to be a widespread belief that Joe Biden has exceeded the mandate for which he was elected. It seems we’re supposed to believe that those who voted for the Biden-Harris ticket craved moderation after Trump’s troubled and unsettling presidency. Writer and commentator Scott Jennings repeats this familiar narrative in a recent interview with CNN:

 

I never imagined how quickly this would all unfold. The person they sold on the campaign, the nice old, you know, moderate grandpa who just wanted to help everybody get along and compromise is not what we got over the last year.

He has no mandate really to do much of anything. It’s amazing that he got a couple of things done when the mandate was really pretty clear—50/50 Senate, a near 50/50 House and a pretty close presidential election. The mandate was simply replace Donald Trump and don’t do anything drastic or stupid.

 

Biden’s voters apparently just wanted a “moderate grandpa” who would lower the political temperature. Instead, they ended up with the agenda of the radical left “Squad” being carried out by a cognitively declining figurehead president. Those who mistakenly supported Biden are now suffering buyer’s remorse, and it would be unfair, we are led to believe, if we blamed these misled voters for what befell them after Biden’s election, the consequences of which they could not have foreseen.

 

Allow me to respectfully disagree. There were more than enough signs that Biden would derail the country when he was running against Trump; and those who voted for him are guilty of having ignored the evidence that Biden would be a far worse president than the person he replaced.

 

I long ago stopped believing that those who vote for catastrophic political candidates are simply the victims of bad choices. Such people get what they want—or what they think they want—and should be scolded for imposing their will on the rest of us. When I went with my parents to a restaurant as a child and ordered something that I didn’t like—usually against better advice—I was made to eat what I picked. It was my misjudgment, not the small print on the menu, which caused me to choose badly. We are now dealing with chronological adults who picked the wrong fare out of obstinacy or anger, but who still insist that it was someone else’s fault. 

 

Biden hardly ran as a moderate. His vice-presidential candidate openly expressed support for Black Lives Matter violence during the 2020 “Summer of Love,” and Biden’s staff were involved in bailing out the criminal participants in those riots. While preparing their separate presidential runs in 2019, both Biden and Harris came out in support of the race-hustling impostor Jussie Smollett. Each treated Smollett’s make-believe attack by Trump supporters in downtown Chicago at 2:00 am as evidence of raging racism and homophobia. 

 

The Biden/Harris Campaign also decried Kyle Rittenhouse as a racist for defending himself against armed assailants (who happened to be white) in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. Biden then expressed anger and concern at Rittenhouse’s acquittal in 2021 in much the same language he had used against him in the past. Never during or after his campaign did Biden stop appealing to his radical black and LGBT base.

 

“We have a lot to root out, but most of all the systematic racism that most of us whites don’t like to acknowledge even exists,” Biden said in a 2019 speech delivered for Al Sharpton and the National Action Network. Within one day of Biden’s taking office, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald notes in a Newsweek article that Biden pledged to fight systemic white racism with the assistance of all branches of the federal government and to give amnesty to illegals. Neither theme was new; both issues had furnished the incoming president with campaign rhetoric for many months.   

 

Moreover, Biden’s open-border policy, which voters are now complaining about, did not result from a post-election decision by the new president. It is exactly what he promised to do while on the campaign trail. He also promised in the spring of 2020 to close the Keystone XL oil pipeline bringing in oil exports from Canada. Thus, his action to do so immediately after he became president should not have surprised anyone who was paying any attention to national politics.

 

Biden was every bit as forthcoming about his presidential plans as Trump had been about his own, four years earlier. The idea that Biden hid his intentions when running for the presidency is utter nonsense. It was invented by those who willfully ignored what he said because they hated Trump or because they agreed with Biden’s proposals at the time that he made them. Those who supported him deserve our stern disapproval rather than inappropriate expressions of sympathy.