Trump sealed his reelection

In the Spectator, Roger Kimball writes,

Time and again the President reminded viewers that Joe Biden has been in politics for 47 years. A scant four years ago, he completed eight years as vice president. What did he have to show for it? Donald Trump has been president for three-and-three-quarters years. He has remade the judiciary, having seen some 300 federal judges ‘in the mold of Antonin Scalia’ confirmed. Next week, when Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, he will have supplied a third of the Court’s bench. He presided over an astonishing run in the stock market, an accumulation of wealth that, as he pointed out last night, benefits everyone, not just the zillionaires who own lots of stocks. Unemployment on his watch was, pre-COVID, at a generational low. Among Blacks and Hispanics, it was the lowest on record. Wages, especially wages at the bottom, were rising fast. He cut taxes for something like 85 percent of taxpayers while also rolling back prosperity-blighting regulation. His exploitation of the country’s gas and oil made America energy independent for the first time in decades. Fracking was a large part of that story, and, true to his word, the President has provided video evidence that Joe Biden has gone on record to announce his opposition to fracking and fossil fuels. It looks like that is a topic that interests people, since, as of this morning, it has been viewed more than 10 million times.

There were two pivotal moments in the evening. The first was this exchange: Donald Trump: Would you close down the oil industry? Joe Biden: [pointless temporizing] Yes.

That, as the President said, is ‘a big statement’, a declaration, in effect, of failure. In the movie Apollo 13, there is a moment when mission control tells Jim Lovell, the commander, to shut down the capsule’s fuel cells: ‘We just lost the moon.’ The second pivotal moment had two parts: Joe Biden’s prediction that America was about to head into ‘a dark winter’ with a resurgence of COVID and the President’s observation, towards the end of the evening, that ‘success is going to bring us together’. Quite a contrast. And it was precisely the contrast that most viewers took away. Joe Biden has been in politics for most of his adult life. What has he accomplished — apart, I mean, from (allegedly) enriching himself and his family? As the President several times observed, and as Joe Biden’s performance underscored, he is ‘all talk and no action’.

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