The Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill Act will cause at least 10 million Americans to lose their healthcare coverage due to sweeping budget cuts to slash taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals. That’s very close to the number of 2020 Biden voters who refused to turn out for Kamala Harris in 2024. Would they turn out for a Democrat in 2028 to express their displeasure? Not if the loss of healthcare has the desired effect.
For journalists, this is the first of two occasions to discuss and evaluate the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. The second will arrive sooner rather than later, when the president dies. Long after we follow him to the grave, historians with the benefit of declassified archives and looser-lipped eyewitnesses will take their own measures of the man and his political career. So away we go with a look at…
The Good…
At the end of Trump’s first term, the country’s infrastructure was in woeful condition. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual report on the roads, water, waste treatment and schools we rely on gave it a grade “D.” 43% of roads were in miserable condition. We ranked at the bottom of the G20 most-developed economies in terms of infrastructure spending.
The 2021 ASCE report said the U.S. needed to spend $5.9 trillion on infrastructure, $3.4 trillion of which was funded. The remaining funding gap was $2.5 trillion.
Biden’s 2021infrastructure spending bill was the biggest and most ambitious attempt in decades to redress neglect by both Democratic and Republican presidents in the form of “deferred maintenance” and to maybe even build more. Republicans had long signaled that they were open to a bipartisan spending package. But when Biden asked for $4 trillion, they chopped it to bits. By the time he signed it into law in November 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided for just $1.2 trillion.
Still, it was impressive. Monies authorized by this legislation will replace out-of-date infrastructure, fund new projects and renovate airports and freight rail and the electrical grid and countless other categories for years to come. Ten and fifteen and twenty years from now, you’ll charge your vehicle at a facility that otherwise might not have existed and drive across a bridge that doesn’t collapse because Biden spent his political capital on pushing this bill, the outgoing president’s signature achievement, through Congress.
…The Bad…
Throughout Biden’s first year in office, President Vladimir Putin repeatedly warned that Russia would not tolerate Ukraine joining NATO, the anti-Russian military alliance whose members pledge to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. Putin’s warning was hardly surprising; how would the U.S. have responded to Mexico or Canada joining an anti-U.S. military alliance like the Cold War-era Warsaw Pact, creating a tense border for hundreds of miles? The U.S. invaded tiny Grenada over far less. And Russia had history to consider: when Nazi Germany invaded Russia during World War II, leaving 27 million Soviet citizens dead in their wake, they came in via Ukraine—and the Ukrainians greeted the Nazis as liberators and eagerly participated in the Holocaust.
Gambling that Putin was bluffing, Ukraine and its Western allies told Putin to go to hell. Months later, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Three years later, despite spending a quarter of a billion dollars on advanced weapons, many of which vanished into the country’s bottomless pit of corruption, Ukraine is losing.
Ukraine’s ex-actor president, Volodymyr Zelensky, played Biden for a fool. Biden assured Americans that our support for Ukraine was in defense of democracy. Ukraine then banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents, censored the media, banned cable news channels that didn’t toe the line and canceled presidential and parliamentary elections indefinitely. We’ve gone to the mat for the dictator of an authoritarian kleptocracy with a serious neo-Nazi problem, and lost.
As if one poor choice of foreign bedmates wasn’t enough, Biden pulled the extreme-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even closer following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 raid from Gaza. Like Zelensky, Bibi cashed the blank check from Biden like a drunk gambler on a bender, gleefully engaging in a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass murder that has killed at least 200,000 innocent Gazans and been officially declared genocide by international bodies and revered human-rights organizations.
Before he dropped out of the presidential race, Biden’s immoral stance in favor of Israel’s bloodthirsty leaders had already hobbled his chances and alienated his party’s progressive base, which was disgusted by the carnage. Kamala Harris, his anointed successor and who echoed his unconditional support for the IDF, inherited this liability. Still worse from a historical vantagepoint, Biden’s branding as a good, decent man, wound up in the toilet.
Oh, and Biden didn’t try to increase the minimum wage or create the socialized healthcare system we need and want.
…and The Ugly
You probably know what I’m going to say, but here goes anyway.
Following his disastrous LBJ-style withdrawal from the race, some Democrats now allow that the 82-year-old Biden ought to have kept his implicit promise to serve a single term, to be “a bridge, not as anything else.”
They’re half-right.
As has now been undeniably established from the testimony of the staff who knew him best and as ordinary Americans experienced with dementia could plainly see from the beginning, Biden’s mental deficiencies did not begin with his catastrophic debate performance in 2024. He had “good days and bad days” back in 2020. He ought not have run in the first place.
Vain and self-deluded, and clearly not as sharp as he needed to be to make such a decision, Biden and his DNC handler-allies somehow convinced themselves that he was the only Democrat who could defeat Trump in 2020. That was almost certainly untrue. There are credible cases to be made that any number of other of his primary rivals, beginning with Bernie Sanders, could have taken out The Donald.
Even if Biden’s only-I-can-beat-him calculus could be proven to have been accurate, however, the nation, the Democratic Party and Biden himself have paid an awful price for his hubris.
There is now no denying that all the “Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes were true. White House officials and staffers, and the Washington press corps, were “hidin’ Biden” for four years in one of the most breathtaking and long-running scams ever undertaken in U.S. politics. They ran a stuffed corpse for president, got it elected, pretended it was running the government, and then, incredibly, tried to pull it off a second time. The Democratic Party, which branded itself the anti-Trump party of democracy and fair elections, pulled off a coup d’état; after they relentlessly attacked Trump for serial lying, it turns out that they were even worse. They stand exposed and ridiculous.
And what was the point? Despite all their efforts, including weaponizing the judicial system against him, Trump won anyway. Now the Democrats are weak and discredited, setting up Trump to be more dangerous than he would otherwise have been.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
Weeks and months after she lost her presidential campaign, which ended with her millions of dollars in debt despite raising billions of dollars, vice president Kamala Harris continues to shake down Democrats for donations.
As the Biden era yields to the second rise of Trumpism, the transition to What Happens Next is continuing with a sense of purpose as well as foreboding. Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) analyze the mood of the country, handicap Kamala Harris’ next moves and try to figure out where the Democrats go from here. Joe Biden, perhaps not strangely, has vanished from the political scene entirely. Meanwhile, victorious Republicans appear to have little standing in their way to impose their radical MAGA agenda on just about every major policy question you can think of.
Defeated presidential candidate Kamala Harris says it’s time for Democrats to roll up their sleeves and start the resistance to Donald Trump. But the party appears to be in disarray, totally dispirited and unable to find a way forward. How should Democrats prepare for the 2026 midterm elections and an open race for 2028? More than 10 million progressive voters stayed home, which allowed Trump to win; can the party do something to bring them back? Is there a way to reconcile symbolic political correctness and identity politics on the left with the party’s pro-censorship and militarily aggressive foreign policy, which appears to be more on the right?
The TMI Show’s Ted Rall discusses the future of the Democratic Party with Manila Chan.
One of the more puzzling decisions of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign was to make numerous appearances with Liz Cheney, the far right neoconservative who is despised universally both by Republicans and Democrats. Now that Trump has prevailed, in part due to decisions like this, it’s likely that the blossoming friendship isn’t what it used to be.
Democrats engaged in all sorts of histrionics during the 2024 presidential campaign, in which the centerpiece of their message was that Donald Trump represented a grave and existential threat to democracy and might even open concentration camps as a genuine fascist. Now that he has prevailed, there is no indication that they believed any of that. Why are they still here?
Defeat is an orphan. But defeated Democrats, themselves responsible for losing an election to Donald Trump that should have been easy to win, are flailing about trying to pin the blame on everyone but themselves.
The world of politics, as well as the globe writ large, was shaken to its neoliberal foundations this week by the surprise victory of Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who did not qualify for debates and was accorded little media coverage, in the campaign for American president. Stein, a 74-year-old physician, will mark a trifecta of history as the nation’s first woman, Jew and third-party victor since 1860 to become commander-in-chief.
Going into Election Day, polls as well as Las Vegas odds makers had shown the major-party candidates, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, locked neck-and-neck in a virtual dead heat, with seven key battleground states considered a tossup. The polls, it turns out, were dead wrong.
A majority of American voters, it’s now clear, collectively decided that the two-party system, derided by critics as a “duopoly,” was no longer serving the country or their needs and needed to be sent a message: be responsive to our wants or needs, or we’ll kick you out.
Pundits, editors and opinion researchers are reeling at this unprecedented and radical turn of events. “Odds that are more likely than not do not preclude an unlikely outcome,” polling expert Nate Silver of The New York Times said. “But this is different. Tens of millions of voters changed their minds, not about which candidate party to support, but about the system itself.” Moreover, voters deliberately misled researchers about their decision to cast ballots outside the two major parties.
“It is really so shocking?” asked Ted Rall, a gadfly cartoonist and columnist. “Third-party voters have been vote-shamed for so long, it may have been easier to express themselves in the privacy of the voting booth than to fend off vote-shaming critics who told them that, say, ‘a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump.’”
Shelly Jackson, a 37-year-old dental hygienist who has voted for both Democrats and Republicans, said she decided to vote for Stein after determining that she was unhappy with both Harris and Trump. “Neither of them had much to say, or at least not much to say that was credible or intelligent, about the biggest issues we face as a nation: climate change, stagnant wages, poverty, unaffordability of healthcare. After I did some research, I found third-party and independent candidates like Chase Oliver and Cornel West who were intelligent and thoughtful. Trump was obsessing over a murdered squirrel and Harris—even she didn’t know what she was saying. In the end, I went with Stein.”
Until late on Election Night, Stein voters believed they were lone voices in the dark, casting protest votes that, as usual, wouldn’t affect the outcome. Typical was JoAnn LeCroix of Baton Rouge: “I told my male friends I was voting for Trump and my female friends I was voting for Kamala. That night, when I saw the results and Jill got to 270 electoral votes and CNN called it for her, I couldn’t believe it.”
Acting on fears of increased government regulations and the belief that a Stein Administration might reduce America’s military projects around the world and make it easier for workers to organize, join unions and negotiate for improved wages and benefits, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 38% on the news, to recover later during the day after the election as civil engineering-related and green-energy sector stocks surged in expectation of increased government inspection.
Traditional U.S. adversaries including China, Iran and Cuba expressed joy at Stein’s win, promising friendlier ties with a Stein Administration if it seeks them. Ukraine’s President, Volodomyr Zelensky, said his country would be ready for U.S.-brokered peace talks with Russia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intention to launch a nuclear strike in the occupied Gaza Strip in anticipation of a shift of U.S. policy away from military and financial support for Israel.
One of many signs that something dramatic had occurred took the form of an unprecedented joint press conference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. “Jill Stein is a hater, a bad woman who totally cheated like a dog. No one has ever seen anything like it,” Trump said as Harris nodded by his side, calling on the Democrats and Republicans to unify against a common threat. “Looking at this holistically,” Harris said, “it’s holistically impossible not to arrive at a holistic conclusion that something has happened that should not have happened. There’s no way that tens of millions of Americans suddenly started thinking for themselves. Stop the steal!” Democrats and Republicans promised to file lawsuits to challenge the results, pressure Stein electors to defect and, if need be, use military force to prevent what they called “a coup from within.”
Stein’s Green Party, with no members in either the House or Senate, will face challenges in pushing legislation through Congress, long-time Beltway observers predict. One person given anonymity to speak freely, said: “This is an epic disaster for the rules-based order and the stability upon which it relies. Citizens will expect changes to improve their lives—and now we may be forced to give in. This is what happens when you foolishly entrust democratic institutions to protect democracy.”
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
On the TMI Show for November 4th, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan err on the side of bringing you more information than you ever thought you needed. This time, with Election Day tomorrow, we offer you a Voters Guide about the five major presidential candidates: the good, the bad and the ugly about them, their policy stances and their parties. We deride, you decide! The TMI Show airs Monday through Friday at 10 am Eastern live, and streams in storage, on YouTube and Rumble.
In today’s headlines: an art heist, the state kills a squirrel and an icon of the music world sheds his mortal coil.
