Anti-Trump Republicans come up with plenty of excuses for supporting President Joe Biden in spite of the fact he stands in opposition to everything these individuals were elected or hired as Republicans to effectuate.
Sure, they may say, they don’t necessarily agree with Biden or what the president has spent his life promoting, but he “respects norms.” Or it’s about being “pro-democracy.” Or he’s really not as liberal as we all — including Biden himself — like to think he is. Whatever.
Of all the reasons for NeverTrumpers to vote for Biden, however, one that I hadn’t really heard before Monday was that Joseph Robinette Biden was a “decent person.”
Credit Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of the swing state of Georgia, for that nugget of unintentional hilarity.
Duncan served as lieutenant governor between 2019 to 2023 but declined to run for a second term, likely due to the fact that his animus toward former President Donald Trump was so great and so public he’d almost certainly lose in the primary.
If you remember hearing his name in the headlines recently, it’s likely because the centrist political group/party No Labels was looking to settle upon Duncan as a presidential candidate after being rebuffed by virtually everyone with a national profile.
(In April, The Associated Press reported, the group ended its 2024 presidential bid after two major setbacks: failing to draw a big enough name to top the ticket and the death of co-founder Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic/independent senator from Connecticut, in late March.)
However, Duncan was not going to go quietly into that good political night, at least not during this election cycle. In an Op-Ed published Monday in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he laid out “Why I’m voting for Biden and other Republicans should, too.”
“It’s disappointing to watch an increasing number of Republicans fall in line behind former president Donald Trump,” Duncan began. “This includes some of his fiercest detractors, such as U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who raised eyebrows during a recent interview by vowing to support the ‘Republican ticket.’ This mentality is dead wrong.”
Now, I’d just like to note that the former lieutenant governor basically set the tone for the entire rotten piece in those three sentences alone.
What “mentality” has Duncan described that unites the decisions of McConnell, Sununu and Barr to announce they’ll support Trump in November?
None, of course. He just listed three notable Republicans who don’t particularly like Trump but said they’ll be voting for him.
Nevertheless, despite failing to identify any single “mentality” that led to these tepid endorsements of the presumptive GOP nominee, Duncan assures us that it’s “dead wrong.”
The logic, such as he presents it, gets no better from there. Duncan admits that “elections are a binary choice,” that “serious questions linger about President Biden’s ability to serve until the age of 86” and that he’ll continue to push “progressive policies [that] aren’t to conservatives’ liking.”
However, the former lieutenant governor assures us that we have to save the Republican Party by delivering the country over for another four years to a senile wreck of a man whose political sensibilities have far more in common with the pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic rabblement overrunning college campuses (before they demand student loan forgiveness, of course) than with those of any sensible Republican.
Duncan claimed that “the GOP will never rebuild until we move on from the Trump era, leaving conservative (but not angry) Republicans like me no choice but to pull the lever for Biden. At the same time, we should work to elect GOP congressional majorities to block his second-term legislative agenda and provide a check and balance.
“The alternative is another term of Trump, a man who has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character. The headlines are ablaze with his hush-money trial over allegations of improper record-keeping for payments to conceal an affair with an adult-film star.”
These charges, pursued by publicity-happy Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are, of course, politicized lawn fertilizer — and one assumes Duncan is fully aware of that fact if he’s been paying attention to these things.
But then he brings in the big guns: “Trump fanned the flames of unfounded conspiracy theories that led to the horrific events of Jan. 6, 2021. He refuses to admit he lost the last election and has hinted he might do so again after the next one.”
Trump’s views on the election of 2020 are indeed a matter that requires scrutiny from voters, but the idea that his “conspiracy theories … led to the horrific events of Jan. 6, 2021” does not; the idea that he incited the small group who went to the Capitol and infiltrated the building has collapsed, in the three years hence, under the weightlessness of the evidence that the former president desired, aided or abetted the incursion.
The Op-Ed rambles on for a few more paragraphs in the same vein: Yes, Biden will be bad for America, you’ll be paying higher taxes and insane progressives will continue to throw those “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests we’ve become accustomed to since the summer of 2020. But, Duncan says, the GOP needs to heal — and our healing requires four more years of pain as we try our best to block the plans of a senescent fabricator by electing a Republican Congress instead. (No Freedom Caucus types, though, I’m assuming.)
But then he ends it with this fantastic line: “This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.” (Emphasis ours.)
Read my latest @AJC oped on why I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass:https://t.co/RVTtgt1Ri3
— Geoff Duncan (@GeoffDuncanGA) May 6, 2024
Really?
Let’s go with that final thought — the idea of a Republican casting his ballot for Joe Biden in a generally conservative swing state because of the president’s inherent decency.
Do you disagree with this take from Geoff Duncan?
First, the bleeding obvious: Biden is a serial liar. He doesn’t just lie about strange stuff — although he does indeed lie about strange stuff, from Corn Pop being a bad dude to his uncle being eaten by cannibals to being a commercial truck driver who participated in the Civil Rights movement, etc. He also lies about far more poisonous things, too.
Speaking of truck drivers, let’s not forget that Biden has repeatedly told the lie that the truck driver who was in an accident with his first wife that killed her and their daughter, Naomi, was drunk at the time of the accident.
When he told the lies, furthermore, the truck driver was long since deceased, leaving him no avenue to defend himself.
The judge in the case not only confirmed there was no evidence that the truck driver was intoxicated but intimated that Biden’s wife, tragic though the accident may have been for her and her family, was indeed responsible for it.
Is this your definition of a decent man, Mr. Duncan — a politician who impugns an innocent truck driver by smearing his name because it makes for an interesting story on the campaign trail? Or is that just one of your “disagreements” with the president? I’d say that speaks to his decency more than anything else, but maybe you’re a little fuzzy on the definition of the word.
Or maybe you’re fuzzy on the lies he’s told about his family’s business matters.
For the entirety of the 2020 campaign, Biden swore upon a stack of copies of Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” that he knew nothing — nothing! — about his family’s peculiar foreign corporate dealings. Then came the leak of son Hunter Biden’s laptop in the waning weeks of the 2020 campaign, which seemed to demonstrate Joe Biden knew plenty about it.
He claimed during the subsequent presidential debates that the Hunter laptop was a Russian disinformation trick. This too was a lie, something every respectable media organization has more or less acknowledged at this point.
And, despite the fact that Hunter could have — and should have — been charged by Biden’s Department of Justice with a slew of tax and gun charges stemming in part from his work abroad, he was given a sweetheart deal by the DOJ that only collapsed when the judge rejected it, saying it was “not standard, not what I normally see,” possibly “not worth the paper it is printed on,” and so unprecedented as to potentially be unconstitutional.
It finally took a special counsel for the first son to be charged with something an independent DOJ ought to have been pursuing in court since day one.
Is this your definition of decency, Mr. Duncan?
Or, maybe we can look at the speech that then-nominee Biden gave at the 2020 Democratic National Convention regarding his vision for healing America.
“We can choose the path of becoming angrier, less hopeful, and more divided,” he said, according to a transcript from CNN. “We can choose a different path, and together, take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light … Character is on the ballot. Compassion is on the ballot. Decency, science, democracy.”
In the three-plus years he’s been in office, Biden has demonized his opponents as “ultra-MAGA Republicans” who are authoritarian bigots while enabling the most divisive elements in the Democratic Party. Yet again, he lied — this time about healing and decency. If anything shows what character really is, this is it.
Yet you, Mr. Duncan, are endorsing someone for his decency, character and ability to heal after he literally stood in front of America and prevaricated his backside off about those three selfsame things.
How gullible can a politician be? If this piece is written in full honesty, that’s not a rhetorical question; Duncan’s further participation in local or national political dialogue requires him to explain how he arrived at a conclusion that Biden is inherently decent when, at every opportunity he’s been given to demonstrate that, he’s failed spectacularly.
The former lieutenant governor spent an entire Op-Ed telling Georgia Republicans they’ve got to suffer under a senile president held captive by failed progressive ideas because Biden is a decent man of character with whom he just happens to disagree.
If he really believes that, he’s obviously terminally unfamiliar with the kind of man Joe Biden is and should never have written the Op-Ed.
If Duncan isn’t that dumb and couldn’t even dash off that final sentence about “decent person I disagree with” without falling off his desk chair in a fit of laughter — and I suspect this is actually the case — he obviously shouldn’t have written the Op-Ed, either.
In short, it never should have been written. There: I read this piffle so you don’t have to.
However, if you really want to see the lengths the NeverTrumpers will go to in order to continue to delude themselves or you, and possibly both, about what electing Joe Biden really means for Americans, you could do worse than Geoff Duncan’s unintentionally hilarious endorsement of our failed 46th president.
