Joe Biden he was never known for his faithfulness to the truth.

Before his ascension to the presidency, previous bids for White house it spawned a plagiarism scandal and a series of notable moves regarding his academic record.

There is much more. The Washington Post has appointed his story about being arrested while trying to see Nelson Mandela “ridiculous.” His tall tale about his father teaching him that love is love was undermined by his own four decades of opposition to same-sex marriage. He slandered the truck driver involved in the tragic drunken car crash that killed his first wife and daughter while intoxicated, following him to the grave with the startling and baseless accusation, only stopping after the press picked up on the defamation.

But even those accustomed to Biden’s dishonesty have been surprised by both the frequency and boldness of the lies he has told since taking the final oath.

Those lies are the rotten fruit of Biden’s dismal tenure as commander in chief.

By any objective measure, the 46th president was an utter failure. Biden’s approval rating was underwater less than eight months into his term and has never recovered. The economic conditions cultivated under his administration’s watch are resented by voters of all faiths and backgrounds. He handed Afghanistan over to the Taliban and invited aggression from America’s enemies in Moscow and the Middle East, who launched unspeakable attacks on our allies that left tens of thousands dead. The country remains as divided as when he moved into the Oval Office, if not more so. And Donald Trump not only made an improbable political comeback, but beat his successor so thoroughly in the polls that Biden was forced to give up a nomination he had already won and his chance at a second term. to the elders of his own party.

How did he get this far — and nearly send his party to what would have been a certain general election loss for Trump this fall? Until this summer, Biden held his base together by telling truths that only diehard Democratic partisans could bring themselves to believe. The rest of the country saw it for what it was: gaslighted.

Inflationperhaps the force most responsible for Biden’s political misfortune, was nothing to worry about, he and his team insisted again and again in the early days of his administration. “Our experts believe, and the data shows, that most of the price increases we’ve seen are expected to be temporary,” he said in July 2021, just months after passing a $1.9 trillion spending bill touted as a COVID-19 relief measure, but which was, in practice, a series of leaflets in the democratic constituencies.

Time and time again, Biden and his economic lieutenants have voiced their opinion that rising prices are a passing inconvenience rather than an anchor tied tightly around everyone’s ankles. “Transient” might have been the word of the year. By the end of 2021, Biden was forced to admit that inflation had become a problem. However, he spent most of the next year bragging, often erroneously, about other supposed achievements. “We have the fastest growing economy in the world — the world,” Biden pointed out during a 2022 appearance at Jimmy Kimmel Live!

It wasn’t true. Fact checks from even nice sockets noted that more than 50 countries had faster-growing economies in the previous year. As it turned out, the economy actually contracted in the first quarter of 2022.

When Biden finally said he had come up with a solution to the surplus money in the system, it turned out he was still pumping. More money back into it through a run-of-the-mill environmental spending bill dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Critics of the bill brought up the misnomer at the time, but Biden and his party insisted it was an appropriate solution.

Still, prices continued to rise, and just months after casting a decisive vote in favor of the bill, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV), realizing he had been duped, accused the president of using the legislation to implement a “radical climate change agenda”. A few months after that, Biden himself almost admitted that the bill’s name was a red herring to provide political cover for progressive policymaking.

“It has less to do with reducing inflation than with the approach of providing alternatives that generate economic growth,” he explained.

Ah.

Biden’s strategy for mitigating the political effect of his countless failures has been the same: deny, deny, deny. He has sent members of his administration, including his border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, to call the southern border secure, even as record numbers of illegal immigrants have crossed it. He argued that the wrongful withdrawal from Afghanistanwho saw Kabul fall before Taliban long before it was complete and 12 US service members killed and leaving behind tens of thousands of US allies twisting in the wind, it was a “tremendous success”. He bragged about how he would bring Vladimir Putin in before giving the green light to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. And in a speech before the United Nations, Biden scored an inexplicable victory over his foreign policy vision, arguing that and -he took office at a time of “crisis and uncertainty” and that he leaves the field with the world in better shape than he did. found him.

Now, Biden’s gas-lit presidency has given way HarrisHis heated candidacy — with disastrous results.

Much has been made of the Harris campaign’s strategic decisions since its launch in July, but the truth is that most of its flaws have been written into its DNA. The second Democratic standard bearer this cycle carries the same baggage as the first.

If Harris hadn’t run his own 2020 presidential campaign well to the left of Biden, he could have credibly made the case that he’s not a one-for-one replacement but rather marks a break from the unhappy Biden years. But because almost all of her previous positions five years ago were just more extreme versions of the unpopular ones Biden himself espoused, this case was impossible to make honestly. After all, even Biden’s advanced age and cognitive decline are yolks that Harris has to bear because of her. often indignant the insistence that it was high.

The only way around it was more lies. For a while, Harris managed to ride the sugar high of not being the octogenarian starter. But once the accident came, she had to lean on something.

That something turned out to be a multitude of platitudes, mouth-watering retractions and outright lies. In other words: gas lighting.

The same woman who last ran for president as an open-borders ideologue open to dismantling Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running ads promoting her bona fide immigration hawk — or, to be more precise, making them up. The same woman now eager to condemn Iran as America’s greatest enemy once reacted to the death of its top terrorist general, Qassem Soliemani, by chastising Trump. The same woman who repeatedly and passionately vowed to ban fracking now happens to shout “Drill, Baby, Drill!” with Pennsylvania’s electoral votes on the line.

Harris’ campaign slogan is “A New Way Forward”. She assured the audience that her own presidency will be much different than Biden’s. But after three months of thinking, he still couldn’t figure out how.

“Turning the page” became a common refrain of the vice president on the campaign trail. However, when asked for an explanation of what the next page might look like at a recent event, she replied that “it is a metaphor that is also meant to describe my intention to engage in a new generation of leadership. And needless to say, mine will not be a continuation of the Biden administration.”

“I bring my own ideas, my own experiences” she addedleaving what those ideas might be to the imagination of her audience.

Believe it or not, this was an improvement over previous iterations of that answer.

Taking center stage during general election season is a path presidential candidates have traveled since time immemorial. To condemn someone for doing this is to condemn everyone else for doing the same.

But the project in which the Harris campaign was launched has a completely different character. Almost all of the alleged reversals of his primary have been announced through campaign spokesmen or unsigned statements. And when asked to vouch for them herself, her explanations are incomprehensible. He can’t say when, how or why he changed his mind about something. And it can articulate no material difference between it and the historically unpopular incumbent.

There is a distinction between a caterpillar that turns into a butterfly and a chameleon that changes colors. What does the alleged transformation of the Vice President best resemble?

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Harris’s big hope is that she can get away with saying that with herself at the helm, the next four years will look nothing like the last four, rather than having to explain why.

Unfortunately for her, Biden lost the public’s trust, and then their trust — and did nothing to win it back.

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediated and a Robert Novak Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.