Where Have You Gone, Sleepy Joe?

A wag can’t help but ham.

In my selfless effort to add to the gaiety of the nations, I penned a farcical column last winter on why Joe Biden would have clobbered Donald Trump in a re-bout. The piece was tongue-in-cheek, or, since the internet disallows mien expression, satirical to a fault.

Months afore November 2024, President Biden was a dessicated husk of a man that would have gifted Trump a landslide of colossal proportions. Reagan vis-à-vis Mondale would look like Broward County circa 2000 in comparison. Americans accept a lot from our political class: cronyism, graft, payoffs, sexcapades, camera-mugging, short-sighted spendthriftness, disgraceful oggling in cable-news hits, outright barratry in custodying the ship of state. Hell, we even put up with graybeareded executives as long as the price of eggs remains reasonable or we don’t instigate World War III, Operation: Nuke Putin.

But an insensate gaffer that put septum-pierced posgrads in charge of an entire commercial republic? No need for a smoky dormroom debate to imagine how that turned out. We got a full four-year case study.

The silvered Biden spell featured theory-mad wokies raiding the federal fisc like daddy’s retirement fund. These self-styled class warriors with Ivy League diplomas dumped a tonnage of dollars into the economy to fund all types of libby cottage concerns: electric car batteries, union pension funds, DEI trainings, social media censorship, charge cards for illegal aliens, transgender operas in Colombia, seahorse migration studies, indigenous affirmative-action grants, mandatory sex-change operations for abbesses. (OK, I made the last one up… or did I?)

The upshot: the worst inflation since Jimmy Carter shucked peanuts on the White House portico. Biden’s lib lackeys pulled all types of woke shenanigans on voters, like insisting that men can become women or that 20 million new neighbors was no great shakes. But asserting that levitating grocery prices were “transitory”? Electoral seppuku. Kamala Harris could have karate-kicked Xi Jinping in stilettos and it wouldn’t have won her Wisconsin.

Donald Trump handily wins re-re-election based on warmly recalled affluence during his first term. A year into the MAGAsequel, animal spirits must be soaring along with the Dow Jones, right-o? Wrong-o. Certainly stockjobbers are doin’ dandy, flipping a buck into a buckfifty with the magic of asset amortization. The capitalist fatcat bingy give-me-one-of-every-stripe ethos is missing among those who don’t slip their toned legs into pressed Canali trousers each morning.

Consumer confidence is at a nadir not seen for a decade. Not even the pandemic’s commercial kill-switch left the average American spender so dolorous. Count yourself lucky if your eyeballs don’t recede while staring at the weekly grocery receipt. William Balfour couldn’t envision a more Marxian dynamic.

President Trump isn’t exactly moving at a scud pace to prime the plunger pump, either. His Administration is hoping for a triple bankshot of tariff-driven reindustrialization, an AI-induced boom, and Jerome Powell acquiescing on interest rate cuts to really sprout those green shoots. A parlay, in other words. The great big American comeback is basically a series of increasingly unlikely FanDuel payoffs.

Onto this dour tableau hobbles an unexpected figure: Grandpa Joe! Back from Shady Acres! Hot cup of tea and comforting recollection in hand.

A new Harvard-Harris poll unwrapped quite the nostalgia-tistic: a slim majority believes the economy is “worse than it was under Biden.” The loud crack you hear is every pair of rose-colored glasses splintering across America.

Has half the country’s hippocampi gone kaput? Has some mass delusion been beamed into our limbic system from without, perhaps by those dastardly Iranians, the Chicommies, or, most grotesque, Rosie O’Donnell?

Washing machine prices jumping up a hundred dollars due to steel tariffs stings the wallet. But paranoid freakers hoarded gas under Biden. Post-war boom years, with cheap, fresh broilers in every pot, they were not.

What accounts for the false memory? Are all those prog therapists right about recovered recall? Is it just the security and assurance that reminiscing ” target=”_blank”>invokes? Was Sleepy Joe a kind and wise steward of our collective money-making talents?

Hardly. The happiest day for a president is Election Day. It’s all downhill after inauguration. Once in office, the head of state can no longer dodge the fatal crumbler of governments: blame. Blame for everything, macro and micro, domestic and foreign, individual and countrywide. The unemployment rate ticks up? BLAME. A suicide bombing in Kandahar? BLAME. Grandma dies? BLAME. Nintendo refuses to rerelease Pokémon: Red Version on the Switch in time for Christmas? WHAT THE HELL, DONNY?! I THOUGHT YOU WERE MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN?!?!

Donald Trump, despite his maiden term, was the antithesis of the sclerotic establishment. But now he, too, rolls under the wave anti-incumbent angst balloters keep spitting forth, hoping something—anything!—changes through the democratic process.

The American voter is trapped between romanticizing bygone administrations while holding a sappy optimism about a soon-to-dawn easy fix, crying out like Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisted, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”

Soon, in the summer of 2029, halfway through President Ocasio-Cortez’s first year, voters will look fondly upon the bountiful Trump era.