The Biden Campaign and the Knives in the Senate

Photo Credit:Vincenzo Camuccini, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Vincenzo Camuccini, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It's tempting to compare the betrayal of Joe Biden by his own to the experience of Julius Caesar—but the discrepanices between the two men are astounding.

On Sunday, July 21, 2024, the White House issued a written statement in which Joe Biden announced that he was withdrawing from his reelection campaign, while intending to remain in office for the six remaining months of this term.

The announcement followed days of reports — both off the record and on — that Biden’s former allies, his fellow party bosses, everyone but his family, was trying to convince him to end his campaign. It will likely never be known what final threats and/or promises were used to convince him to step down. Promises of non-prosecution for him and his family?  Promises of pardons too, just in case?  Or perhaps money — the Bidens always responded to illicit contributions in the past; once you’re an ex-president, it’s a lot easier to make those illicit contributions look legit.

They certainly have the resources to offer anything a corrupt old pol could want. And by the end, the cabal held all the cards.

It should be no surprise that they were finally able to get him to sign the letter, when push came to shove — as it most certainly did.  Perhaps they put the letter in one of those padded blue folders when they handed it to him, so that he’d think he was just signing another unconstitutional executive order, like so many dozens before. He always signed those, without question. All it ever took was Dr. Jill’s positive nod, and he happily signed whatever was put in front of him, for almost four years now. As long as there was an ice cream at the end of it.

In light of these developments, the political discussion — especially on social media — has been full of imagery about the ambush of Julius Caesar.

It’s a tempting comparison, certainly: a politician at the peak of his power, cut down in a surprise attack by his closest friends.  After four years at the top, having assumed virtually dictatorial power, and having recently won his party’s nomination with little more than token opposition, so much like Caesar’s five years of near-absolute rule, culminating in the offer — cordially declined — of a kingly crown at the Lupercal.

15 million Democrats voted for Biden’s renomination in his fourth year in office, and now the U.S. Senate Majority Leader and former Speaker of the House, not to mention the previous two Democrat presidents, were all stabbing him in the back — figuratively if not literally.

Yes indeed, it’s Julius Caesar all over again — to those who have read no more history than the IMDB plot summaries of a few old Louis Calhern and John Gielgud movies.

Unfortunately for the romantics, however, even the wizardry of Hollywood — long famed for refurbishing reputations and puffing up egos by making the mundane seem heroic on the screen — could never make Joe Biden look like Julius Caesar.

A brief refresher:

Julius Caesar was the founder of the Julio-Claudian family of Roman emperors, which ruled Rome for a century. Caesar was among the greatest military men of antiquity, and was also a historian; much of his fame is from having written the definitive books about his victories in The Gallic Wars. Even today, over 2,000 years later, when students study Latin, they use Caesar’s history as their textbook; his command of the written word was equal to Rome’s greatest epic poets.

Caesar was an orator, a skilled politician, and a successful administrator. As he rose in the ranks of the Roman Republic, Caesar had to manage logistics, tax revenues, the spoils of victories, and the payroll of an army.

He built bridges over the Rhine River that were cheered for centuries as engineering marvels. He championed the cause of war veterans, improving their pay and their respect in society.  Caesar was a scientist and mathematician, at least for his times; he recognized flaws in the calendar and created his own version, the Julian calendar, that lasted a millennium and a half before Pope Gregory solved its remaining flaws.  A masterpiece.

We cannot deny the negatives of Julius Caesar’s life and accomplishments; he helped drive the final nails into the coffin of the old Roman Republic, and he largely masterminded the transition from weakened republic to pure empire that was to last the next five centuries. He’s no hero for a modern Republican.

But even without supporting Caesar’s ends, we must acknowledge an unprecedented amount of individual talent at the heart of these accomplishments.  Caesar was a writer and thinker, an administrator and conqueror, a strategist and builder. And at least at some of those things, he is still renowned as the best of his class, two thousand years later.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is hardly fit to shine Caesar’s shoes or to pour him a goblet of wine.

Biden is known to have blatantly plagiarized many of the stories he told, both out loud and in print, and he needs ghostwriters to come up with the briefest of executive orders.

Biden made up stories about his own background out of whole cloth, claiming easily disproved things as nonexistent college scholarships, top class rankings, even imaginary jobs.  The man had to repeat third grade, and arguably never really got any brighter.

While Caesar won wars, inspiring respect and peace throughout the known world, Biden’s weakness encouraged wars, as Russia charged into the Donbas region of Ukraine, and China doubled down on its threats across the South China Sea, having no fear of American response on his watch.

While Caesar built roads, bridges, and buildings for the Roman Empire, Joe Biden just promised to, but then spent the money thus raised on other things.  The “infrastructure” plans that Biden championed in the 2020s turned out to be payoffs to Chinese wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers, bribes to cities and states to support the regime’s policies, and pressure to America’s automakers and power companies to give up on technology that works, and switch to technology that doesn’t.  Biden’s infrastructure bills just littered the landscape with wind turbines and solar panels, EV charging stations and shuttered businesses.

Julius Caesar rose to the top by winning the respect and loyalty of the military; Joe Biden’s loathing of the American military is undeniable and barely even hidden.  As Caesar used his military to expand the holdings of Rome, Biden supervised America’s shrinkage, insisting on a pullout from Afghanistan that looked more like fleeing a disastrous failure than turning over the keys to a sturdy ally.  In fact, Biden largely undid 20 years of American and allied efforts, effectively returning Afghanistan to the very people we’ve fought for more than two decades.

Caesar would never have done any of that.

But perhaps the biggest difference, the most consequential, was who did them in and why.

Caesar was dethroned by his fellow senators — Brutus and Cassius, Casca and Galba, Trebonius and Decimus -– because they believed in the cause of the once great Roman Republic.  The conspirators believed that Julius Caesar had acquired too much power and had weakened the republican structures of the senate and the council of the plebs.

Biden, by contrast, was dethroned by people who are perfectly happy to see republican structures weakened, people who are in fact fully on board with the dictatorial powers of an imperial presidency.  They just fear that Joe Biden wouldn’t be able to win reelection, and his loss would put their cronies’ power in the executive branch in jeopardy.

In the final analysis, then, Joe Biden wasn’t overthrown by a party trying to preserve a republic, but rather, by a party trying to hasten its descent into monarchy — a party that finally came to the conclusion that Biden’s weakness and incompetence is spoiling their plans for empire.

We are not out of the woods yet; as long as the Democrats exist as a political force in America, the nation remains at great risk. We must study history, not only to understand the metaphors of the day, but to avoid repeating the errors of the past.

May Divine Providence bless our nation again, as we try to climb out of this abyss.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his brand new nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

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Image: Public domain.