Final proof Biden’s America is utterly adrift, ignored – and barrelling toward disaster: incoherent President… now losing all control

The words were forceful enough on Tuesday when President Joe Biden rightly condemned the current ‘ferocious surge of anti-Semitism in America and around the world.’

He was speaking, appropriately enough, at a Holocaust memorial ceremony in the US Capitol on May 7 – seven months to the day of Hamas‘s unprovoked and barbarous attack on Israel.

Biden was even explicit about Hamas’s crimes and its responsibility for the war that inevitably followed October 7. 

‘I have not forgotten,’ averred the President.

But the most remarkable feature of his speech was how little his words seemed to matter. They disappeared in the wind almost as soon as they were uttered.

There was a time when America — indeed the world — took serious notice of what a US president said. Biden, it appears, can be safely ignored.

Certainly few seem to heed his warnings these days. 

He told Iran ‘don’t’ when it threatened to retaliate for Israel’s fatal attack on its Revolutionary Guard HQ in Damascus, Syria. Tehran proceeded to launch over 300 missiles and drones at Israel, nearly all of them thankfully taken out before reaching their targets.

He informed Israel that rooting out what’s left of Hamas in the southern Gaza city of Rafah was a ‘red line’ the Jewish State must not cross because of the potential for more civilian casualties. This week Israel started rooting out Hamas in Rafah.

On Tuesday, he addressed the poisonous anti-Semitism now rampant on university campuses.

He highlighted ‘vicious propaganda on social media … Jews forced to hide kippahs under baseball caps, tuck Jewish stars into their shirts … Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class .. antisemitic posters, slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel … too many people denying, rationalizing, ignoring the horrors of the Holocaust and October 7th … it’s absolutely despicable — and it must stop.’

He is, of course, absolutely right to call this out. The pity is that it’s taken him so long to do so. Even now, he can’t bring himself to be specific.

The so-called National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), instigators of many of the encampments, has called October 7th ‘a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.’

New York’s Columbia University SJP has declared ‘full solidarity with Palestinian resistance,’ praising the ‘historic’ attack ‘despite the odds.’

These are not protestors pleading for peace to be given a chance. They want to see Israel destroyed and Hamas victorious.

Biden’s own campaign supporters are funding this pro-war rabble.

Money from Democratic megadonor George Soros has gone to a group called Jewish Voice for Peace which immediately after October 7 blamed, ‘Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity,’ for the slaughter.

Biden, again rightly, said there are eerie echoes in all this of how Hitler and the Nazis prepared Germany for the eventual obliteration of the Jews.

But he cannot bring himself to name names or call out particular campuses, unlike in the aftermath of Charlottesville when he was quite specific about the evil of the torchlit neo-Nazis who tried to storm the University of Virginia eight years ago. He’s even claimed, unconvincingly, that Charlottesville is the reason he decided to run for president.

Yet as President, Biden couldn’t even bring himself to condemn the notorious anti-Semitic ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ chant so beloved of the protestors.

Even his hapless White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre has managed to do that. But not her boss.

In truth, Biden is struggling to straddle a Democratic Party deeply divided between its pro-Palestinian progressives and its pro-Israel establishment. He thinks he needs both for his re-election. It accounts for him pulling his punches — and for the doublespeak.

As Biden claimed his support for Israel is ‘ironclad even when we disagree’ we learned that his administration was holding up shipments of precision bombs to Israel to signal to the Israeli government that Washington really doesn’t want it to pursue the all-out defeat of Hamas.

For all its strong words, it’s clear the Biden administration fears further explosions of protest on US campuses should Israel mount a full-scale invasion of Rafah, protests that have already led to over 2,000 arrests in 40 campuses.

As a result, Biden ties himself up in contortions.

‘We must give hate no safe harbor,’ he intoned on Tuesday. Except, it seems, in Rafah.

He and his most senior cabinet ministers lecture Israel on the need to avoid further mass civilian casualties. A perfectly reasonable position. Except that they then deny Israel the sort of precision munitions that would reduce civilian casualties.

It all adds to the growing impression, here and abroad, that the Biden administration is adrift and increasingly powerless. 

The physical infirmity of the President and his verbal incoherence when he departs from the script on his teleprompter — sometimes he’s incoherent even when he sticks to the script — are the visible signs of a President struggling to stay in control. But failures of policy are also tangible evidence of a President losing his grip.

Almost everything he touches these days turns to dust. 

His anti-Semitism task forces have done nothing to stem the worst outbreaks of anti-Semitism since World War 2. His humanitarian aid pier for Gaza is still to be realized and remains fraught with danger. His hopes of bringing Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords, which he could have done three years ago, thereby pre-empting October 7th, are going nowhere fast.

His efforts to micromanage Israel’s military strategy in Gaza are merely ludicrous and win him no friends on either side of the war. Indeed pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protestors now shout ‘F*** Joe Biden’ in unison

Democratic Party strategists are increasingly concerned about the political fallout from all this. Republicans are already well ahead on the most important issue for voters — the economy. 

Democrats fear they will also run on a tough law-and-order ticket, as the second most important matter on voters’ minds, claiming it’s all part of the same chaotic Democratic picture — uncontrolled borders, lawless cities, rundown police departments, anarchy on the campus.

Republicans will claim America is falling apart and Biden is powerless to stop it.

This would obviously have huge appeal to the independents and suburban voters Republicans need to win over to retake the White House, hold on to the House and take the Senate.

It could be countered by a president showing resolve and strength. But Biden is inching steadily in the opposite direction, looking increasingly weak and conflicted.

To be fair, Biden’s intervention, well-meant and heartfelt – as it no doubt was despite all its inadequacies – was over-shadowed by Stormy Daniels testimony in the Donald Trump hush-money trial in New York.

The media was more obsessed with that than Biden’s important words about anti-Semitism, which is not the President’s fault.

But you can’t help feeling that a President with more authority and respect would also have commanded more attention.

However, that’s tough, perhaps impossible, to achieve when the most telling metaphor for the Biden presidency is now an empty Oval Office.