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WASHINGTON -- President Joe Biden has had enough of Donald Trump's efforts to reverse his lost reelection bid. He has reminded him flatly how he failed in his bid for a second term, and with it the power he abused for four chaotic years in the Oval Office.
Biden waited for more than a year after his 2020 decisive victory over Trump to tell him off. It was an abrupt No More Mr. Nice Guy transformation by Biden, putting the onetime New York real-estate tycoon in his place as a rejected private citizen.
Noting that Trump "could not accept his loss," Biden appeared to welcome a prospective Biden-Trump rematch in 2024.
"I did not seek this fight, brought to this Capitol, one year ago today," he said, "but I will not shrink from it either." Biden is aware that Trump's erratic behavior in his four years in the Oval Office has provided Biden ample new political ammunition to fire against him in a rematch.
"I will stand in this breach," he said. "I will defend this nation and allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of democracy." For the first time in our history, Biden said, a president had "tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, as a violent mob breached the Capitol. But they failed, they failed. He has done what no president in American history has ever done. He refused to accept the results of an election and the will of the people."
Biden described the horror we all saw via television and the internet, of rioters rampaging, attacking police protecting the Capitol, running through the halls of Congress bent on violence. Biden went on: "What did we not see? We didn't see a former president who had just rallied the mob to attack, sitting in the private drawing room off the Oval Office in the White House, watching it all on television, and did nothing for hours as police were accosted, lives at risks, the nation's capital under siege."
After quoting the line from scripture that "the truth shall make you free," Biden called out Trump's pattern of prevarication.
"The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He's done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interests as more important than his country's interests and America's interests, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution.
"He can't accept he lost, even though that's what 93 United States senators, his own Attorney General, his own Vice President, governors and state officials in every battleground state have all said: He lost."
The president was on a roll now, rubbing Trump's nose in his bungling coup attempt. Biden concluded: "He was just looking for an excuse, a pretext to cover for the truth, that he is not just a former president, but a defeated former president, defeated by a majority of 7 million of our votes in a free election." By one count, Biden uttered the phrase "defeated president" 16 times in about 10 minutes, to drove the point home.
In all, it was clear that the man who had beaten Trump by 7 million popular votes in 2020 was intent on benefiting again, by virtue of the same simple political advantage of the last time they face each other -- that he is not Donald Trump. Biden's last opponent remains the same controversial figure to whom the current president was a preferable alternative the last time around, and hopes to be so judged again in 2024, if they meet a second time.
* Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at juleswitcover@comcast.net.