President Joe Biden has always thought he was the smartest man in the room, even when it’s clear that he’s not.
Take his response to the Afghanistan crisis, for example. Not only did he delay addressing the nation about the Taliban takeover and subsequent American evacuation problems in Kabul, but he has also refused to take responsibility for the lack of planning associated with the botched withdrawal, and offered flippant looks at his watch and anecdotes about his own son’s death to cancer as a response to the grieving families who lost their loved ones in the Kabul explosion last week.
Any speech that he gives is plagued with nonsensical verbiage, uncomfortable pauses, and weird comments about how he is or isn’t allowed to answer questions from specific people about specific topics.
But Biden’s deluded sense of self-expertise has been fed by corporate media and “foreign policy officials” who defended Biden as a foreign policy expert on the campaign trail and well into his administration.
“Why Joe Biden’s foreign policy experience is both a weakness and a strength in 2020,” Vox wrote in 2019.
Biden even wrote a column in early 2020 titled “Why America Must Lead Again: Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump.”
Just a few months before Biden’s approval rating plummeted due to his poor handling of Afghanistan, polling reports suggested the president “Gets High Marks for Foreign Policy.”
Even Biden hinted as early as 1988 that he might “know more about foreign policy” than Gary Hart, his then-rival for the Democratic nomination for president. In that same now-infamous interview, Biden, who was a senator at the time, proudly boasted about his accomplishments to people at a campaign event in New Hampshire.
“I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” Biden told one voter who asked him about his educational background.
In addition to claiming that he attended law school “on a full academic scholarship” and was “the only one in my class” to do so, Biden falsely claimed that he completed school in the top half of his graduating class, was rewarded for being an outstanding student of political science, and earned three undergraduate degrees.
These claims are all verifiably false, the Washington Post notes. Biden’s full academic scholarship “was a half scholarship based on financial need,” he finished 76th out of 85 in his class, he was not rewarded for being an outstanding political science student, and his only degree from the University of Delaware was “a single B.A. in political science and history.”
It wasn’t until he was peppered with allegations of plagiarism that the high-achieving student Biden painted himself as was reduced to a guy who flunked a law school class after using pieces of a law review article in one of his papers without citation.
Somehow, Biden’s political career has stayed alive this long, but his egotistical, rash, angry approach to the presidency isn’t going to last forever. Afghanistan exposed Biden’s incompetence even more than his tendency to call a lid on the campaign trail, his speeches fraught with gibberish, or any of his other political blunders did. Biden’s inability to prioritize Americans and keep them alive during a mission designated to bring U.S. citizens home will continue to prove that, despite his insistence, he is not the smartest person in the room and he never will be.
