Ever since Donald Trump launched his 2016 campaign, Democrats have argued that he is too weird in too many ways to be president.
They let their Hollywood wing paint him as Crazy Orange Man and the Washington wing stoke fear about threats to democracy and the smashing of political norms.
These two wings merged Tuesday in the bizarre appearance of Robert De Niro.
Once a great actor, De Niro has become an unhinged Trump hater and his denunciation of the former president alternately as a “clown” and a “tyrant” amounted to little more than a pip squeaking.
Except for one fact: De Niro didn’t show up on his own accord outside the lower Manhattan courthouse where Trump is on trial.
He was sent by Joe Biden’s campaign team as its representative.
The juvenile speech he read presumably was written by or approved by the White House.
And they say Trump is weird?
When a has-been actor is your top surrogate, somebody in the White House is panicking.
Election ‘anxiety’
In fact, there is nothing normal about Joe Biden or his misbegotten presidency, despite what he and the media would have you believe.
Finally, the pressure of facts is demolishing the manufactured patina of character and competence.
The De Niro performance came on the same day that Politico chronicled a “freakout” among party leaders who believe Biden is headed for defeat.
“Anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives,” the outlet reports.
“And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.”
This is a sensible reaction, but what took them so long?
The Biden presidency has been a disaster for more than three years and the brains behind it are just now waking up?
Chief among their ideas was to persecute, er prosecute, Trump to keep him off the campaign trail and potentially put him in prison.
Superficially, it has succeeded as he’s stuck in a Manhattan courtroom most days and subject to a nonstop barrage of indictments and critical press coverage.
The only hitch is that the legal jihad has backfired politically.
It’s made Trump more popular as the four criminal cases are so deeply flawed that it’s obvious they wouldn’t exist except for partisanship.
That’s not just abnormal — it’s unprecedented in American history.
Yet bad ideas are hard to kill and the artifice that Biden is normal and Trump is abnormal lives on.
