Yesterday in Wilmington, Delaware, President-elect Joe Biden held a televised, on-stage presentation of many of his new cabinet picks. I watched most of it and thought it was at times an emotionally-stirring event as each person gave a brief speech. The main idea that came across was that the Biden team intends to restore U.S. values in especially foreign policy, thereby hoping to regain integrity at least with its allies. And, of course, Mr. Biden made it quite clear, as he has been repeatedly saying, that his team will work as hard as possible to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic and aid the tens of millions of Americans who are hurting financially due to the depressed economy this virus has caused.
The primary difference between Trump and Biden on foreign policy will be that Trump the Disruptor purposely alienated America’s most important nation-allies with his Trump Doctrine of America First, whereas Biden will seek to restore relations with our allies through mutual trust. Biden said yesterday of his on-stage appointees, “They embody my core beliefs that America is strongest when it works with its allies.”
The primary difference between Trump and Biden on COVID-19 will be that Mr. Biden will be very active in addressing this pandemic, whereas President Trump has been absolutely AWOL about COVID-19 in recent weeks if not months. A perfect example, as I blogged before, is that he attended the important, Saudi-led, virtual meeting of G-20 last week; but when the subject turned to COVID-19, Trump immediately departed for his nearby Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C. to get in a quick 18 holes.
Having said this, I admit that President Trump went all out in America funding some pharmaceuticals in their efforts to produce a COVID-19 vaccine. Those efforts began paying off three weeks ago when, first Pfizer, and then Moderna–both of whom received substantial funds from the U.S. government–announced that their vaccine had proved in trials to be 90-95 efficacious and that they expected to begin issuing doses next month in the U.S. if approved soon by the FDA. That will prove to be one of the few feathers in Trump’s cap. And if that timing had been about a month or two earlier, I think Trump might have won the election. But it was his very sorry dealing with this pandemic before that that sunk his reelection bid more than anything else.
The second thing that sunk Trump’s reelection was his constant lying which also showed that he was unqualified to be president. For example, since I’m a pro golfer, when Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency, in 2015-16, he criticized President Barack Obama for “playing too much golf.” Trump added that if he became president, he would be too busy doing his job as president to have time to play much golf. It has been just the opposite–President Trump has played way more golf during his four years in office than President Obama did in either of his terms. So, that was just another one of the over 20,000 “lies or misleading statements,” as the fact checkers say, that Donald Trump proclaimed publicly, either by speech or tweet, during the 3.5 years of his presidency.
Biden isn’t like that at all. During his 36 years as a senator of Delaware and 8 years as Vice President to President Barack Obama, Mr. Biden was well liked by his colleagues and known for not lying. With Biden’s immense experience and friendships on both sides of the aisle in the Senate, I expect that hurting Americans will be much better served and America’s positive reputation in the world as a shining beacon of democracy will be restored. And I think Biden’s selection of former prosecuting attorney and senator of California, Kamala Harris–who will be the first female vice-president in our nation’s history–will prove to make a terrific Biden-Harris team.
[And for all you Republicans who may not like what I’m saying here, and may presume I’m a Democrat, just remember, as I constantly state in this blog when I post about politics, I have been an independent voter all of my life, yet I voted for the Republican candidate for the presidency my whole life until 2008 to this time. That’s because I believe the Republican Party has changed a lot and left its original values. As I posted on October 4th last year, “Republicans–Three Strikes and You’re Out.”]
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