From Insurrection to Satire: Biden’s Valley Forge Speech Fails to Cement the Trump-Dictator Narrative Roger Kimball
I would not be surprised if future historians singled out Joe Biden’s Valley Forge speech as the moment his campaign began its final retreat into senile collapse.
How deeply has Donald Trump burrowed into the psyche of the Democratic establishment? I’d say the takeover is nearly total. For proof, you need only contemplate the alarming pantomime that Joe Biden just acted out at Valley Forge. It lacked the totalitarian, Riefenstahlich trappings of his speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in Sept. 2022. At that time, the President’s puppeteers believed that they could scare voters by turning the acronym “MAGA” into a negative epithet and affixing the extreme-sounding intensifier “ultra” to its front end.
They managed to scare themselves, but hardly anyone else. By the fall of 2022, the wrecking ball that is Joe Biden’s administration had already smashed its way through the American economy, our southern border, and our foreign policy. Suddenly, “Make America Great Again” sounded like a pretty good formula. And if Trump and his supporters were advocating “MAGA with knobs on,” then why not?
That’s what more and more of that most irritating cohort, voters, seemed to think.
Biden’s handlers attempted a variation on the Independence Hall theme at Valley Forge. Noting the date, they decided to take a risk and memorialize the jamboree at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That prefabricated entertainment, brought to you by deep state actors like Nancy Pelosi with an assist from extras supplied by Trump Industries, Inc., was at the time baptized as a frontal assault on “Our Democracy™,” the worst thing since 9/11, nay, since Pearl Harbor or the Civil War.
It did not take long for observers to understand that the carefully orchestrated Reichstag-like outrage of January 6 was more of a hoax than an “insurrection.” But that memo had not made it to the C-suite of Biden HQ, where the strategy was formulated and the narrative honed. They still thought that voters believed January 6 was an existential threat to the Republic. So that was the message they had downloaded to Joe Biden’s larynx for his Valley Forge speech.
It didn’t work.
For some weeks now, the Soros-funded, Obama-tutored troops have been repeating the catechism that Donald Trump is a would-be “dictator” who, should he somehow find his way back to the White House, would exterminate his enemies, obliterate the Constitution, and wield autocratic power in a manner that would make Macbeth envious.
Sound extreme? Well, it is extreme. But that is The Narrative. “There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States,” Robert Kagan recently wrote in The Washington “died-in-darkness” Post, “and it is getting shorter every day.” Heavens. What happened? “In 13 weeks,” Mr. Kagan explained, “Donald Trump will have locked up the Republican nomination.”
Yep. And the clock is ticking. The dreaded day when Trump becomes the presumptive nominee is just around the corner now.
The Trump-will-be-dictator meme has been everywhere the last month or so. It’s function has been like the preliminary shelling of enemy territory—a softening-up exercise. That is, it has been intended to confuse, disarm, and weaken its target.
It’s my sense that it has failed miserably.
The reception of Joe Biden’s Valley Forge speech has strengthened that sense.
In a word, it has been laughed at, guyed, ridiculed, and satirized.
According to Joe Biden, January 6 is “a day forever seared in our memory.” Why? “Because that day, we nearly lost America.” How’s that? Why, because that was the day Donald Trump showed he was willing to “sacrifice democracy” by unleashing a “violent mob” to storm the Capitol and undertake an “insurrection.”
But no one believes this. Why? Because the more footage we see from the events of that day, the clearer it becomes that what happened on January 6, 2021, was not an insurrection. Moreover, Donald Trump, far from egging on his supporters to violence, went out of his way to urge them to protest peacefully. “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful,” he Tweeted that afternoon. “No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!”
The reaction to Joe Biden’s histrionic demonization of Trump has been swift and merciless. Remember the chap who was photographed carrying a lectern across a room in the Capitol? He now Tweets under the handle “Lectern Leader.” He posted the photo and had this to say about Biden’s speech: “Throwback to the time I brought America to its knees by moving furniture tens of feet and became king.”
There have been lots of spoofs like this:
It was 2:20 p.m. on this day in 2021. I was in my classroom- quadruple masked- explaining to my students how queer slaves actually wrote the Constitution, when I heard it: sobbing from the hall.
I went outside to find my colleague, an English teacher, sobbing uncontrollably. At first I thought Ron DeSantis had made our jobs even more difficult by banning us from discussing our kinks in the classroom, but it was far worse.
“A white supremacist insurrectionist has his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk,” they/them cried.
I rushed back into my classroom to see the look of fear on my students’ faces.
“Are we going to lose access to our puberty blockers?” a purple-haired demiboy asked.
“If they overthrow our democracy, yes,” I replied.
For the next several hours we watched the TV in fear as several hundred terrorists searched the Capitol for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, so they could have their way with her.
Thankfully, a brave police officer of color shot a hysterical Karen in the face, sending the MAGA idiots running for their lives at the sight of such a strong Black man.
Uh oh. You’re not supposed to make fun of the worst tragedy in American history. But everybody is. Consider this hilarious clip. It shows protestors proceeding calmly through the Capitol, guided by welcoming security guards, to the satirical voice-over of some naughty satirist. What we had here, Vivek Ramaswamy scoffed, was a scene of “The bloody battle that nearly ended the republic on January 6, caught on film.”
The great Julie Kelly, who has been terrier-like in investigating what really happened on January 6, is right. Joe Biden’s over-the-top execration of all things Trump in his Valley Forge speech shows that the official narrative about January 6 is crumbling. “They thought it would end the GOP and result in mass defections to the Democratic Party,” Kelly wrote. “They thought it would end questions about the 2020 election. They didn’t think anyone would ever question what happened, how it happened, or expose the lies it was built upon. They thought their dirty secrets would be hidden forever.”
Au contraire.
[I]t’s all collapsing right when they need the narrative to hold most. Jack Smith’s J6 prosecution of Trump is teetering. SCOTUS could overturn the most common felony count.
Polls show more people now vs 2021 think the 2020 election was illegitimate. . . And suspicion about the animating role of the FBI and other government agencies continues to grow.
As well it might. Joe Biden’s Valley Forge speech was supposed to inaugurate his 2024 campaign. I would not be surprised if future historians singled it out as the moment his campaign began its final retreat into senile collapse.
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