Introducing Bidenoptics

Because we need a term to describe Team Biden's infallible instinct for the absurd

A Great Moment in Bidenoptics: Dark Brandon as America’s Maximum Leader

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Many new concepts and words have had to be dreamed up on behalf of that hit comedy series, the Biden Administration—now playing, alas, across this broad land, from coast to coast and border to border. One is Bidenomics, which is Newspeak for the amalgam of malarky, magical thinking and economic illiteracy that passes for economic policy among the President, his minions, and his Democratic/progressive cheering section. They describe it as a master plan for building the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out”—which is, if one pauses to reflect on it, an alarming image.

Amusingly, Bidenomics originated among the disloyal opposition as a term of abuse, only to be coopted by Team Biden in what they thought was a devilishly clever political chess move. But Mr. & Ms. Flyover America were unimpressed and now, it seems, the campaign to promote the President’s economic vision with that label has been quietly shelved.

I come now to propose another addition to the lexicon: Bidenoptics. Some such term has long been needed to cover those all-too-frequent occasions when the President and his Administration have publicly beclowned themselves. Some of these own goals have been accidental—or, if you like, evidence of cosmic justice in action. Others are in the nature of Bidenomics—ideas that seemed clever at the time but crashed and burned when launched.

On the cosmic justice front, it was so arranged that Joe Biden would enter office just as the cult of DEI was rising to a peak of hysteria. Particularly unfortunate for Middle Class Joe was the fact that the zany ideology of gender was at the center of those hysterics. This set the stage for lots and lots of bad optics, nor was the Biden Administration slow to embrace its fate.

The people around Biden saw in gender ideology an opportunity to make history on the front of firsts. Thus did we get the first gay Secretary of Transportation, the first black lesbian White House Press Secretary, the first “gender fluid/nonbinary” Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, and the first “trans female” Surgeon General of the United States. Results varied. Buttigieg and Karine Jean-Pierre turned out to be duds, but at least they’re not alarmingly creepy. The same cannot be said for former chief nuclear waste janitor Sam Brinton, with his they/them pronouns and a wardrobe to match—which, it transpired, he supplemented by stealing ladies’ luggage from airport bag carousals. Then there’s Surgeon General Rachel Levine, a biological male who took to posing as a woman relatively late in life, and is a walking, talking refutation of the claim that “transgender women” are actual women. How’s that for bad optics?

Gender ideology has generated many great moments in Bidenoptics. Last June, the Biden Administration disgraced itself with a White House event celebrating “Pride Month 2023.” The spectacularly ugly LGBTQIA2S+ Pride Flag (no joke, as our absurd president might say, that’s what it’s called), was accorded precedence over the Stars and Stripes—an astonishing display of disrespect. And it got worse. Because gender ideology is all about transgressive performance art designed to épater la bourgeoisie, a fake woman styling himself Rose Montoya bared his surgically constructed breasts for the cameras just minutes after shaking hands with Biden.

And to mark Easter Sunday this year, Biden & Co. took it into their heads to remind America that March 31, 2024, was also “Trans Visibility Day”: Move over J.C., Dylan Mulvany needs some visibility! One could be forgiven for reflecting that in view of the absurdly inflated enormity of trans “visibility,” the White House could have passed on this one, and that anyway April 1 was available. But no, Team Biden went there, delivering another great Bidenoptics moment.

The origin story of Bidenoptics is inextricably linked to Joe Biden’s Afghanistan debacle, otherwise known as The Greatest Airlift in History. It was then, in August 2021, that the American people first beheld in full focus the confusion, incompetence and incapacity of the man to whom they’d handed the top job less than a year previously. This was a shattering blow to the Biden presidency, one from which it never recovered. And Bidenoptics was launched on its career.

Subsequently, there were efforts to repair the damage, for instance the “Dark Brandon” initiative, another attempt to flip a negative by making our stumblebum president look cool. All this succeeded in doing, however, was to make Biden look ridiculous, for instance during his fascist-themed address at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, in September 2022. It was probably around that time that his people concluded that the less seen of Biden the better. He was not ageing well, and any public appearance, unless it was scripted and choreographed to the max, was judged to pose an unacceptable risk. But Biden could not be entirely hidden away, and every stumble, every moment of confusion, every memory lapse, every run-on sentence terminating in a mumble, padded the Bidenoptics dossier.

Things were bad enough by the first of this year that the President passed on the ultimate in free media: a press interview on Superbowl Sunday during halftime, which had become something of a tradition. Presumably, the White House judged that even with the most gentle and sympathetic treatment on the part of the interviewing journalist, Biden might commit some embarrassing gaffe. So instead, he appeared in a prerecorded spot—lecturing the American people about corporate greed and evil in the form of “shrinkflation”: The price of America’s snack bags may not have increased, but the number of chips in them had been decreased! It was yet another great moment in Bidenoptics. The whole performance was comical in its economic idiocy, pathetic in its shrinkage of the American presidency to fit the man who holds the office.

For the President’s minions, the media and Biden supporters—but I repeat myself—life has become a dismal, increasingly desperate effort to ignore the evidence of Bidenoptics. With the inimitable Karin Jean-Pierre setting the example, Team Biden must project the appearance of struggling to keep up with the guy, why despite his eight decades positively bubbles over with energy. Come to think of it, this ludicrous playacting is itself a prize specimen of Bidenoptics. And we can, I think, look forward with confidence to many more many more such precious moments in the months ahead.