R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 36

Exit, stage left: In a stunning development President Biden leaves the race, but huge questions loom

President Joe Biden’s sudden announcement that he is leaving the 2024 presidential race seemed inevitable, but the reality of his statement, coming just after the Sunday news programs were broadcast, hit like a political bomb. Biden’s withdrawal represents a stunning reset of American political history.

In his statement, Biden addressed “my fellow Americans” and then boasted of political achievements before, at the end of the third paragraph, declaring, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

The sense of inevitability had been building for weeks, and the concern can be traced to Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump. Ironically, the Biden campaign had pushed for the early debate with Trump, thinking it would boost Biden’s campaign. Instead, Biden’s collapse was catastrophic. In retrospect, it is hard to imagine how any candidacy could continue after such a debacle. Adding to Biden’s problem, reports of mental lapses due to age started coming in an avalanche, with major Democratic figures and international leaders adding to the mounting evidence. Every news broadcast became a Biden senility watch and then, just as Biden tried to energize his failing campaign, he came down with COVID-19 and was seen walking down the lower stairs from Air Force One, looking like a beaten man. He was.

His party began to abandon him, calling for him to withdraw. Donors cut off the money, threatening downline Democrats and assuring the doom of Democratic hopes to hold the Senate and recapture the House. One by one, the public statements came. Party grandees kept calling on Biden to preserve his place in history and avoid crashing his party, packaged in the call to “pass the torch” to a new generation. Biden kept insisting that he was in the race to stay, which he was until he wasn’t.

This is one of those amazing moments that will reset American history. I can remember watching President Lyndon Johnson speak to the nation in a televised address on Vietnam and then, astoundingly, announce that he would not seek or accept the 1968 Democratic nomination. As we watched together in the living room, my dad looked me in the eye and told me I would never forget watching that happen. He was right.

But Johnson made that announcement on March 31, 1968. President Harry Truman shocked the nation, and his Democratic Party, by making the same kind of announcement. But Truman made that news on March 29, 1952. Joe Biden withdrew from the race on July 21—one month before the Democratic National Convention and only about 100 days from the general election. Nothing like this has ever happened. The big issue now—and the total obsession of both parties—is what Democratic Party names will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. At this point, little else matters.

On that score, Biden also leaned in on Sunday by a second post on X in which he addressed “my fellow Democrats,” offering his “full support and endorsement” for Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party’s 2024 nominee for president.

But this isn’t March—it’s late July—and even as Harris appears to have the advantage of the inside game, no one knows if that will be enough. Face the facts here: An open slot at the top of the presidential ticket at this point in an election cycle has never happened before and will likely never happen again. Are rivals to Harris going to just sit it out?

Actually, they might. The many Democrats with presidential aspirations have to know that, even as the prize looks tantalizing, the odds are not good. Truman and Johnson made their announcements in March, and the Democratic Party was able to go through a legitimate nomination process. In both cases, the party went on to face failure on Election Day. Giving Harris the opportunity is clearly the path of least resistance. Nominating someone other than the vice president would be seen for what it is—sidelining the African-American woman who has the inside track, the easiest path to using about $100 million in campaign funds, and now the unqualified endorsement of Biden. Harris is likely to choose a white male politician in a swing state (someone like Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona) to balance the ticket.

What will this mean for Nov. 5? Frankly, it’s hard to imagine the nation being excited about a Kamala Harris presidency. Her campaign in the 2020 cycle ended as an embarrassment, but Biden chose her and, as his post on Sunday indicated, he stands by her now.

The bottom line as Biden departs the race is that he has now done what conservatives predicted all along. He will go down in history as the man who made the leftward leap of the Democratic Party possible. He was elected as good old Joe from Scranton, the working man’s Democratic candidate. He had played that role (awkwardly and often embarrassingly) for more than three decades in the Senate. He then served as Barack Obama’s vice president, only to be snubbed after eight years of loyal service when Obama pushed him out of the way and supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race. He fought back in 2020 and gained the nomination as the only hope for Democrats to unite the party, but all along the Democrats assured themselves that Biden would be the bridge to a far more ideologically liberal party.

Understand clearly that the Democratic Party is going to lurch far to the left with this generational shift. With Biden out of the way, it will be full steam ahead. And Biden bears responsibility for making it all happen. The Democratic left had one final role for Biden to play, and he played it. They finally decided that he played it for too long, and so the gig is up. Brace yourselves for what is to come.

And watch the parable unfold as President Joe Biden rather bitterly leaves the political stage. Exit, stage left.

This article was originally published at WORLD Opinions on July 21, 2024.

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Tuesday, August 20, 2024

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Monday, August 19, 2024

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Numbers 13-14

Third Avenue Baptist Church

Louisville, KY

Numbers 13-14

August, 18, 2024

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Friday, August 16, 2024

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Thursday, August 15, 2024

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The Power of Marriage: Combatting the Great Lies of Our Secular Age and Recovering the Key to Human Flourishing — A Conversation with Professor Brad Wilcox

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Wednesday, August 14, 2024

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Providence and presidents: The attempted assassination of President Trump raises the deepest of all questions

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump represents one of those rare historical moments when fundamental truths are clarified. Yesterday’s attack at President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania shocked the nation and the watching world, and it instantly revealed so many essential truths.

First, life and death can come down to a matter of a millimeter. The video of President Trump grabbing his ear and then diving onto the platform will be indelibly etched into the nation’s historical memory. Just the slightest deviation in the path of that ammunition round would have changed a bleeding ear into a dead former president, even as Trump is just days from his official nomination as the Republican candidate in the coming election. How can human life be so fragile as that? But the fragility of life is essential to our understanding of the gift of life. In a world of sin and evil, assassins and pathogens, every breath we take is a gift. At some point, a single breath will be our last.

For Donald Trump, his last breath could have come yesterday, broadcast to the entire world. Thankfully, that was not the case. But why? Those who hold to a purely materialistic and naturalistic worldview have no answer but luck, which is a major doctrine of secular theology. But Donald Trump (and the watching world as well) must surely know in his heart that something far greater than luck preserved his life. Speaking to the press, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., acknowledged the hairline distance that separated life and death in the assassination attempt: “Fate stepped in.” Interestingly, it was President Trump himself who clarified the issue, posting on Truth Social that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” Indeed, it was God and God alone, for God alone is the sovereign ruler of the cosmos.

Second, the reality of moral evil and the necessity of moral responsibility were instantly clarified yesterday. America has known so many tragedies, including the horrifying assassinations of presidents and presidential candidates. But in every case, the correct moral impulse is to find the assassin, stop the threat, and hold to account anyone involved in such a horrific crime. No one speaks then of moral relativism or makes ridiculous claims that morality is nothing more than social convention or cultural construction. This was an attempt to assassinate a former president of the United States and a current (leading) candidate for the White House who is headed to accept the nomination of his party within days. This was an attempt to abandon politics and embrace violence. This was a premeditated attempt to undermine an entire civilization and kill a human being. Though President Trump survived the attempt, at least one American is dead, a beloved husband and father named Corey Comperatore, and at least two others are critically wounded. This was an evil act, and no sane person is arguing otherwise. That should tell us something really important.

Third, as a dimension of human activity, politics brings out the best and the worst in us, and more often it’s the worst. This is especially true when the stakes are as high as we see in the 2024 election. Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, along with their two parties, do not merely represent two different plans for America. In reality, the two parties, and the two presidents, now represent two different visions of America. President Biden rightly called President Trump to speak thankfully of his preservation and to acknowledge the evil of violence. Every single politician on the Sunday news programs spoke to the same conviction—that violence is a threat to our entire constitutional order and that violent acts like what happened on Saturday are never acceptable. No doubt they mean it when they say it.

But, even in the calmest of times, military metaphors abound in political campaigns. The path to victory requires rendering your opponent as a threat to the very existence of the nation. Language matters, and while both sides are quite capable (and often guilty) of using overheated and violent language, the political left in the United States has demonized Donald Trump and has fueled the atmosphere of violent language and imagery. Biden’s language of putting a “bullseye” on Trump is perhaps the clearest example. That language has not aged well, to say the least.

Finally, there are so many questions that demand answers. Once again, the urgent demand for those answers is a testimony to the fact that God made us moral creatures who are driven by an insatiable appetite to understand the world in moral terms. We are also driven by the urgency of holding people accountable for their actions. No doubt, yesterday’s horrors will launch innumerable investigations. But some of the questions cannot ever be answered, for the suspected shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, is dead. Why would a 20-year-old young man from rural Pennsylvania do such a thing? We are right to demand answers, but we will surely be frustrated by the lack of adequate answers.

Clearly, our political system is not well. The stakes in the coming election are genuinely high. Both sides know it, and yesterday’s events will not bring about a kinder and gentler political culture. The 2024 election looms large as we consider the future of our nation. Those who see no higher plane than politics are increasingly desperate. Christians cannot share that kind of desperation.

Why? Because the Christian faith underlines the two realities of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. Both are absolutely necessary to Biblical Christianity, and both are absolutely necessary to the Christian worldview in every respect. But though both are necessary, they are not equal. Human responsibility is real, but it exists only within the transcendent reality of God, and within the context of his unconditional providence. The reality of God’s providence is something many Americans, and no doubt many Christians, think about with far too little seriousness. But I dare to ask, how do you look at yesterday’s events in Butler, Pa., and see it all merely as a lucky miss? If that’s all there is to it, our luck will one day run out. Thank God that day was not yesterday.

This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on July 14, 2024.

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Tuesday, August 13, 2024

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