Opinion

QUAY: Biden May Hate Putin, But He’s Well On His Way To Becoming Him

OPINION
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Grayson Quay News & Opinion Editor
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“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” President Joe Biden yelled as he wrapped up a March 2022 speech in Warsaw.

The man in question was Russian President Vladimir Putin. When asked later whether he had just committed to a policy of regime change against a nuclear-armed power, Biden desperately tried to walk back the claim.

“I wasn’t then nor am I now articulating a policy change. I was expressing moral outrage that I felt,” Biden said a few days after the speech. So intense is the president’s righteous hatred of Putin that he is apparently unable to restrain himself from provoking nuclear war. (RELATED: Biden Claims White House Didn’t Walk Back Europe Comments, Says He Doesn’t ‘Care’ What Putin Thinks)

There are plenty of reasons to hate Putin — such as his ties to the old KGB or the atrocities his military has committed against civilians in Chechnya, Syria and Ukraine. But perhaps Biden’s revulsion has a deeper, more psychological source. 

An old Russian proverb, which Putin himself has quoted, warns that “one should not criticize a mirror if you have a crooked face.” Vladimir Putin is a mirror in which Biden sees his own worst impulses reflected back at him. How much of the deformity is in the mirror and how much resides in his own falsely rejuvenated countenance, even Biden himself no longer knows. He cannot bear to look.

There are similarities between Putin’s rise to power at the end of the millennium and Biden’s in 2020. Both offered themselves as safe consensus candidates in an age of political chaos. For Putin, it was the disorder and corruption of post-Soviet Russia under President Boris Yeltsin.

For Biden, the source of the instability was Trumpian populism, the COVID-19 pandemic and the prospect of Bernie Sanders running away with the Democratic nomination. 

Both promised to restore faith in democracy. Once power was secure, however, the open hand became a closed fist.

Putin wasted no time in persecuting his enemies. Much has been made of his thuggish assassinations, but Putin’s preferred weapon is the legal system. Six months after he took office, media magnate and Putin critic Vladimir Gusinsky found himself charged with fraud and forced to flee the country. Boris Berezovsky, a lawmaker and billionaire who helped fund Putin’s rise before turning against him, also became the target of a fraud investigation. He fled to the United Kingdom in 2000. Oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky called for political reforms. In response, Putin’s government investigated him for corruption, destroyed most of his net worth by freezing shares of his energy company and finally threw him in prison.

And it’s not just the wealthy and powerful who have reason to fear Putin’s courts. When members of the feminist punk ban Pussy Riot staged a blasphemous anti-Putin protest outside a Russian Orthodox cathedral in 2012, three members of the group got two-year prison sentences.

Biden’s administration has taken similar steps against his enemies, arresting not just his predecessor and likely 2024 opponent Donald Trump, but also the lawyers who advised him. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and refused to play the Biden admin’s censorship game, he quickly found his company SpaceX, which depends largely on government contracts, facing a DOJ lawsuit for failing to hire enough asylum seekers. Pretexts can always be found. 

Biden is just as defensive of America’s state religion as Putin is of Russia’s. And his Justice Department is just as willing to crush any who dissent. His FBI spies on parents who go to school board meetings to complain about transgenderism. The same bureau sent a SWAT team to terrorize a father who dared to defend his son against a psychotic pro-abortion radical. On Tuesday, a federal court found five activists guilty after they peacefully blockaded an abortion clinic. Each could face up to 11 years in prison. (RELATED: Jury Finds Pro-Life Activists Guilty After 2020 Abortion Clinic Protest)

In neither case, however, does the leader’s zeal for law and order extend to himself and his allies. Before his meteoric rise in Moscow, Putin did work for St. Petersburg’s mayor that was closer to organized crime than government bureaucracy. And yet, when he became president, every investigation into those activities quietly vanished. 

Similarly, when allegations emerged that Biden and his son Hunter had engaged in corrupt dealings with overseas business partners, U.S. Attorney David Weiss found himself facing pressure to drop the investigation. It’s only thanks to two brave whistleblowers and one eagle-eyed judge that the case hasn’t been buried alive.

Putin has been accused of rigging elections in his own favor. In the 2021 legislative elections, for example, one estimate suggests that Putin’s tame United Russia party inflated its share of the vote by nearly 20 percent. 

But again, Biden is in danger of becoming that which he despises. In 2020, he convinced his old friends in the intelligence community to sign their names to lies in order to suppress the unflattering story of his son’s sordid laptop. Once in power, he quickly moved to enshrine in federal law the COVID-era early and mail-in voting expansions some states had implemented. He knew he wouldn’t have won without them. Only principled opposition from Biden’s fellow Democrats stopped this scheme to create a permanent one-party state.

Putin, we heard ad nauseam throughout most of the Trump administration, interferes in foreign elections. What, then, are we to make of Biden, whose Agency for International Development is subsidizing anti-Orbán media outlets and NGOs in Hungary and who oversaw, as vice president, the coup that illegally deposed Ukraine’s duly elected leader. (RELATED: The Real Reason The Democrats Are Determined To Punish Hungary)

Speaking of Ukraine, perhaps the greatest objection to equating Putin with Biden is that Putin is a bloodthirsty imperialist and Biden is not. But is that the case? Biden inherited, and continues to pursue, a policy of aggressive NATO expansion. Considering the breakdown of military expenditures, it would not be a stretch to describe NATO as an American empire of sorts. Putin’s invasion was an act of unjustified aggression, but at any point the U.S. could have averted it by pledging not to admit Ukraine to the alliance. 

Biden could also have prevented the war by deploying 100,000 U.S. troops to Ukraine. Putin wouldn’t have dared to fire on American soldiers. But that wouldn’t do. From Biden’s point of view, the primary utility of the war in Ukraine is that it kills Russians. The longer and bloodier it is, the better. (RELATED: Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Hasn’t Gone As Well As Expected. Here’s Why)

Arming Ukraine in the early months of the invasion, when the defenders strove to halt and then turn back the Russian onslaught, was an admirable act. Eighteen months later, American support looks less heroic. Instead of pushing for a just peace or sending Ukraine what it needs to win, we provide just enough materiel to ensure that waves of Ukrainian infantry keep dragging themselves across Russian minefields to hurl themselves against Russian fortifications.

Biden surely knows that Ukraine is unlikely to secure total victory. The president’s true goal is to blunt the military might of a geopolitical rival. His allies even brag about how cheaply they’ve been able to do it. Cheaply, that is, from an American perspective. For the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian parents who will receive their children back maimed or in boxes, I imagine it feels quite costly.

Setting aside the justice of the cause, which is more noble? To order one’s own countrymen into the hell of modern combat? Or to pay a country halfway around the world to do your fighting and dying for you?

Grayson Quay is an editor at the Daily Caller.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.