© Wikipedia/Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images/KJNFormer US President James Buchanan • Current US President Joe Biden
Comparisons to Jimmy Carter are pervasive, but trite — and too flattering to Carter. Perhaps
a more apt (and dark) analogy, given how civic strife has reached a fever pitch,
is to James Buchanan, historians' typical consensus pick for
worst president ever.Indeed, to fully capture the absolute horror that is this senile near-octogenarian's presidential swan song would be a Herculean task, better suited for a David McCullough-style biography than a column. But for present purposes,
and despite the difficulty of narrowing down from such a vast sample size, consider a few examples from recent months:In late March, in a combative speech in Warsaw, Biden veered off-script and announced that
Russian kingpin Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power." There is a sordid history of such meddlesome talk when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, encapsulated by John Bolton's shockingly candid
on-air admission to Jake Tapper this week that he has "helped plan coups d'etat." Biden, in Poland, thus explicitly called for regime change against the long-standing leader of a nuclear-armed hegemon. As the writer David P. Goldman immediately pointed out,
multiple generations of Cold War-era U.S. presidents knew to never so explicitly provoke the Kremlin. The White House immediately — and implausibly — attempted to walk back, and downplay, Biden's clarion utterance.
Comment: A 'Come to Kremlin' moment is upon us.