Anne Lamont’s recent opinion essay — in which she critiques the Left’s decision to put the former president’s “head on a stake” — reads like an angry dirge. Given Joe Biden’s recent fall from grace, her funereal style is appropriate. But because he is still living, a dirge seems a bit premature.
I’ve penned a lament instead.
I’m a lifelong conservative, so it won’t surprise you to learn that I don’t write in support of Joe Biden. I write instead to ask my conservative friends — especially those of us who self-identify as Christian, one question: even in the wake of mounting evidence that the former president was, in fact, mentally and physically unfit for office during his tenure, why the gloating?
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.
Asking the question doesn’t mean I don’t understand why. Conservatives spent months leading up to the 2024 presidential election sounding the alarm about Biden’s visible decline while legacy media — including the cable news network Lamont says is acting like a PR firm for Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson — gaslit the American people into believing the former president was “sharp as ever.”
Obviously, he wasn’t.
But that doesn’t mean conservatives need to gloat.
In fact, conservatives do not even need to continue making the case that they were right. The 2024 election cycle proved they were. The American people, in their collective wisdom, saw through the smoke and mirrors, and they voted accordingly. They were not fooled.
In America, electoral victory begets the right to govern. And that should be satisfaction enough. Yet a chorus of voices on the right continues to belabor the point, rehashing Biden’s cognitive lapses with mockery, disdain, and a sense of triumphalism that has become plain cruel.
This impulse is visible across conservative media. Some of the pieces, as one might expect, make their points well: Biden seems to have been propped up — everyone from power-hungry aides to dishonest pundits. Even his family, closest friends, and allies allowed the charade to continue. And yet, one wonders: What good is gained from dwelling on all this now?
Conservatives are no longer dealing with a political opponent. President Biden is now simply “Joe.” He is a has-been.
But he is also a sick man. You may disagree, but I believe the former president, not unlike every man, deserves to live out his final years with peace and dignity, despite how he and those closest to him operated, especially during the 2024 election cycle.
Rest assured, the Biden presidency will be judged, and perhaps not kindly. But that judgment need not take the form of gloating over Biden’s cognitive and physical decline. It certainly need not take the form of memes mocking a man who may no longer recognize his own wife and children. There is a difference between legitimate critique and a public lambasting done for sport, full stop.
Some conservatives seem to believe that they cannot let the public forget the legacy media and the Democratic establishment’s complicity. I understand that position, too. But at what point do the headlines stop being tools of accountability and start becoming swords of vengeance? What good is a moral victory if it makes us smaller in spirit?
Let the journalists explain why they lied. Let the bureaucrats spin their narratives. Let Biden’s family and handlers live with what they’ve done. While Democrats are trying to get their divided house in order before it falls, conservatives should turn the page. Not in denial of what happened, but in acknowledgment that Biden has been sidelined. It’s the GOP’s turn to govern.
Of course, now isn’t the time only to not gloat. No — and especially so for those conservatives who self-identify as Christian — now is the time to pray (Matt. 5:44). To pray that Biden recovers. And if he cannot, then pray that he declines pain-free and peacefully, without further humiliation. He is not merely a former president or a fallen figurehead. He is a man — a husband, a father, a grandfather — who now faces what’s coming for us all: the decline of the body and the decay of the mind (2 Cor. 4:16).
At 82, this is likely the beginning of the end for Biden. But it is not a moment for jeering. It is a moment for mercy. This may sound like a platitude, but conservatives must be better than the party that extols a party above all. Indeed, conservatives must hold the line — not just politically, but morally.
Joe Biden is not the president anymore. And that should be enough for conservatives.
Grayson P. Walker is an attorney, former chief of staff to Oklahoma Governor J. Kevin Stitt, and a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. He has written for the Gospel Coalition, Front Porch Republic, Public Discourse, and American Reformer.
