Biden Has Fallen Into a Psychological Trap
The same approach that has long driven his success now threatens to destroy his legacy.
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Every neutral observer regards Joe Biden’s debate performance as a historic debacle. To Joe Biden, it’s simply life repeating itself.
Since childhood, Biden has suffered recurrent episodes of brutal humiliation, when the world has mocked and dismissed him. On each occasion, Biden has stubbornly set out to prove his worth. Persistence became his coping mechanism, his effective antidote to humiliation. Triumph was always just a matter of summoning sufficient grit.
In most ways, this tendency of Biden’s has made for a resilient, healthy psyche. Right now it is his psychological prison, a mental habit that might doom American democracy.
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Become a SubscriberHumiliation—and its transcendence—is Biden’s origin story. Born with a speech impediment, he faced the cruel bullying of peers. Even the nuns who taught him mocked him, so much so that he once left in the middle of class and ran home. (In 2019, he vividly recounted this chapter in his biography to my colleague John Hendrickson.)
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