Free Republic

In the White House Rose Garden, where for four years Donald Trump raucously celebrated political wins with his allies, it was now the turn of Democrats to take a victory lap – masked and physically distanced, of course. Kamala Harris, the vice-president, heaped praise on Joe Biden for signing a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the biggest expansion of the American welfare state in decades. “Your empathy has become a trademark of your presidency and can be found on each and every page of the American Rescue Plan,” Harris said. Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have...

Joe Biden reflected recently on the last time a Democratic administration had to rescue an economy left in tatters by a Republican president. “The economists told us we literally saved America from a depression,” Biden told the House Democratic Caucus last week. “But we didn’t adequately explain what we had done. Barack was so modest; he didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap’. I kept saying, ‘Tell people what we did.’ He said, ‘We don’t have time. I’m not going to take a victory lap.’ And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.” The...