COMMENTARY: Taking a vacation away from politics

Being far away from home in Iceland and Britain for the past two weeks was perfect timing.

Just as President Joe Biden was proving to the whole country that he’s incapable of being president for another four years, or another week, I left the madness of American politics and flew off to Europe for a vacation cruise.

We Reagans had an especially great time in Iceland. On Reykjavik’s scenic waterfront we visited the Hofdi House, where my father made world history in 1986. You would never suspect that the modest white-washed building was where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev first met and began the arms talks that would eventually bring a peaceful end to the Cold War.

During our trip I also relaxed by watching England and Spain win their soccer matches against the Netherlands and France and make their ways to their showdown in the finals of the European cup. And I saw a lot of the Tour de France on TV.

I deliberately paid very little attention to the daily turmoil, panic and 24/7 BS-ing going on back home in the Democrat Party after Biden’s terrible debate performance against Trump.

I knew the liberal media had turned on their hero Old Joe. I knew they were pretending to be angry with the Biden administration for misleading them about the alarming extent of his mental decline, when the news media have known about it for years and wouldn’t report it because they were protecting him.

But I was on a pleasure cruise, not a torture ship. So I refused to talk about American politics at dinner or watch it on TV. I also stayed off X and social media.

Now that I’m back home in Los Angeles, I realize I didn’t miss much. The Biden question — does he have to drop out of the race or can he stay in? — has little to do with the undeniably diminished state of his brain or body. Biden has been a pretend president for four years. It’s the people around and behind him who are calling the shots.

For the Democratic Party pooh-bahs, it’s all about beating Donald Trump in November and holding on to their power. Actually, though, it won’t matter who wins, Biden or Trump. Whoever controls the Senate will control the country’s politics for the next four years.

If the Republicans don’t take the Senate from Democrats, Trump would be at the mercy of Chuck Schumer and he would get nothing passed. If Biden wins but Republicans take over the Senate, which, on paper, looks like a good bet, then anything Biden wanted would be blocked by the GOP Senate.

In other words, gridlock in Congress will reign. That’s the reality.

If the country were not in such a Biden-made mess, gridlock would be a blessing. But the border is wide open, and both parties in Washington are wrecking the future with their drunken spending and trillion-dollar annual deficits.

Those and other problems need to be fixed, not kicked down the road for another four years.

Everyone’s talking about the recent assassination attempt and Trump’s high poll numbers. But even if he wins by a landslide, if Republicans don’t get the Senate it won’t mean a thing. To paraphrase that crazy old Cajun James Carville, the GOP campaign slogan for 2024 is “It’s the Senate, stupid.”

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on X.