The riotous outbursts sparking across American cities are a shot of epinephrine on the Trump campaign.  Weeks before the latest bursts of hellish hooliganism in Kenosha, Wis.; Portland, Ore.; and Washington, D.C., among other metros, the president's poll favorability was on a declivity.  But with the ashy smoke rising from smoldering small businesses, Trump's approvals are riding the updraft.

Joe Biden's team realized they made a fatal error: in tarrying to denounce the destructive tantrums of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other loosely organized leftist cohorts, they've given Republicans the upper hand.   "These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats," Andrew Sullivan, no GOP friendly, wrote.  The identity comes with its own deathly baggage: blood is being spilled, and people are dying in the streets.

In his Yinzer speech, Biden flailed in reversing this perception, trying to pin the turmoil on Trump but managing only to jab himself: "He may believe mouthing the words 'law and order' makes him strong, but his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows you how weak he is."  The reference, purposefully oblique, is to Kyle Rittenhouse, the unfortunate teen who, after heeding the call to protect a local Kenosha business, shot three men in apparent self-defense.

In another tin-eared line of oratory, Bided issued what any generous reading would regard as a threat: "Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is re-elected?"  The not so tacit promise seems to be that the country will experience more, if not continued, mayhem should Trump win four more years. 

You can imagine the TV spot: "Elect me, or your local Dunkin' Donuts turns into Dante's inferno.  I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message."

The line falls flat, if only for its blatant mendacity.  Democrats are inextricably glued to the infernal columns being waged on unsuspecting downtown concerns.  They can try deflecting blame back on the president, but anyone with a semi-working frontal lobe can distinguish that the black-clothed waifs smashing ATMs with baseball bats aren't red meat–masticating Republicans.  If they aren't voting for Biden this fall, they're assuredly burning their ballots up on a Green Party enviro-nut or whatever poor, disordered soul the CPUSA is offering up.
This can't be a position Joe Biden — the candidate, not the various campaign hands pulling strings behind him — wants to be in.  Biden, the crime bill–authoring senator and back-slapping pal of segregationists, isn't the kind of lawmaker associated with pyromaniacal mobs.  But his lot is sealed: the closeness of BLM to the roving Robespierres, and their ostensible cataclysm in aggressive policing of blacks, makes it electorally disastrous to fully disassociate, lest he cobble his play at reassembling the African-American-reliant Obama coalition.

Biden may be a hapless go-alonger whose public service is distinguished more by dumb luck than honorable steadfastness.  But he is still a moderate in his left-wing gamut.  "Trojan horse for socialism," as Trump labeled him, or not, the Wilmington watchdog of the working class represents the Democrats' old guard.  Joe isn't woke, at least not personally.  When elocuting, he has to pause and enunciate liberal buzz phrases like "systemic racism."  His ad-libs on race reveal a kind of jokey dismissiveness of skin color typical of Boomers and Silent Generationers who lived through the civil rights era and figured things had moved on.  For those up in years like Biden, race is secondary to intellect and achievement; for the Millennials and Zoomers the Democratic Party is rapidly soaking up, race is essential, defining people the way oxygen defines lungs' utility.

This unwokeness is Biden's main selling point for being the Democratic nominee.  His sleepy senescence to progressive esoterica like "critical theory" and "anti-racism" is the party pitch: look, he's liberal, but not that liberal.  Biden likes the New Deal, but he can't quote Ibram X. Kendi.  Voting for him means a friendly admonishment to use "Latinx" instead of the masculine "Latino" from your grad-student nephew at Thanksgiving and not a shrill lecture on the forced displacement of the Choctaw tribe.

And if the pitch fails?  Biden was sold to the Democratic base as a necessary compromise.  His cachet as an elder statesman, his unrevolutionary demeanor, were concessions the Leninist wing of the party swallowed to make the ticket palatable to white suburban moms.

If Biden isn't president-elect on the first Wednesday of November, expect the scène intérieure of the Democratic Party to make Kenosha look like an idyllic sunflower field.  The brewing civil war will be an apocalyptic mix of Fallujah, Aleppo, Dresden, and Hiroshima.

Joe Biden is the last wheezy gasp of the Democrat's square-toed clique.  And he's spending his swan-song campaign asking, in a desperate tone, "Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?"

No, Uncle Joe, you don't.  And that's why the socialists will carry you out of the party in a palanquin and throw you over a cliff should you lose.  The next Democratic presidential nominee giving a full-throated endorsement of looting is not that unthinkable.