One of the worst decisions Joe Biden ever "made" as president was also one of his first. He tapped Amanda Gorman, a mediocre Harvard grad (but we repeat ourselves) to read one of her crappy poems at his inauguration. It was like watching the neighborhood Karen recite the lyrics to a Red Hot Chili Peppers song at the #Resistance poetry slam.
Red, white, blue, Mountain Dew like majesty. Ooze this truth like hope's audacity. Crash these waves on a Mayflow'r tragedy. Blood soaked hands on the land mass casualty. Rat-a-tat, John Doe, James Dean, Jimmy Crow. Cemetery cyclone, colonize the ozone.
Surely enough time has passed by now. Even our liberal friends can admit that Gorman is a talentless bore who, in the words of the esteemed reporter David Weigel, traffics in "word-shaped air." If we all agree that Kamala Harris and Karine Jean-Pierre were hopeless incompetents, Gorman cannot plausibly be excluded from the list. Such is the Biden legacy—doing more to undermine the case for DEI than its principled opponents ever could.
Donald Trump is different. This year we learned that one of America's most gifted poets was hiding in plain sight while serving at the pleasure of our greatest president. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who moonlights as the health and human services secretary, did not intend to share his art with the world. Our humble bard denies even writing the bodice-ripping love poems that leaked out—in quivering spurts—amid the scandal that erupted on Olivia Nuzzi, the horny journalist he longed to impregnate.
Virtuosic in form, volcanic in passion, seismic in consequence. To encounter such language without reverberation in one's heart and loins is to profess an absence of the soul. To imagine these verses read aloud in Kennedy's smoldering rasp is to drench oneself in celestial goo, unburdened by the bonds of earthly restraint.
Given the evidence, we had always assumed that Kennedy men were incapable of wooing their young concubines through the civilizing arts of charm and eloquence. After all, most of them were "educated" at Harvard. Reading those poems forced us to revise our opinion of that fetid dynasty. Perhaps not all Kennedys are boorish, substance-addled rapists. Who knew?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s words inspired us to be better lovers. In a world plagued by romantic desolation, his roving pen dispenses the vaccine. He has the jab our country craves. And so now, he is not just the secretary of health and human services, he is the first-ever Washington Free Beacon Poet Laureate of the Year.