With a barely adequate press conference at the NATO summit, President Joe Biden may or may not have temporarily tamped down the Democrats’ rebellion seeking to remove him from office.

But his comments there on the Israel–Hamas war were a disgrace. Their entire tenor was critical of Israel, with barely a word supporting our ally or denouncing Hamas. He once again failed to make forceful demands for the release of U.S. hostages held by the terrorists. And at a time of massively rising antisemitism, the president failed to put down a moral marker against that vile and virulent prejudice.

Combined with Biden’s frequently unhelpful interference in Israeli war plans and his embarrassing sponsorship of a pier for humanitarian aid that proved to be an utter fiasco, Biden has been an impediment to resolving the conflict after a suitable show of support for Israel that ended a week after Hamas’s barbaric attack last Oct. 7.

Biden’s opening statement included six short sentences on Gaza, with a bare five words about bringing hostages home and a blanket declaration that “this war … should end now.” It was as if the problem is the “war” itself rather than Hamas’s evil and its use of human shields while brutalizing innocent hostages.

Later, Asma Khalid with NPR asked Biden “if there’s anything that you feel personally you wish you would have done differently over the course of the war.”

Biden’s immediate reply was to talk about all of his work with Arab partners to get “more aid and medicine into the Gaza Strip.” What about the need to destroy Hamas? Not a word. But he did manage to get in a dig at Israel right away, claiming it had been “less than cooperative” with aid, even though its army pleaded with Egypt to open its border to aid trucks and helped to set up aid corridors within Gaza itself.

Then Biden was off to the races with a pro forma statement about how long he allegedly has supported Israel, followed immediately by a “but.” Here, the “but” was that “This war Cabinet is one of the most conservative war Cabinets in the history of — of Israel. And there’s no ultimate answer other than a two-state solution here.”

The makeup of Israel’s war Cabinet should be no concern of Biden’s. And there are several possible answers other than the creation of a Palestinian state. They include the elimination of Hamas.

Then came this: “The question has been from the beginning: What’s the day after in Gaza? And the day after in Gaza has to be — the end — the end of the day after it has to be no occupation by Israel on the Gaza Strip, as well as the ability for us to access — get in and out, as rapidly as you can, all that’s needed there.”

Biden asserted that the problem is the “occupation by Israel,” not that the problem is that terrorists want to wipe Israel from the map and kill all its people. Or that Hamas steals humanitarian aid and uses it in its murder of innocents.

Biden didn’t even stop there. He praised himself for warning “Bibi” (note the lack of formal respect) not to make the mistake of occupying territory. Then, again with the focus on the idea that Israel is doing everything wrong, he said, “So, there’s a lot of things that, in retrospect, I wish I had been able to convince the Israelis to do. But the bottom line is we have a chance now. It’s time to end this war.”

Only then did he say that after ending the war, Israel still could “go after … Hamas.” Our narcissistic president concluded by claiming, as if this were the real point of everything, that “my numbers are better in Israel than they are here.”

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His “numbers.” Polls. Not the terror, the loss of life, the attempted genocide of Jews. Biden thinks his polls are good, so, to answer NPR, he doesn’t regret much.

Meanwhile, Hamas continues to hold five Americans hostage. Biden showed no urgency, much less dudgeon, about their plight. As we said: disgraceful.

When President Joe Biden’s White House released a policy statement rejecting the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, it correctly noted that “it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections.” 

This is true, so far as it goes, but it does not go very far. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote, but laws need to be enforced and often, to do that, they need to be made stronger.

It is also already illegal for noncitizens to cross our border without authorization. Yet literally millions of migrants have done exactly that and instead of being detained or returned across the border, as is required by federal law, Biden has let them into the country.

As a result, there are record-high numbers of noncitizens in the country, 6.6 million more since Biden took office, and thanks to loopholes in the National Voter Registration Act, many of them are registering to vote. 

This is a direct assault on the integrity of federal elections and it must be stopped. The House of Representatives is set to vote on the SAVE Act this week, and every Democrat who votes against it should be held accountable at the ballot box this November.

Passed in 1993, the National Voter Registration Act requires states to provide voter registration materials to anyone who enters a Department of Motor Vehicles office or requests a mail-in voter registration form. The law also requires states to register any individual who completes and returns a voter registration form.

The standard national voter registration form includes a box asking the applicant to affirm that he or she is a U.S. citizen. But it does nothing to require proof. The form does ask for an “ID number,” but the ID required varies by state. In many Democratically-controlled states, such as California and Illinois, a driver’s license or other state-issued identification number suffices, even though a noncitizen can get a driver’s license. Democratically-controlled states are also notorious for making this very easy. All an illegal immigrant needs to do to register to vote is check the box and submit a state driver’s license or state-issued ID number. Then they could vote.

There are also millions of noncitizens who have Social Security numbers. Migrants who illegally crossed the border and were paroled into the United States by Biden can get Social Security numbers after filling out the right forms and getting authorization to work. Many who entered legally and then illegally overstayed their visas also have Social Security numbers. All these noncitizens could easily vote after checking a box and providing their Social Security numbers.

The White House also claims that it is “extraordinarily rare” for noncitizens to vote. It is also rare for migrants to rape and kill U.S. citizens yet it happens with increasing frequency under Biden. Studies show that even “rare” illegal voting can swing elections. One 2014 study of the 2008 elections found that while just 6.4% of noncitizens voted, their votes were enough to swing close elections and “likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters to pass health care reform and other Obama administration policies.”

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Preventing noncitizens from voting is fundamental to national sovereignty. If we cannot prevent noncitizens from determining our electoral outcomes, we are not a real country. The SAVE Act addresses this crisis by requiring a would-be voter to provide proof of citizenship before a state may register them to vote. To make this requirement easier on states, the legislation also provides free access to existing federal databases so they can confirm someone’s citizenship and clean up existing voter registration roles of noncitizens.

Considering everything Biden has allowed at the southern border, the public has no reason to trust that just because something is illegal, it doesn’t happen. The most important thing about a law is that it is enforced. If it isn’t, it does not really exist and all other considerations, such as its merits and its justice, are moot. Illegality is not only common under Biden, it is encouraged. Witness the millions of migrants illegally brought into the country through parole programs. Illegal immigrants broke our laws to come here, there is no reason to think they will start following the law if they stay. If we can’t protect our border, we must protect our ballot boxes and the SAVE Act will help accomplish that.

Days of bravado from President Joe Biden combined with bullying by his closest adherents and crass careerism in the Democratic Party may be about to save the incumbent from being forcibly retired, as he should be. 

If he manages even a moderate performance during his scheduled Thursday press conference at the NATO meeting in Washington, D.C., it is possible that he will avoid the proper consequences of his embarrassing debate performance. But his survival, if it comes, should cost every Democrat the last shred of credibility, for it would require them to pretend not to see what every voter has seen — that Biden is manifestly incapable of continuing to lead the country.

For more than a year, an overwhelming majority of voters, including a slim majority of Democratic voters, have told pollsters that Biden is too old to serve another term. These concerns are not the result of a conservative media propaganda campaign to undermine a Democratic president, as has been suggested. They are what any fair-minded person would have concluded from watching Biden since he first took office. This newspaper has said Biden was unfit for the office since before he entered it, not merely because of his career of incompetence and bad decision-making, but also because of his obvious and rapid mental decline.

Examples of his intellectual fragility are too numerous to count, but here are some picked at random. He forgot the name of his own secretary of defense just weeks after moving into the White House; in a speech he repeatedly called for Rep. Jackie Walorski to join him at the podium, not remembering that she was dead; and he mixed up the presidents of Mexico and Egypt during a late-night press conference specifically called to refute special counsel Robert Hur’s description of him as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

He is also obviously in physical decline. He fell off his bicycle in Delaware, fell over in a heap at a military event, and repeatedly fell while trying to climb the steps into Air Force One. There are dozens more examples that should embarrass the majority of the White House press corps that ignored them. Some news outlets including these pages have not shied away from the truth and have reported what is going on. But for the most part, news media have worked hard to cover for Biden and conceal the truth from the public. They have betrayed their calling.

The Left-dominated press decided there was no story, so the story was suppressed rather than pursued. This is inexcusable. There has been some late accountability, such as the sacking of a radio host in Philadelphia who used a list of questions provided by the White House in an interview with Biden the day after his debate debacle. But her complicity in the media’s big lie is no different in substance from what many in the White House press corps have been doing for years — making sure their questions toed the official White House line, sometimes even to the extent of submitting those questions to the press shop in advance so Biden’s staff could prepare his answers.

As bad as was MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s infamous assertion that Biden at 81 years old is “the best Biden ever,” he is just one of many who have hidden Biden’s condition because they thought their first duty was to prevent the election of his opponent, former President Donald Trump.

Many of the most senior Democrats are equally to blame in this colossal cover-up and fraud on the public. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and most importantly, Vice President Kamala Harris all regularly talk with the president and meet with him in person and must have known how enfeebled he had become. What did they know and when did they know it? These questions must be answered.

Democrats must now ask themselves how big they are willing to let their lie get. After an initial round of truth-telling by some elected Democrats in the aftermath of the debate, Biden and his allies have browbeaten many critics into submission. They and Biden himself in a letter to Congress argue that he is not going anywhere. It is a threat to critics that they will be excluded from influence and power if he wins. If he loses, critics will be blamed. This is an appeal to the careerist fears of the Washington swamp.

Two days ago on a private call, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said Biden should step aside. Now he says, “He’s going to be our nominee, and we all have to support him.” Did Biden suddenly get well? On Sunday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) was planning to lead a delegation to the White House to force Biden to step down. Now Warner only says, “It is incumbent upon the president to more aggressively make his case to the American people.”

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The truth is that Biden did not merely have one bad night. His condition is bad and, through no fault of his own, it can only get worse. Every time Biden slips up, every time he says he is the “first black woman” to be president, every time he claims he created NATO, and every time he suggests Warner ran against him for the presidency, Democrats will be forced to repeat the lie that Biden is still capable and competent to do the toughest job in the world.

Biden seems to believe all the polling is wrong and thinks he is tied with Trump. Democrats can see the polling too. They know he is wrong. They seem increasingly content to let his delusions continue on to the crack of doom. They, like him, do not deserve the trust of the nation.

In a surprise triumph over the populist National Rally, France’s left-wing political alliance came first in Sunday’s final round of parliamentary elections. The New Popular Front coalition of leftists won 182 seats, President Emmanuel Macron’s party won 168 seats, and the National Rally and its allies won 143 seats.

Many in the Western media are celebrating the National Rally’s failure to secure a parliamentary majority. In some ways we agree that it is a good thing that the National Rally will not control all policy. For, while National Rally seeks to secure France’s borders, which is a desperate need, it is also economically statist and parochial and anti-American, which are regrettable. It cannot properly be called right-wing at all, let alone “far right,” which is the insult thrown at it by leftist legacy news media.

But the Left’s win is nothing to celebrate.

Led by left-wing stalwart Jean-Luc Melenchon, the victorious coalition demands to pick the next prime minister. This is a problem for many reasons, foremost among them the fact that Melenchon is a deeply unpleasant politician. He is a creature of the European Left’s fetishistic and deluded anti-Americanism. He seems to believe that America is the cause of most of the world’s ills. He despises NATO and sympathizes with Vladimir Putin and his imperial war against Ukraine. He is hostile toward Israel and Jews and has made numerous blatantly antisemitic remarks. Yet he is now a political kingmaker.

Melenchon’s policies are as ridiculous as they will prove damaging if implemented. The coalition has pledged to reverse Macron’s increase of the pension eligibility age from 60 to 64. It wants price controls on key goods, higher public sector wages, and expanded welfare benefits. The French economy is already weak, overburdened by taxes and regulations, runs a high fiscal deficit, and has a soaring debt-to-GDP ratio of 111%. Expanding benefits for an aging population amid economic sclerosis is a recipe for national failure.

The French Left has never shown much sensible restraint. It wants what it has long wanted, which is to extract benefits today at the expense of future generations. It indulges in the politics of emotion and protest rather than of logic and good governance.

Its pro-immigration policies also seem designed to ensure the National Rally keeps gaining popular support in advance of the 2027 presidential election. The Left opposes immigration controls and wants additional welfare benefits for migrants and new staff to process asylum claims.

The National Rally is furious that it has been defeated by the strategic voting orchestrated by an alliance of otherwise disparate political parties working to obstruct it. But it will now gather new supporters by spending the next three years pointing out the dysfunction of a divided government.

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Macron faces parliamentary opponents who despise him and wish to embarrass him. While he has recently shown robust support for Ukraine, he may be hesitant to use what little political capital he has left on that issue. It’s going to be a tough few years for the president.

But it’s going to be even tougher for the French people. France has chosen a mad Left instead of a populist Right. Even if delayed, the Right is surely now on the path to power.

The Democratic Party is in a bad place. Its already unpopular president has just been exposed as mentally unfit for office. The process for choosing a new candidate to replace him ended months ago. Democratic primary voters will have no say in who their next candidate is if President Joe Biden resigns.

There is a nominating convention scheduled for next month, but most of the delegates have already been hand-picked by the Biden-Harris campaign. The delegates are not neutral Democratic primary voters. Democrats can stage all the debates they want with Vice President Kamala Harris and other candidates, but the fix would be in. It would not be an honest process.

As bad as the situation is for Democrats going forward, the country is arguably in a worse place now. For months, conservatives have been arguing, including these pages, that Biden was not all there — that he had lost more than one step, that he was not making all the decisions in the White House, and that a coterie of close aides was controlling the president.

Now we know that is all true. And many in the Democratic Party, including Harris, have known all along. “The country saw [at the debate] what those of us who have had personal interactions with him have all known for the last 2 1/2 years,” one senator said anonymously. White House staff “create a protective bubble around POTUS,” a former Biden aide admitted. “He’s staffed so closely that he’s lost all independence.”

Many Democrats are alarmed by these revelations. And many of them are bravely calling for Biden to step aside. But many others are acting like nothing is wrong, that allowing an obviously infirm man to act as some sort of puppet is fine as long as he has supportive Democratic ideologues around him to run the country. 

“A presidency is more than just one man,” Obama Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently said on television. “I would take Joe Biden at his worst day at age 86 so long as he has people around him like Avril Haines, Sam Power, Gina Raimondo supporting him over Trump any day.”

The Democratic Party’s faith in unelected staff running the country for an incompetent president might not be as alarming if the Democratic Party did not also have such an expansive view of the powers of the Executive Branch. Biden may have said after the Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity ruling, “I know I will respect the limits of the presidential power, as I have for 3 1/2 years,” but that is simply not true. When the Supreme Court found Biden’s college debt amnesty plan illegal, Biden bragged, “The Supreme Court blocked me from relieving student debt but they didn’t stop me!”

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And debt amnesties are far from the only area where Biden has exceeded his power. Not only has he released millions of illegal immigrants into the country on parole when the law specifically says he must detain them or return them to another country but Biden is actively flying in tens of thousands more illegal immigrants every month through an entirely separate and completely illegal parole program. He has abused the powers of the Clean Air Act to outlaw the sale of gas-powered cars, he has abused the Higher Education Act to force men into women’s dorms, and he has used the Department of Justice to persecute pro-life activists.

If Democrats do lose to former President Donald Trump this November, a big reason will be their continued effort to take as many decisions out of the hands of voters as possible.

Voters don’t get to choose whether they want to live under Republican or Democratic Party rule for almost four months, but people are already voting with their feet, they have been for years, and their choice is clear: people overwhelmingly want to live in Republican-run states.

The latest data come from the Internal Revenue Service which released the most current migration data on June 27. The data come from taxpayers’ 2022 tax returns and show how many taxpayers moved between each state in 2021. 

The five states that gained the most people and the most income from new people coming to their state were Florida, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. On net, Florida gained 245,000 people and $36 billion in adjusted gross income, Texas gained 181,000 and $10 billion, North Carolina gained 83,000 people and $4.6 billion, South Carolina gained 70,000 and $4.8 billion, while Tennessee gained 61,000 and $4.7 billion.

These are all solidly Republican states with all but North Carolina led by a Republican governor. And even North Carolina has a centrist Democratic governor kept in check by Republican majorities in the state House and Senate.

Now this data does not reflect population gain from new tax filers. This is purely based on existing taxpayers who moved from one state to another. And so if there were states that gained taxpayers, there would have to be states that lost taxpayers, and those states are California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

California lost 307,000 people and $23.8 billion, New York lost 223,000 people and $14 billion, Illinois lost 87,000 and $10 billion, Massachusetts lost 45,000 people and $4 billion, while New Jersey lost 37,000 and $5.3 billion.

All of these loser states are run by the Democratic Party, some uninterrupted for decades. Some Democratic Party apologists have argued in the past that similar numbers only reflect people moving from the cold Northeast to warmer Southern states. But this does not explain why California is the biggest loser state of all. No one has ever left California because of bad weather. Ignoring the party that controls the government, California is the most beautiful place in the world with the world’s most temperate and enjoyable climate. Something must be really, really wrong with California’s governing party for so many people to be fleeing the state so fast, and taking their income with them.

Democratic Party-controlled states are terrible places to live because the interest groups that control the Democratic Party make life unaffordable for middle-class families. The environmental groups that fail to implement expensive taxes and mandates at the federal level succeed at the state level. As a result, all of the Democratic states listed above have above-average gas and residential electricity prices, with California having the highest costs of all. Environmental groups also make building new homes next to impossible with all of the required environmental reviews, zoning, and clean energy mandates for construction materials and appliances.

Not only are housing and energy costs absurdly high in Democratic Party-controlled states, but the services delivered by these states are all terrible as well. Government unions in every one of the five states above are more powerful than the environmentalists, and the purpose of all government unions is to enrich their members at the expense of taxpayers while delivering as few actual services as possible. Why do all the governors of the Democratic states send their children to private schools? Because they know the teachers unions have made the public schools places they do not want to send their children.

In order to pay for all of the inefficient and corrupt government union salaries, Democratic-controlled states also have to raise taxes far higher than states without government unions. This makes it enticing for businesses to leave high-tax, bad-service Democratic-run states, for low-tax, efficient-service Republican states.

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It is not that Republican-run states are perfect. There is corruption and bad decisions are made occasionally, but at least the primary elections are not controlled by government union bosses whose allegiances are always to government union employees and never to the average citizen.

Voters across the country have a choice this November: the higher taxes, higher energy costs, and higher housing unaffordability of the Democratic Party, or the low tax, low energy costs, better housing affordability of the Republican Party. Many voters aren’t waiting. Their choice is clear.

The United Kingdom’s governing Conservative Party suffered a major electoral defeat on Thursday. Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer is the new prime minister, buoyed by 412 Labour seats in the 650-seat House of Commons. The Conservatives lost 250 seats, facilitating Labour’s big majority of around 170 seats.

Outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has apologized and will soon resign as Conservative leader. That’s no surprise. One defeated Conservative minister described the result as “electoral Armageddon.” And that’s hardly an understatement. Big Conservative scalps included former Prime Minister Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and others.

The polls suggested this was always going to be the outcome.

The more recent years of Conservative government have been defined by a repeated failure to deliver on much-vaunted promises. The economy remains sluggish and has failed to deliver the post-Brexit bump that many Conservatives promised. Illegal immigration into the U.K. remains a significant concern, with tens of thousands entering the country each year. The Conservatives failed to persuade the public that they were in control of the borders. They struggled to stop illegal boat transits from France, in particular. The government then became bogged down in the courts over its unconventional plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda to await the results of their appeals for U.K. residency.

Then there has been the cronyism. Though he led the Conservatives to a significant 2019 election victory and then finally carried out Brexit, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson became entrenched by the public perception that his government was rooted in cronyism and dysfunction. His successor, Truss, lasted only a remarkable 49 days in office. The shortest-serving prime minister in U.K. history, Truss was forced to resign following major market turmoil in the face of her proposed economic reforms. Sunak followed. And while smart and soft-spoken, Sunak always struggled to bring a charismatic sense of direction to his office. The country saw him as a caretaker prime minister always waiting for an electoral shooing out of the door.

Ultimately, time was not the Conservative Party’s friend. In power since 2010, the Conservatives came to be perceived as out of ideas and more interested in their own infighting than public service. Under Starmer, a centrist successor to far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, Labour was seen to offer a viable and less risky proposition for change.

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Now, with a powerful parliamentary majority and facing a gutted Conservative opposition, Starmer has significant latitude to govern. He may move toward the center in an effort to restore economic vitality and assure voters that Labour is indeed a moderate rather than left-wing party. But the size of Starmer’s majority means that he’ll also face pressure from the party’s left to move more boldly in increasing the already substantial role of government in the economy and society.

There is a lesson here for Republicans. As in the U.K., France, and elsewhere in Europe, the failure to deliver results on promises is not likely to be well received by voters. The retention of power must be earned and the perception of governing competence constantly reinforced by positive action. If not, as with the Conservative Party on Thursday, the consequences can be disastrous.

Listen to any Democrat spinning President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week, and one of the lines you’ll hear is, “Yes, Biden had a bad night, but Donald Trump repeatedly lied.” To be fair, falsehoods poured from Trump much as usual, but the dichotomy Democrats wish to suggest is a false one. Biden was just as dishonest. He lied constantly, as he always does. Biden has a long history of not telling the truth, going all the way back to his first failed presidential campaign in 1987.

Before we address Biden’s debate claims, it is only equitable to note some of Trump’s worst falsehoods. He did not, as he claimed, deliver the biggest tax cut in American history (that honor still belongs to President Ronald Reagan), it was not Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who turned down National Guard protection before Jan. 6 (that was the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms), and illegal immigrants are not destroying Social Security and Medicare (although they are a huge burden to state and local governments that have to house, clothe, feed, and educate them, they do not qualify for Medicare or Social Security benefits).

Now consider Biden. He claimed early in the debate that he is the “only president this century that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world.” This statement was a huge surprise and insult to the families of the 13 American servicemen and women who died during Biden’s reckless and negligent withdrawal from Afghanistan. The three service members killed by a drone in Jordan this January also apparently escaped Biden’s memory.

Biden then fantastically claimed that we’re now “in a situation where there are 40% fewer people coming across the border illegally. It’s better than when he left office.” Border crossings are down from this December’s record-high 301,983 migrants arrested for illegally crossing the border, but that was a 300% increase from Trump’s last month in office. In total, over 7 million illegal immigrants have been arrested illegally crossing the southern border under Biden, and the president has released millions of them into the country. Far, far more than Trump ever did.

Relatedly, Biden claimed he had been endorsed by the Border Patrol union, a claim the union itself quickly denied, posting on X that night, “To be clear, we never have and never will endorse Biden.”

Biden said “the vast majority of constitutional scholars supported Roe,” which should have been surprising to Biden himself, who said in 1986, “there is an overwhelming universal criticism by proponents of pro-choice and opponents of pro-choice that Roe v. Wade wasn’t very well-reasoned.” Maybe he just forgot that too. 

Biden claimed that unemployment was 15% when he came into office, and that “there were no jobs. … It was terrible.” In reality, the economy was already rapidly recovering under Trump, adding 1.4 million jobs a month with a 6.4% unemployment rate when Biden was sworn into office. Since Biden became president, job growth has slowed to 400,000 jobs a month.

As important as all these Biden lies are, however, they don’t break but extend the record of falsehood he has achieved in the past. During his first presidential campaign, Biden falsely claimed he was the first in his family to go to college, falsely claimed he finished in the top half of his law school class, and was forced to exit the 1988 Democratic primary after being exposed for plagiarizing a campaign speech.

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But the biggest lie of all is the one Biden is still telling right now: that he is mentally competent to be president of the United States until the age of 86. For months, the White House has attacked those who claimed Biden has lost even a step mentally. Now, after last Thursday’s debate performance, everyone knows the truth. Biden is a shadow of even his unimpressive former self, unable to complete sentences and finish a train of thought.

There are many contrasts between Biden and Trump, but honesty is not one of them.

On this Independence Day, consider how a very few people, in very dire straits, made the difference for the very existence of the nation we now know as the United States.

Consider, too, how one of those very few people was also the final president of the founding generation and how his legacy is forever connected to the Fourth of July.

By December 1776, the American Revolution was all but dead. Gen. George Washington commanded only some 3,500 troops, almost none decently trained for battle. The British had about 20,000 well-trained regulars, plus thousands more Hessians and other mercenaries. Worse for Washington, the enlistments of almost all his men were scheduled to end on Dec. 31. They were ill-fed, ill-equipped, ill-dressed, and mostly shoeless. And, after four significant battle losses in a row, they fought for a populace that had all but given up on the revolution, with large numbers redeclaring their loyalty to the British king.

Without a significant victory before Dec. 31, the revolution effectively would be kaput.

Facing those grim odds against horrible weather and with sleep-deprived men trudging on bloody, frost-bitten feet, Washington took 2,400 troops to attack a British-Hessian outpost at Trenton, New Jersey, after midnight on Dec. 26. Their breathtakingly dangerous crossing of the Delaware River was followed by a forced march of 9 miles through the dark of a brutal snowstorm. Still, with the element of surprise, their attack at dawn gained early success on the main streets of the town.

That’s when the Hessians, rallying, readied a cannon in the middle of King Street to mow down Washington’s men. If the cannon had succeeded in reversing the tide, the whole Revolutionary War effectively would have ended.

Instead, six Americans rushed the cannon. In hand-to-hand combat, they gained control of the weapon, stopping the last Hessian counterattack. The Hessians were routed, the revolution was reinspired, and a call for new enlistments was successful. The cause of American liberty quite arguably had rested on control of that cannon. Because the cannon was taken, liberty survived.

One of those six Americans who rushed that cannon, who saved the day, was badly injured, with a severed artery leaving him close to death. Yet he survived. He was just 18 years old, a Virginian by the name of James Monroe.

Monroe then served for half a century in a host of elective and appointive roles famous for their successes. He played a key role in writing the Northwest Ordinance, which provided for the administration of vast new territory without slavery. His diplomacy was largely responsible for doubling the size of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase. His leadership as secretary of state and secretary of war helped turn the tide in the War of 1812, snatching what was treated as victory from the very mouth of defeat.

Elected president in 1816, Monroe so deftly navigated the politics of the day that his two terms have forever since been known as “The Era of Good Feelings,” with almost no organized opposition. He secured Florida from Spain, gained joint occupation, with Great Britain, of the vast Oregon Territory, and proclaimed the famous “doctrine” that bears his name, saying the Western Hemisphere would henceforth be off limits to foreign colonization.

Barely more than a year after Monroe left office, the two main authors of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, died on the declaration’s 50th anniversary on July 4, 1826. Five years later, to the day, suffering from heart failure and tuberculosis, Monroe followed suit.

In his last presidential message to Congress 200 years ago this year, Monroe wrote with civic pride about the Spirit of ’76 — of “the great cause in which we were engaged and the blessings which we have derived from our success in it. The struggle was for independence and liberty, public and personal, and in this we succeeded.”

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“There is no object which as a people we can desire which we do not possess or which is not within our reach. … We have every motive to cling together which can animate a virtuous and enlightened people. The great object is to preserve these blessings, and to hand them down to the latest posterity,” he added.

Our job, then, is to seize and neutralize the cannon. Happy Independence Day.