The best defense President Joe Biden and his allies have been able to offer for his failing presidency is that he is a helpless bystander who can’t do anything about anything. When Biden is the common factor in all of these problems, though, maybe he is the problem after all.
“Most Americans still not sold on EVs despite push from Biden, poll finds,” was CBS’s headline from Tuesday. A MarketWatch headline on Monday read, “Your taxes will likely have to go up, despite Biden’s $400K pledge.” That keyword, “despite,” tells us that Biden is supposedly doing all he can, but he simply cannot live up to the campaign promises he made or move the needle on his highest priority problems.
You can see this pattern throughout Biden’s presidency.
“The Biden administration is asking Mexico to help curb the huge flow of migrants into the U.S., as Biden runs out of options to fix a problem that is hurting his polling,” NBC News reported in January in an article that suggested Biden was at the whims of the Mexican government in negotiations. The Associated Press bemoaned in May 2022 that Republicans were “blaming Biden” for the baby formula shortage, the border crisis, gas prices, and inflation.
How did all of these things happen? Could it be that Biden immediately reversed successful Trump-era border restrictions and undermined Border Patrol, giving Mexico more leverage and making the border crisis worse? Or that Biden’s massive spending policies made inflation worse, highlighted by what Biden later admitted was the deceptively named “Inflation Reduction Act”? Is it because Biden put incompetents in charge of addressing the supply chain crisis? Or is Biden just a bystander as national and global events happen around him?
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One may recall Biden took a similar disposition during the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. According to him and his administration, the collapse that left American military equipment and citizens in the hands of the Taliban, abandoned Afghan allies to Taliban retribution, and led to the death of 13 United States service members was inevitable, “we planned for every contingency” and his hands were tied because of former President Donald Trump anyway. Once again, Biden was supposedly a helpless bystander.
This is not a convincing argument to make for the most powerful man on the planet. All of these crises and problems aren’t happening “despite” Biden’s presidency. They are happening because of Biden’s presidency, whether it be his own destructive policies or his administration’s weakness in the face of activists. Biden isn’t the victim of all these problems. He is the problem.