Dishonest. Incoherent. Corrupt. An abuser of power and a destroyer of norms, Joe Biden’s tenure as president was a holistic failure, ensnaring economic, social, constitutional, and foreign policy.
It might be said in his defense that his lack of courage, competence, and brainpower greatly hindered any chance of success. Few men have been less prepared for a job, even though he spent 50 years in what he likes to call "public service."
Nevertheless, it’s difficult to summon much sympathy for a spiteful, ungracious, and unpleasant braggart who spent his political lifetime lashing out at anyone who dared query or challenge him. Indeed, perhaps the only thing more impressive than Biden’s unearned confidence was his utter lack of principles. From his early days simping for segregationists to his latter days simping for radical abortionists, there was no position Biden wouldn’t sell for a morsel of power.
A well-earned feeling of inadequacy drove Biden to become one of the most shameless fabulists in America's political history. One could write a dense novel replaying the man’s personal fictions: From being “shot at” during a trip to the Green Zone in Iraq to travailing the deadly hazards of Afghanistan to pin a medal on a soldier, participating in sit-ins after his “soul raged upon seeing the dogs of Bull Connor” to working pro bono for the Black Panthers, living a hardscrabble childhood in a Welsh mining town to being recruited by colleges for football, graduating gloriously in his law school class to having conversations with his father about gay couples kissing on the streets in working-class 1950s Wilmington, barely anything Biden told us about his life has been true. The man is a shameless serial fabulist, as dishonest as the day is long.
Running Biden for the presidency was an unpatriotic and irresponsible act, as it was clear even during the 2020 campaign that his already unexceptional mental capacity was diminishing quickly. After years of gaslighting the public about his condition, the first presidential debate in the 2024 cycle destroyed the legacy media’s fantasy about this being the best Biden ever. Democrats and the media that had been exposed as foolish and deceitful quickly turned on Biden to oust him and rebranded him as a modern-day Cincinnatus voluntarily relinquishing power when, in fact, he was forced out by the powerful Democrats. His successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, was one of the weakest presidential candidates in memory.
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Biden ran as a centrist in 2020 and had a chance to grab the middle but decided to recalibrate his policies to align with social and economic quackery that was trending strongly among left-wing progressives. This was an enormous political misjudgment of the public’s mood and a disaster for the country.
Biden's administration institutionalized “wokeism” in government — from funding identitarian racial discrimination policies to draping the White House in rainbow flags and contending that the mutilation of young children with gender dysphoria was an act of “love.”
Then, there was his unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department, not only against political opponents but also against citizens who had little power to fight back. It was in the Biden era that the state normalized and rationalized censoring people, openly pressuring and threatening private companies to shut down his political opponents.
As with so much else, these outrages were unprecedented.
Biden began his run for the presidency on the promise of rising above partisan divisiveness and reclaiming the moral high ground after the alleged indecency of the Trump years. Before long, however, he was standing in front of the crimson red background in Philadelphia, delivering one of the most acrimonious and demagogic speeches in modern presidential history. Decrying the rise of “semi-fascism,” Biden not only aimed his ire at opposing politicians (as he did back in 2014 when accusing Mitt Romney of wanting to put black people “back in chains”) but also at voters themselves.
This speech was an element in the calculated hysteria Democrats whipped up about the end of “democracy” and the rise of fascism. Biden was not above participating in this. He was rarely above anything low and dishonest.
He abused his executive power, and Democrats busily destroyed constitutional order.
Though Biden's presidency was marred by corruption and continuous ineptitude, two events will stand out as exclamation points in his legacy. The first is the shambolic withdrawal of American military forces and civilians from Afghanistan. In the 20 years since the invasion of that country, Biden embraced every position debated in our politics. Whether withdrawing from the country was the right thing to do or not (and I believe it was), it was accelerated into a rout, and its timing was driven by political considerations linked extraordinarily crassly to the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, just outside Washington, D.C.
Relying on his blunt foreign-policy instincts, Biden allowed the Taliban to dictate the date Americans would leave, and in August 2021, in mass confusion and panic, a suicide bomber murdered 13 American servicemembers and at least 170 Afghans at the Abbey Gate outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport.
The Biden administration reportedly shared a list of “American citizens, green card holders, and Afghan allies,” most of whom were abandoned to the Islamists, along with munitions, tanks, helicopters, aircraft, and more. Shamefully, the administration thus betrayed people who had worked for years to help us.
After the killings, Biden adopted his faux tough guy act and launched an airstrike against those responsible. Gen. Mark Milley referred to the strike as “valid” and “righteous” in a press conference and offered alleged details about the “ISIS facilitator” who was killed in the raid. It turned out, however, that the strike hit 10 innocent Afghans, seven of them children. Biden barely spoke of the incident again. Milley never explained why he said what he did.
Not one person lost his or her job. Not one person apologized. Biden infused his administration with a culture of shamelessness.
The other event that sank Biden was his self-inflicted economic disaster. He was handed an economy already in robust recovery after the COVID-19 slump, but instead of riding it and taking the credit, Biden and Democrats decided to turbocharge it and, at the same time, dole out billions of dollars to their pet causes, a move that was like pouring gasoline on a hot economic engine, which burst into inflationary flames. Even before Democrats proposed their misnamed and self-congratulatory “American Rescue Plan,” there was too much money chasing too few goods. Many economists, including well-known Democrats such as Larry Summers and Steve Rattner, warned of the dire consequences that would follow dumping money supply into the economy. Though inflation was already inching up, Biden dismissed it — “no serious economist” is “suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way,” he claimed. The president's sidekick, Ron Klain, with many in the legacy media, laughed off the threat of price spikes as a "high-class problem."
Once inflation was roaring and couldn't be ignored anymore, the administration pushed a counterintuitive narrative that the best prescription for alleviating inflation was yet more spending. Biden is one of those Democrats — there are many of them — for whom more spending is the answer to every question ever asked. Democrats renamed their “Build Back Better” legislation the “Inflation Reduction Act” and pushed through a massive lefty hobbyhorse spending bill, corporate welfare, and tax hikes. What the bill did not contain was any policy that would mitigate inflation. Soon after it passed, the country was hit with 40-year high inflation rates above 9%.
To add to our troubles, Biden had signed a slew of executive orders in his first days in the White House that were bound to make inflation worse. He paused government leases on public lands, shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, and stymied fossil fuel drilling in the Gulf of Mexico over concocted "social cost of carbon" externalities. This ensured that the cost of energy would spike, and since energy is needed to transport every good we use, Biden's energy suppression policies pushed the price of everything higher. By June 2022, gas prices were also at an all-time high.
It turned out not to be a high-class problem. It was a problem that hit the lowest-income earners hardest.
Biden takes credit for “creating” millions of jobs during his administration, but this, too, is a transparent deception. The jobs were mostly those recovered in the economic rebound after the government-compelled lockdowns that he had supported when running for office.
Despite his lifelong dishonesty, Biden seems still to be under the impression that giving his word “as a Biden” inspires confidence. But he gave his word that he would not pardon his son, Hunter Biden, and yet swiftly after the election was safely over and his double cross could do no political harm, he gave the reprobate younger Biden a free pass not only for the crimes of which he had been convicted but also for any other crimes he may have committed during the decade of his massive influence-peddling operation.
It was arguably the most corrupt pardon in history. Former President Bill Clinton had pardoned his brother Roger, and President-elect Donald Trump pardoned his son-in-law’s father. But both had already been punished. Biden had lied again and again about having no knowledge of his family's influence-trading business, but photographs eventually emerged, again after the election, of him helping net his family millions. His pardons, forestalling all criminal investigations, protected him.
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For decades, the Washington political class treated Biden as a mostly harmless but ridiculous blowhard and buffoon who had generally decent and moderate personal traits. This was always a myth. Once it was clear that Biden would win the 2020 Democratic Party primary and run against Trump, the same people helped drag the candidate over the finish line. But they couldn’t shield him from the realities of the job or from his own blundering.
If there is justice, Biden will be remembered as one of our worst presidents whose misgovernance this nation has ever endured.