Now that President Joe Biden has officially announced that he is, in fact, running for reelection, it’s time for us to look back at the last three years of his presidency and ask ourselves: is Biden really worthy of getting another term in office?
Obviously, I am biased. I think he’s the worst president in my lifetime. As my colleague Gregory Copley loves to joke, Biden’s entire purpose as president is to make Jimmy Carter look good.
While I realize we’ve reduced our national politics to a series of pathetic and meaningless personality contests—Joe Biden says he should be president again because he’s not Donald Trump and Trump says the same thing about Biden—Joe Biden really does have a record.
That record is not so great when you look at it.
His supporters (who really are more opponents of Trump and the Republicans than they are believers in Biden’s agenda—whatever that is) will say that I’m being unfair.
As president, Biden took over a country eviscerated by the novel coronavirus from Wuhan, China, and was sworn into office during a literal insurrection. Not since Abraham Lincoln has a president faced such problems.
Since I’m in a fair mood today, I’ll acknowledge that Biden did take over during a particularly tumultuous moment in modern American history.
(I was so open to a Biden presidency that I even did a one-time consultation with the Biden team on space policy at the start of his presidency only to discover, much to my horror, that they were planning to go after SpaceX).
Yet, every president goes through tough moments. Not just the big names we remember, like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt. So, too, did the lesser remembered presidents, like James Polk or Warren G. Harding.
Such is the nature of the office. Normally presidents don’t sit around crying about the tough hand they’ve been dealt. They just absorb the crises and try to resolve them.
Biden seems incapable of resolving much of anything. And when he’s not failing to find solutions to problems he inherited from his much-maligned predecessor, President Biden is making new problems for himself.
Without further ado, I present my top five Biden failures as we enter what I am sure will be a painful reelection campaign in 2024…
Joe Biden: Failing to Secure Our Border
Since taking office under a cloud of controversy in January 2021, President Biden has both failed to secure our border and his policies have made the situation along America’s southwestern border worse than when he took power.
When Biden became president, his predecessor had staunched the flow of illegal immigrants across the southwestern border significantly.
In 2019, it was winnowed down by former Republican President Donald J. Trump to 1 million crossings and in 2020 that number halved to around 500,000.
Under Biden, illegal migration into the United States has exploded. In 2022, nearly 2.4 million illegal border crossers were arrested along the US-Mexican border.
Most experts predict that 2023 will significantly outpace 2022’s staggering numbers. Immigration can make or break a nation-state, such as the United States. Too little and the economy might not grow; innovation might stagnate. Too much and the system, such as ours is today, might be swamped by criminality, disease, and abuse of America’s generous welfare state.
Democrats have made the misanthropic political assessment that unfettered migration—both illegal and legal—into the United States will permanently alter the demography of the country which, in the long term, will favor the Democratic Party’s quest for political dominance in America.
Thus far, they’ve been proven correct. Do not expect these numbers to abate in any way so long as Biden and his party remain in charge.
Making America Dependent on Foreign Energy Again
When he left office, Donald Trump had imparted a great gift to the United States: he had presided over the expansion of America’s domestic energy boom. The investment into North American fossil fuel industry, as well as the reduction of environmental regulations on that industry, made the United States (for the first time in decades) a net exporter of fossil fuels.
This, more than anything we could have ever done to support Ukraine against Russa or oppose China’s rise or contain Iran, gave us decisive strategic advantages over our global rivals.
Biden’s actions as president as they relate to energy has been to make America more dependent on foreign sources of fossil fuels. Not since the early 2000s has the outcome of events in far away, dusty foreign lands mattered so much to the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans.
More fossil fuel production at home under Trump meant that Americans were shielded from the excesses of foreign energy instability. It meant that Washington had greater leverage over its rivals, too. This outcome also led to cheaper energy prices for Americans which meant they could spend that money elsewhere.
That all changed with Biden.
In fact, one of the initial actions that Joe Biden took as president was to issue a spate of executive orders restoring the Obama era environmental regulations upon North America’s fossil fuel industry and refusing to build new pipelines linking American and Canadian energy sources together (such as the KeystoneXL Pipeline). He also infamously refused to support the creation of key pipeline in Michigan.
By taking these domestic sources of fossil fuel off the global market at a time when the world was going through a general contraction of fossil fuel sources (largely as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns), Biden made Americans more susceptible to the volatile spikes in price that define the global energy market.
That’s why the national average for fuel has been so much higher than it was during the Trump years.
Inflation Run Amuck
Since taking office, the national inflation rate has been at historic highs. Not since 1980, has the inflation rate been this high. Inflation, as Milton Friedman used to say, was a hidden tax on the American Middle-Class. That has certainly been the result of the Biden economic policies. President Biden has turned profligate spending into a Zen-like state.
Regardless of his intentions, whether it be student debt relief or hiking costs on consumers to pay for ill-advised Climate Change policies, the greater the spending, the more money that is printed, and the more money that is printed, the higher our inflation rate is (meaning the greater the drag on America’s overall economy will be).
Biden wants to be Santa Claus to as many voting blocs as possible. It’s a cynical calculation: he can dole out money from the treasury to effectively buy votes. Politicians have done this time immemorial. But Biden has taken it to Weimar Republic-levels—and then some. More than $2 trillion US dollars in circulation today have been printed in the last three years.
That’s unheard of.
While Biden’s predecessor certainly printed his fair share of money needlessly and contributed bigly to the national debt, Biden came in and basically poured fuel on that raging inferno with great aplomb.
To combat the excessive spending and the presence of so many dollars chasing too few goods, the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has opted to hike interest rates. This is a double-whammy for Americans, as things are now completely unaffordable—including basic household goods, such as eggs!
Any other president would have been kicked the curb with no questions asked. Joe Biden, on the other hand, is inexplicably given a pass. It is his spending policies that are contributing mightily to the spending which, in turn, is causing the inflation (and so many other woes that Middle-Class Americans are being saddled with).
The economy is struggling the way it is largely because of the inflationary woes we are all being made to endure.
A Crime Surge Like No Other Under Joe Biden
Since 2021, the year that Biden took office, the national crime rate has spiked. According to a 2022 report from the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), “violence in major cities remains dramatically higher than it was before the pandemic.” The report goes on to assess that based on data from 23 metropolitan areas in the United States, the homicide numbers for the first half of 2022 were “39% higher than they were in the same period of 2019.”
The CCJ report also looked at property crimes, violent crimes, and drug offenses in 29 major metropolitan areas in the country. They determined that, “Aggravated assaults and robberies increased 4% and 19% respectively. Property crimes also increased by 6% while larceny went up 20%, residential burglaries rose by 6% and motor vehicle thefts jumped up by 15%.”
The bulk of these crime statistics emanate from Democrat-controlled cities. The CCJ, by no means a Right-wing institution, attributes the increase in these crimes to a combined “pullback” from police in these cities (you can also add in George Soros-funded, Left-leaning district attorneys choosing not to prosecute criminals the way they are supposed to) and gun violence.
Before anyone tries to ascribe the uptick in gun violence to Republican pro-Second Amendment policies, bear in mind that the bulk of these cities that are experiencing the increases in gun violence are Democrat-controlled—and have been for decades. And those politicians are decidedly anti-gun (and implement policies meant to restrict gun possession in their cities).
While many of the decisions that the CCJ believes have led to the increase in crime are at the local and state level, the fact remains that the Biden Administration has a general soft-on-crime approach at the federal level. Given how much money and resources cities and states require to do their law enforcement operations, there is a general incentive imposed by the Biden Administration to implement these soft-on-crime policies that are leading to the spike in criminality everywhere.
From Kabul to Khartoum, US Foreign Policy is Doomed
The United States has enjoyed its position as the world’s sole remaining Superpower since the end of the Cold War. Most Americans living today have either never lived in or have long forgotten a world in which a rival seriously contested American power.
Today, an axis of autocrats in Eurasia is arising to challenge American power everywhere.
Led by China and Russia, this semi-alliance—which includes countries, like Iran and North Korea—wants to push America’s dominion far from Eurasia. In China’s case, they dream of a world not ruled by the American Superpower but by a Chinese Communist Party-led one.
President Biden has argued that he was the more competent presidential candidate in 2020, largely because of his decades of experience in government. Specifically, Joe Biden made the case that he was most qualified because of his years of foreign policy expertise.
Yet, from Kabul, Afghanistan to Khartoum, Sudan, all Biden has managed to do as president has been to engage in a series of catastrophic withdrawals that have weakened America’s standing in the world and empowered the very enemies in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang, that Biden claims he’s trying to contain.
The sloppy pull-outs are merely a symptom of a much larger problem: Biden fecklessness at the strategic level. More to the point, few have been able to deign what, precisely, the Biden Administration’s wider strategy is.
At the same time that Biden has presided over disastrous withdrawals have diminished US power globally, Biden has also encouraged the rise of the most vicious anti-American regimes from Brazil to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, President Biden has overcommitted the United States to what very well may lead to a nuclear world war with Russia in Ukraine while squandering precious—and limited—diplomatic, political, and military capital there at the expense of being able to defend greater American interests in places like the Indo-Pacific and the Greater Middle East.
Clearly, another four years of Joe Biden in the White House will lead to the permanent diminution of US power globally and will, by default, lead to the expansion—and solidification—of Chinese world power that is both anti-democratic and anti-American. As one U.S. Air Force general once said to me, “The United States is about to go from a Superpower with global responsibilities to a regional great power with diminished global reach.”
The End of America as We Know It?
There is little doubt that Joe Biden’s presidency has damaged the United States on all fronts. Biden routinely tries to pretend as if he’s saving America from the damage that his predecessor had visited upon our great land.
This is simply untrue.
Biden is presiding over the willful diminishment of America as a global power. His administration is actively embracing policies that will permanently gut the American middle-class (once the backbone of America’s economic power, which is, in turn, the foundation of US military power).
America under Joe Biden is less prosperous, less stable, and more threatened by domestic crime and international rivals. We truly cannot survive another four years of the Biden Administration. The list above is by no means comprehensive, but it is indicative of a painfully negative trend lines. Most Americans have been conditioned to believe that the forces of history are far more important to the outcome of events that individuals or groups of people.
Biden is proving the inverse of the “great man theory” of history. Because he is the least competent and one of the weakest American presidents in modern history, Biden is causing so many problems for a United States that still retains all the capabilities it needs to survive and thrive in this dangerous, post-pandemic world. It’s just that President Biden is hindering us.
The next election, if Americans put someone else in charge with a comprehensive vision of American greatness, could see a drastic—and sudden—reversal of fortunes for the United States.
But time is not on America’s side. Failure to radically change course in terms of leadership will ensure that the 2020s are America’s lost decade. And the worst patterns and proclivities of the Biden years will become permanent features of a declining America rather than a historical blip.
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A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
