Biden administration

No one has done more to undermine the Biden administration’s vaccination strategy than Joe Biden. From his confusion over when to wear a mask and when not to wear a mask, to the lack of press conferences, on through the Delta variant, we arrive at Biden’s biggest optics crisis yet: 15,000 migrants flooding the southern border under a Del Rio, Texas, bridge in temperatures reaching 100 degrees. Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed last week that his department's border officials did not test the some 12,000 to 15,000 migrants for COVID. He did say that some had fallen ill, but would not elaborate further.

Eight months in and I am perilously close to employing one of the worst political clichés in existence — Joe Biden’s honeymoon is over. You’re not imagining things — the Biden presidency is in a state of free-fall. This is not a joke. It’s not an overreaction. It’s not about Biden’s opponents pouncing or seizing. Biden’s presidency has a very real chance of completely foundering within its first year. After a promising start where he inherited a vaccination process that was already in progress, albeit briefly, under Trump, his vaccine strategy has stalled to the point of him now demanding mandates on private businesses, a step he assured the electorate he would not take.

President Biden told Americans to expect an era of unity and normality after four years of disruption. What they got was a chief executive unable to cope with the overlapping crises of the coronavirus pandemic, consumer price inflation, illegal immigration, crime and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yet there is one thing that Biden has restored to good working order: the DC gravy train. In Biden’s Washington, well-connected liberal Democrats in the influence industry have no problem enriching themselves. The world is a mess but the Swamp is as fetid as ever. Not long after taking office, Biden issued an executive order restoring and strengthening the government ethics provisions that had been in force under President Obama. He banned gifts from lobbyists.

With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 having come and gone, many have turned to reflection. Some meditate on the solidarity and sense of national purpose that act of terror engendered; others view it as a dramatic opening to our miserable 21st century. What comes to my mind are the images of our hasty retreat from Afghanistan over the last month. As is often the case, my best thinking has already been articulated by the late Charles Krauthammer. In the introduction of his best-selling collection of essays Things That Matter, Krauthammer explains his evolution from psychiatrist to public intellectual.

President Biden walked to the White House podium on Tuesday and proclaimed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan an ‘extraordinary success’. He relied on the unanimous advice of military leaders and strategic advisers for these wise decisions. If there were any failures, they were due to Donald Trump. Never in history, he said, had there been such a successful airlift. Of the Americans who wanted to leave, we got out an amazing 90 percent. Surely that’s a success all around, despite the collapse of the Afghan army, which nobody expected. Of course, as a far-sighted leader, Biden said he had ordered plans for that, too.

‘How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not?’ Biden asked last week. ‘How many more lives, American lives, is it worth, how many endless rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery? I’m clear on my answer: I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past.’ They were the words of a man who knew from what he spoke and knew to whom he was speaking. It was not to the national news media, an elite that has abandoned its working-class roots and audience, and have nothing but censure and contempt for Biden’s brave decision.

You actually can spell ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’ without ‘America’, as it turns out. You can also, however, spell ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’ without, say, ‘European Union commissioner Ursula von der Leyen’. And right now, that seems like the more pressing of these two anagrammatical bombshells. Both the United States and Europe have spent the last week reprising what by now ought to be played-to-death roles. America made another clumsy move in the Middle East without cluing in our Nato allies, and the Europeans complain about it into the roar of a C-130 engine.

Joe Biden emerged from his cave, saw his shadow, and told us there will be three more years of winter. That winter, descending on America’s position in the world, was on public view at Biden’s Friday press conference about Afghanistan. Standing behind him was the Vice President, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the national security adviser, a stark contrast to the sad photo of Biden alone on a video call from Camp David with those advisers. Why have them stand there, mute? To convey to the public that the administration was united...and to convey to his advisers that they were all on this sinking ship together.