RUTHFULLY YOURS

You’d think someone whose career in national politics goes all the way back to 1972 would have noticed this, but apparently President Biden hasn’t: Unpopular presidents tend to complain that they were dealt a bad hand, and then grouse that the media are making things look worse than they are. But Biden was dealt an excellent hand; he has no excuses for the mess he’s in.

When Biden took office, the U.S. was already bouncing back from economic calamity, and tens of millions of vaccine doses were in the pipeline. If he had made smart decisions, the U.S. would be doing fine right now. Instead, he is the primary cause of the crises that are swamping his presidency. The media could scarcely be more inclined to spin things in his favor, and yet even they can’t entirely ignore the dispiriting facts.

A sympathetic-sounding author, Chris Whipple, who is writing a book about White House chiefs of staff, told NBC News that Team Biden “came in with the most daunting set of challenges arguably since Franklin D. Roosevelt, only to then be hit by a perfect storm of crises, from Ukraine to inflation to the supply chain to baby formula. What’s next? Locusts?” Biden has himself, according to the same NBC News story, been sympathetic to the why-am-I-so-unlucky view.

This is amusing, because the Biblical plague of locusts was not a random act but a planned punishment promised and enacted by God upon Egypt for its leader’s failure to release the Children of Israel from bondage. No doubt Pharaoh whined about his bad luck, too, despite being told by the Lord, “If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow.” The locusts were the eighth plague out of ten, suggesting that Pharaoh was a little slow to grasp reality.

Maybe not as slow as Biden, though. Consider his other crises. It may be a coincidence that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on Biden’s watch, but a realpolitik reading of the situation suggests this is fanciful. Biden’s predecessor had many faults, not least of them his unpredictability and defiance of norms, but those flaws must have looked different to Putin as he considered making his breathtakingly audacious move on Ukraine. If President Trump’s irritable and capricious temperament made him ill-suited for the White House, it probably also made Putin wonder about the wisdom of acting too boldly. In any case, Putin did not invade Ukraine until Biden virtually gave him a green light to do so by speaking the way he habitually speaks — like a senator given to rambling rather than a commander in chief who knows his words carry heavy freight.

The single biggest problem Biden faces — inflation — is clearly his fault. Congress passed trillions of dollars worth of stimulus in 2020. By the time Biden took office, the economy had rebounded energetically, growing 33.4 percent and 4.1 percent, respectively, in the last two quarters of 2020, and it was already roaring along at a 6.4 percent growth clip for the first quarter of 2021. Yet Biden pushed for more stimulus and got it, pouring $1.9 trillion worth of kerosene on the fire. And then he pushed for even more of the same, spending the rest of the year advocating trillions in infrastructure spending (which he got) and trillions more in spending on the so-called Build Back Better agenda (which he didn’t). Gasoline prices are not as directly linked to Biden’s actions as inflation, but he can hardly blame exogenous forces for the spike in the cost of fossil fuel when disrupting its supply has been a nakedly stated objective of the bureaucracy he put in place.

Supply-chain problems? Biden is responsible for some of them, and the labor-union allies whose influence he wishes to expand are to blame for some others. Biden’s failure to waive the nonsensical Jones Act, which severely limits maritime trade, has prolonged and worsened the crisis. Meanwhile, Biden’s own bureaucrats at the FDA are responsible for the baby-formula shortage, because it’s the FDA that decrees, again nonsensically, that the baby formula used by millions all over Western Europe is not up to U.S. standards.

A less measurable crisis is the nationwide sense of being browbeaten into submission by woke politics. Biden has been the Vladimir Putin of this culture-war bombardment, nominating far-left candidates for key regulatory posts, attempting to set up a Ministry of Truth within the Department of Homeland Security, blasting away at Florida for stopping schools from teaching eight-year-olds about sexuality, endorsing sex-change procedures for children, siccing the FBI on parents who dare to speak out against school boards, and going easy on woke terrorists. Meanwhile, Biden’s administration refers to mothers as “birthing people.” If the president would like to stop looking ridiculous, he could start by criticizing the Oberlin-meets-Newspeak lingo his appointees favor.

Biden is the primary author of the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan that first caused his approval ratings to sag. His softness on illegal immigration is the obvious cause of the ongoing border crisis. And his inability to get through even a heavily stage-managed appearance without looking as clueless as Grandpa Simpson is the reason Americans doubt his fitness to lead. These last 18 months could have given us a story of American renewal and recovery. Instead, they’ve given us a damning story of presidential mismanagement.