RUTHFULLY YOURS

The chances are that most voters do not know where Joe Biden’s secretary of defense is at any given moment. The public is likely to assume that the president, his subordinates, their staffs, and the watchdogs in media whose job it is to chronicle government officials’ activities are on top of it, if only because that was a reasonably safe assumption up until this week. What is likely to bite Biden — if Lloyd Austin’s reckless vanishing act bites the president at all — is the epiphany dawning on voters that no one in the administration was on top of it. And when those voters begin to think about it a little more, they might conclude that Biden hasn’t been on top of very much.

Biden’s presidency is buffeted by events, flitting directionless from one crisis to the next without having much of an impact on the trajectory of any one of them. Austin’s disappearance occurred amid an ongoing national humiliation abroad. No one, administration officials included, denies that Iran is behind the many dozens of attacks on U.S. service personnel in Iraq and Syria. Nor do they quibble about who is pulling the strings in Yemen, where a ragtag rebel group has partially closed crucial Red Sea shipping lanes to commercial traffic.

Presumably at someone’s direction, the Pentagon has retaliated against some of Iran’s proxy forces — with the notable exception of Yemen’s Houthi militia — but in a calibrated fashion that has failed to restore deterrence. Joe Biden and his officials appear content to allow Iran to dictate the tempo of events in the region. At the very least, the nation’s foremost defense official doesn’t see these ongoing assaults on America’s men and women in uniform and the U.S.-led geopolitical order they maintain as an obstacle to taking an unannounced sabbatical. Nor, apparently, does the president believe that Austin’s dereliction merits any sort of reproach.

The president and his White House appear similarly out to lunch when it comes to the crisis at the southern border. As NBC News reported, Biden has run “out of options” for dealing with the disaster after having tried almost nothing. When Biden’s back was against the wall, his administration suddenly discovered that pressuring the Mexican government to at least pretend to police its side of the Rio Grande reduces the number of border-crossers encountering U.S. authorities. Likewise, restarting deportation flights to Venezuela resulted in a “drop” in the number of migrants arriving in the U.S. from Venezuela.

Maybe it will dawn on Biden officials that doing even the bare minimum to police illegal border traffic generates results. That might beget the realization that even more pressure on border crossers would arrest the inflow of migrants further still. Maybe. But so far, the administration seems to resent that conclusion and seeks to avoid it despite the mounting political costs that now accompany its lethargy.

Voters’ foremost concern — the instability of consumer prices — seems to have similarly paralyzed the White House. Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress took one big swing at inflation with the flagrantly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” an exercise in misdirection designed to smuggle into law the provision of massive sums of taxpayer dollars to green-energy producers and climate-change-related initiatives. Maybe voters aren’t aware that forecasters quickly concluded that the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” would actually exacerbate inflation in the long run. They almost certainly do know that Biden and the Democrats have no intention of doing anything else to fight inflation save this act of legislative performance art.

Biden doesn’t talk about prices all that much. When he does, he insists voters’ biggest concern isn’t a concern at all — at least, not relative to the rest of the world, which has it much worse. When confronted with inflation’s effects on American wallets, Biden officials strike a theatrically confused pose. They insist that inflation’s causes are devilishly complex, bristling with feigned irritation over the notion that lawmakers have any control over the phenomenon. Voters are not similarly perplexed. As early as October 2021, pollsters Joel Benenson and Neil Newhouse found that 71 percent of independent voters agreed with the idea that consumers “will continue to pay more money on everyday expenses unless the government becomes more fiscally responsible.”

Flooding the zone with taxpayer-backed stimulus, juicing consumer demand at a time when producers couldn’t meet that demand, has consequences that voters do not struggle to grasp. Nor can the public ignore the evidence before their own eyes, which suggests that the administration either doesn’t share their intuitive apprehension of inflation or doesn’t much care.

Americans could be forgiven for drawing from Austin’s unannounced medical leave and the president’s impassive reaction to it broader conclusions about Biden’s lackadaisical leadership. It might dawn on them that the whole episode is a symptom of a more general malady. This presidency does not seem to see itself as the master of its own destiny. It is running on inertia — a condition that emboldens America’s adversaries, incentivizes would-be lawbreakers, and cements the impression in voters’ minds that they are on their own.

Eventually, the phenomenon becomes self-perpetuating. Voters resent Biden’s inaction. They register their disapproval in polling, limiting Biden’s willingness to act boldly in defense of their interests at the possible expense of his support among the partisan Democrats who are all that remain in his camp. The president’s conspicuous indolence intensifies all the conditions that are sapping the public of confidence in the president, and the cycle spirals on into the abyss.

The Biden administration is on autopilot, cruising along toward November 2024 with no goals beyond Election Day. Operating under the assumption that Donald Trump’s boorish affect and debates over abortion access at the state level will do the hard work of creating a compelling reelection narrative for them, administration officials are running out the clock. It’s a disastrously flawed strategy, but correcting its shortcomings would require energy and input from the president and his subordinates that they just can’t seem to muster.