Commentary: Seven Major Failures of the Biden Presidency

When Biden took office, we were assured that the “adults” were back in charge.

That’s not what it looked like when administration officials were tested by its first real foreign policy crisis. Instead, they created a crisis of confidence in American leadership.

3. Return to Energy Dependence

The Afghanistan mess wasn’t the only foreign policy debacle so far under Biden. Russia launched a major invasion of Ukraine in the days before the president’s State of the Union speech.

Unbelievably, former Secretary of State John Kerry, Biden’s climate czar, said the situation in Ukraine is worrying because Russia will be distracted from staying “on track” to fight climate change.

It’s an illustration of just how misguided the Biden administration’s priorities are.

Although the ultimate blame for the invasion remains with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden strengthened Russia’s hand with generally misguided energy policies.

In 2018, during Donald Trump’s presidency, the United States became a net exporter of oil for the first time in 75 years. Technological innovations, alongside the Trump administration’s policies to open up more opportunities for drilling while eliminating regulations, dramatically boosted American energy independence and global influence on energy issues.

Not only did this energy independence benefit Americans economically, it weakened the position of petro states such as Russia.

But the Biden administration shifted away from this strategy. It encouraged an increase in green energy projects at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. These renewable energy sources are a long way from meeting global energy needs. Biden put more regulatory burdens on the oil and natural gas industry, slowing its production considerably. And perhaps most dramatically, he shut down the Keystone XL pipeline project to move oil from Canada to the U.S. while effectively greenlighting financing of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry natural gas to Germany.

These moves made the U.S. and its allies more dependent on Russian oil and natural gas.

Biden now says the administration will pivot and place sanctions on Nord Stream 2. But what would things be like now if he had pursued a course that signaled the U.S. is committed to energy production and dominance from the get-go?

4.  Authoritarian COVID-19 Mandates

Remember when Biden said he would shut down the COVID-19 virus and not the economy?

Well, most Americans now believe that COVID-19 is here to stay no matter what we do. This after Biden reached beyond the powers of his office to force Americans to get vaccinated and tell states to enforce the most stringent mask mandates.

Biden tried to force private employers and other organizations with over 100 or more employees to enforce a vaccine mandate, despite saying that he didn’t think it was exactly constitutional.

The Supreme Court agreed, and struck down the executive order in January.

Despite this kind of ham-handed Caesarism, COVID-19 has not gone away. The omicron variant spread like wildfire in the winter months and is only now receding after countless Americans, vaccinated or not, got sick.

This development certainly undermined the justification for brutish vaccine requirements and the violation of civil liberties that was surely taking place.

The result has been a collapse in the popularity of Biden’s COVID-19 strategy. Even many Democrat-controlled states and cities are starting to drop vaccine card requirements and mask mandates.

If celebrities can watch the Super Bowl in a crowded stadium without masks on, why can’t we stop forcing children to participate in this farce?

Americans are fed up and want to move on with their lives.

5. Crime Surge

American cities have experienced an explosion of violent crime since the summer of 2020.

It’s a trend that shows no sign of abating. In December, ABC News reported that a dozen U.S. cities had set homicide records in 2021.

This trend coincided with—and almost certainly was exacerbated by—the “defund the police” movement. In fact, many Democrat-run cities made good on this slogan by defunding their police departments and stemming the use of proactive policing.

No surprise that cities that defunded police agencies often make the list of places with the largest increases in violent crime. Now, some of these city leaders are changing their tune and restoring police funding after much of the damage has been done.

This hasn’t stopped reckless left-wing district attorneys, such as Chesa Boudin in San Francisco and Alvin Bragg in New York City, from selectively deciding not to prosecute crimes.

Biden mostly has dodged the idea that radical policies embraced by his Democratic Party are to blame for this issue.

Instead, Biden has pointed to the pandemic and guns as the cause of the sustained surge of violence and criminality, rather than the lawless riots and soft-on-crime policies. The president said he thinks police departments should get more money, which some took as a sign that he had departed from the message of left-wing activists.

However, Biden said in January that he thought police should get more money to hire “psychologists and social workers,” which essentially is what the defunding crowd has called for.

6. Rising Inflation 

In July, Biden said inflation would be a temporary problem that his administration had a handle on.

“I want to be clear: My administration understands that were we ever to experience unchecked inflation in the long term, that would pose a real challenge for our economy,” Biden said. “While we’re confident that isn’t what we’re seeing today, we’re going to remain vigilant about any response that is needed.”

Now we’re well into the new year and, if anything, inflation is getting worse.

For most Americans, inflation has become almost impossible to ignore. Even leading Democrats have acknowledged that inflation is getting out of control.

In December, inflation hit 7%, the highest it has been since 1982. But this isn’t the same situation as in the 1980s.

We are on the other side of the wave, as The Wall Street Journal has noted. In 1982, inflation had fallen from its peak of 14.8% in 1980, the last year of Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency.

Correcting course required tight monetary policies from the Federal Reserve and a quick but sharp recession to pull the country out of the spiral.

“Upon becoming Federal Reserve chairman in 1979, Paul Volcker set out to crush inflation with tight monetary policy,” Greg Ip wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “In combination with credit controls, that effort pushed the U.S. into a brief recession in 1980. Then, as the Fed’s benchmark interest rate reached 19% in 1981, a much deeper recession began. By the summer of 1982, inflation and interest rates were both falling sharply. Four decades of generally low-single-digit inflation would follow.”

Today, inflation is rising, not falling. And it’s been exacerbated by the policies of the Biden administration, rather than being lessened as it was in 1981 by the policies of the Reagan administration.

Rachel Greszler, an economics expert at The Heritage Foundation, explains that Biden and his legislative allies are making a bad situation worse:

Having already stimulated greater demand for goods and services with $5.5 trillion in so-called COVID-19 spending while simultaneously restricting the labor supply through welfare-without-work policies and COVID-19 unemployment benefits that discouraged a return to work, the Biden administration and progressive lawmakers are pursuing more of the same. Their big-government socialism Build Back Better Act, increased regulations, and command-economy tactics would all exacerbate inflation.

Biden is starting to change his tune about the whole “temporary” thing about today’s inflation.

But he chose this path, and now the country is paying the consequences.

7. War on Parents

Violent crime is spinning out of control, but the Justice Department clearly doesn’t see that as the real threat to this country.

No, the real threat is parents who disagree with what’s happening in their local schools.

Parents around the country, even in far-left San Francisco, have been organizing in response to the misguided and often egregious policies of many K-12 schools.

From the inclusion of critical race theory and similar racialized ideas in classroom curriculum to over-the-top COVID-19 restrictions that forced students to stay home for over a year or wear masks all day long, parents are fed up.

The result has been old-fashioned self-government in action.

However, the response from the left has been to call transparency a threat to democracy, demonize parents, and threaten them with an FBI investigation.

In October, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent out a memo calling on the FBI to investigate “violent threats against school officials and teachers,” despite a lack of evidence of such threats.

The Biden administration actually moved to treat parents as if they were domestic terrorists.

It appears that Garland’s memo was urged on by the National School Boards Association, which represents many local school boards. The association also receives a huge amount of money from teachers unions.

In addition, Garland’s son-in-law is a co-founder of an organization that advocates “culturally responsive training” and other ideas associated with critical race theory.

So the attorney general’s memo wasn’t only an uncalled-for threat to parents, it also appeared to involve some serious conflicts of interest.