With President Joe Biden set to deliver his first State of the Union address on Tuesday night, it’s a good time to ask: How has Biden done as president and what is the actual state of our union?
According to the American people, things aren’t going great.
A CNN poll in early February asked Americans what they thought of Biden’s presidency and what he’s done right since entering office Jan. 20, 2021.
The top answer by a wide margin, according to that poll—hardly likely to be skewed against Biden and Democrats—was nothing at all.
Over half of those surveyed couldn’t come up with a single success during Biden’s first year in office.
“I’m hard-pressed to think of a single thing he has done that benefits the country,” one respondent wrote, according to CNN.
Yikes.
When Florida Governor. Ron DeSantis said in his speech at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference that Biden was off to the worst start of any president since the 19th century, he clearly was echoing the opinion of many Americans.
Biden campaigned on a message of uniting the country, but the country seems more divided and fractured since he took office—except perhaps on appraisals of his job performance.
Biden is now hitting record-low approval ratings This is the right time for a president to be elected.
Americans are skeptical about their leadership because of the fact that more than a few national crises and outright disasters may be linked directly to the failures and political allies of this president.
Here are seven.
1. Border Crisis
The security situation at the southern border is a continuing disaster that has been barely covered by the legacy media.
The massive spike in border crossings initially was excused by Biden allies in the media as a “seasonal” problem. It was seasonal, it was open-borders season.
Biden’s election has seen a historic influx of illegal migrants cross the border illegally. These numbers are the highest ever recorded. decades. The problem? isn’t abating.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports that U.S. agents recorded 153,941 migrant encounters during January. This is twice the number of encounters from January previous year and quadruple the number compared to January before.
“Just three months into the 2022 fiscal year, the United States has already recorded nearly half a million southwest border encounters,” Jordan Boyd wroteThe Federalist, January 31, 2012. “So far, border apprehensions in the 2022 fiscal year are on track to exceed 2 million, which would blow away the 2021 fiscal year’s already record-breaking 1.7 million apprehensions.”
The federal government’s fiscal year runs from October through the following September.
What’s remarkable about this problem is that it coincides with the Biden administration’s messaging during the pandemic about doing anything necessary to end the threat of COVID-19.
In many cases, Americans are required to show their vaccine papers before they can go to a restaurant. The Biden administration tried forcing Americans to get vaccinated.
At the same time, the Biden administration has been letting millions of people with no proof of vaccination—or proof of anything else—into the country.
2. Withdrawal from Afghanistan: A Messy Situation
Biden’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan was certainly one of the low points of his presidency and one of the lowest points of American foreign policy since the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
The Biden administration assured the country that the withdrawal would be orderly, and that the Afghanistan government was stable upon America’s departure.
We clearly had a massive failure of intelligenceSince the collapse of the Afghan government, the Taliban have taken over the country in a matter of weeks.
Even worse, Biden was seemingly not available to help as the crisis unfolded. The world watched as videos showed Afghans falling from planes in desperate attempts at escape. However, the administration kept silent, making excuses.
Even reliably left-wing media figures began to question Biden’s leadership and competence on this matter. Biden refused to answer basic questions about the failed operation, and instead became belligerent, essentially saying that he and his advisers couldn’t have prevented the disaster.
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 in American leadership.
3. Energy Dependence: Return to Normal
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 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.
This energy independence not only benefited Americans economically but also weakened the position petro-states like Russia.
This strategy was abandoned by the Biden administration. It encouraged an increase in green energy projectsThese renewable energy sources are a threat to nuclear and fossil fuels. These renewable energy sources can be a long wayFrom meeting global energy needs. Biden put more regulatory burdensThe oil and natural gas industry by slowing down its production. 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 helped the U.S. and its allies. more dependent Russian oil, natural gas and other petroleum products
Biden now states that the administration will pivot and place sanctionsNord Stream 2. What would the world look like if he pursued a course which indicated that the U.S. is fully committed to energy production and dominance?
4. Mandates COVID-19 Authoritarian Mandates
Remember Biden’s statement that he would close the U.S. COVID-19 virus and not the economy?
Well, most Americans now believe that COVID-19 is here to stayregardless of what we do. After Biden stepped beyond his office’s powers to make Americans vaccinated and to tell states to enforce strict 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 orders in January.
COVID-19 has not disappeared despite all the Caesarism. After countless Americans got sick, the omicron variant spread like wildfire during winter months.
This development certainly weakened the justification for the brutish vaccination requirements and the violation that was clearly taking place.
The result has been a collapse in the popularity of Biden’s COVID-19 strategy. Even many Democrat-controlled states and citiesMany are beginning to drop mandated mask and vaccine card requirements.
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 tired of being unhappy and want to move forward with their lives.
5. Crime Surge
Since 2020’s summer, violent crime has increased in American cities.
It’s a trend that shows no sign of abating. ABC News reported December. reportedIn 2021, homicide records were set in 12 cities across the US.
This trend coincided with—and almost certainly was exacerbated by—the “defund the police” movement. Many Democrat-run cities followed this slogan and defunded their police departments, as well as cutting back on proactive policing.
It’s not surprising that citiesOften, defunded police agencies make the top ten list of places with the highest violent crime increases. Some of these leaders are now changing their tune. restoringAfter much of the damage is done, police funding.
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 has mostly avoided the notion that radical policies embraced in his Democratic Party are to blame.
Biden instead pointed to the pandemicAnd gunsas the main reason for the violence and criminality that has been raging, and not the lawless riots or soft-on crime policies. The president stated that he believes police departments should receive more money, which some saw as a sign he had. departedFrom 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
Biden will be in July saidHis administration would manage inflation as a temporary problem.
“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 AmericansInflation has become almost impossible for people to ignore. Even the most prominent Democrats admit that inflation is spiraling out of control.
Inflation was 7% in December. highest it has been since 1982. But this isn’t the same situation as in the 1980s.
The Wall Street Journal reported that we are on opposite sides of the wave. In 1982, inflation had fallen from its peak of 14.8% in 1980, the last year of Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency.
To correct the course, tight monetary policies were required by the Federal Reserve. A quick, but severe recession was necessary to pull the country from the spiral.
“Upon becoming Federal Reserve chairman in 1979, Paul Volcker set out to crush inflation with tight monetary policy,” Greg Ip wroteThe 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. Inflation and interest rates had fallen sharply by the summer 1982. Four decades of generally low-single-digit inflation would follow.”
Inflation is on the rise, 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 is an economics expert at The Heritage Foundation and explains how Biden’s legislative allies are making the bad situation worse.
While increasing demand for goods, services and spending $5.5 trillion in COVID-19 has already stimulated the economy, the Biden administration is pursuing more of the same. Progressive lawmakers and welfare-without work policies as well as COVID-19 unemployment benefits discourage the return to work have also restricted labor supply. Inflation will be exacerbated by the Biden administration’s big-government socialism Build Back Better Act as well as increased regulations and command-economy strategies.
Biden is now starting to change his tune about the whole “temporary” thing about today’s inflation.
But he chose this pathThe country is now 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 across the country have organized to protest the misguided and often inhumane policies of many K-12 schools.
Parents are fed-up with parents who have to force their children to stay home for over a decade or wear masks throughout the day because of COVID-19 restrictions.
The result was old-fashioned self-government in action.
The left’s response has been to label transparency a threat, 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 tried to treat parents as domestic terrorists.
It appears that Garland’s memo was urged on by the National School Boards Association, which represents many local school boards. The teachers unions also give a lot of money to the association.
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.
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