President Biden during a bilateral meeting with Ecuador's president, Guillermo Lasso, in the Oval Office of the White House on Dec. 19. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
The *worst presidency in my lifetime got worse in 2022. In my last column, I offered my list of the 10 best things President Biden did this year. Here are the 10 worst:
*Hyperbolic crap, particularly in light of what happened the previous 4 years.
10. He presided over a plethora of disastersAssociation is not causation.
On Biden’s watch this year, our country experienced the worst inflation in 40 years, the largest decline in real wages in four decades, the highest gas prices ever recorded in the United States, the biggest annual rise in food prices since 1979, crisis-level labor shortages and the worst crime wave in many cities since the 1990s. Not since Jimmy Carter has a president unleashed so many calamities at once.
9. He called Georgia’s election law “Jim Crow 2.0”
Despite Biden’s ugly and false claim, early voting shattered Georgia’s record for midterm elections, with Black voters accounting for 29 percent of early voters. Biden owes Georgia an apology.
8. He and his party urged Republicans to reject extremists while promoting them in GOP primaries
Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars supporting MAGA candidates in GOP primaries, hoping they would be easier to defeat — one of the most cynical, immoral political strategies in memory.
A tactic used by the GOP too, so no moral high ground to stand on.
7. His administration discharged thousands of troops for refusing coronavirus vaccination
The Army fell short of its recruitment goals by 25 percent, or 15,000 soldiers this year, and Pentagon officials warned of the worst military recruitment crisis since the inception of the volunteer service. Yet more than 3,000 experienced, battle-hardened troops were needlessly forced out.
Had those troops rejected the roughly dozen other vaxxes mandated in boot camp, the military is nothing if not a bunch of mandates/orders, they would have been discharged for that as well.
6. He begged foreign despots to produce more oil while weakening domestic production
Biden lifted sanctions and allowed Chevron to produce and export Venezuelan oil again, and he begged OPEC to produce more, all while leasing fewer acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling than any president since the end of World War II.
Misleading. Oil companies are sitting on leases not on Federal land.
5. In an unconstitutional power grab, he canceled up to $1 trillion in student loans
His order — hung up in the courts — would force blue-collar workers to subsidize the higher education of white-collar professionals by using a 9/11-era law intended to help service members called up to active duty avoid default.
4. He has failed to avenge the Kabul airport bombing that killed 183 people, including 13 Americans
Biden warned those who carried out the 2021 attack: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” But since the U.S. withdrawal more than a year ago, there have been no “over the horizon” strikes against the ISIS-K terrorists responsible.
3. He signed into law an Inflation Reduction Act that will not reduce inflation or climate change
This massive climate spending bill’s impact on inflation will be statistically indistinguishable from zero, and it will reduce the rise in global temperature by 0.0009 degrees — next to nothing.
2. He made the worst border crisis in U.S. history even worse.
In fiscal 2022, there were almost 2.4 million encounters at the southern border, plus more than 600,000 known “gotaways” and 98 people on the terrorist watch list were stopped near the border. More than 800 migrants died crossing the border illegally. Yet when asked why he had not visited the border, Biden said he had “more important things going on.”
1. He slow-rolled military aid to Ukraine out of fear of provoking Vladimir Putin
He refused Ukraine’s requests for Stinger and Javelin missiles for months before Russia invaded. After Moscow attacked, he offered to help President Volodymyr Zelensky escape — to which the Ukrainian leader reportedly replied, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Then Biden forced Ukraine to defend itself for months primarily with antiquated Soviet-era weaponry — and blocked Poland from transferring Soviet-designed MiG-29 jets to Kyiv, terrified that stronger U.S. support could cause “World War III.” (This prompted Zelensky to ask, “What is NATO doing? Is it being run by Russia?”)
Biden waited more than nine months to give Ukraine just one Patriot air-defense system, allowing Putin to destroy schools, homes, hospitals and critical infrastructure. When he finally did deliver the game-changing High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), they had been secretly modified so they couldn’t fire long-range rockets.
And Biden still refuses to give Ukraine longer-range Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missiles because they could (theoretically) reach Russia or M1 Abrams tanks. As a Ukrainian reporter asked Biden at his news conference with Zelensky: “Can we make long story short and give Ukraine all capabilities it needs and liberate all territories rather sooner than later?” Zelensky added: “I agree.” Biden’s refusal to do so is dragging out the conflict, leading to thousands of civilian deaths and delaying Putin’s defeat.
Limiting this list to 10 was extremely difficult, so here are a few dishonorable mentions: Biden engaged in weak public hand-wringing at a Democratic fundraiser about his fears Putin might start a nuclear war. He fecklessly depleted the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices before the midterm elections. He did not deliver on his promised support for Afghan women or for women rising up in Iran. And after promising to put his “whole soul” into uniting the country, he compared Republicans to racists, segregationists and traitors.
Biden’s second year was even more divisive and incompetent than his first. I shudder to think what Year 3 will bring.
Comments:
Is this columnist unaware of how our government works? Biden doesn’t have the power to “unleash “ all of these things. Inflation is worldwide, shortages are worldwide, climate/weather disasters same. Most things presidents try to do unilaterally are challenged in court and go nowhere. Biden tried to negotiate with US based oil companies and was told no. Doesn’t this guy read his own paper! None of these issues is an easy fix. But they all have been ignored for years by his beloved GOP!
As usual Thiessen ascribes problems to Biden that were caused in large part by others and never credits Biden for solutions. For example, gas prices skyrocketed after Putin invadedq Ukraine. Biden countered by releasing oil from our strategic reserve, dropping gas prices while earning over 4 billion dollars for the US Treasury when he restocked the reserve at lower prices.
It was Biden who bucked up NATO to push back on Putin, after Trump attempts to extort Zelensky for weapons Congress had already appropriated.
Again and again Thiessen obscures reality to indict Biden for manufactured mistakes.
Did i miss the part in this right-wing opinion piece where if Trump was still President, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine so gas would never have gotten high and there would be no inflation?
Not even worth serious attention. Just worth as conversational starter if one has nothing better to do than to chew on political demagoguery.
One can debate the 10 items on your list. There certainly is some degree of truth to a lot of what you say. But to write that Biden is the worst POTUS in your lifetime is absurd on its face. The Iraq War was the single-worst mistake EVER made by a U.S. President, the direct and indirect repercussions of which continue to blot out whatever you may think GWB did well. And compared Trump — a man who tried to lead an insurrection — really? Whatever credibility you ever may have had as a journalist is gone — forever.
Anyone declaring that Biden's presidency was the worst in a lifetime needs to rethink their values. Did you forget his seditious predecessor who was personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths as he repeatedly down-played the importance of vaccines? All to prop up the stock market so that his cronies could continue to rake in their millions. Actually, Biden's policies have been quite moderate and timely.
The idea that the President caused inflation (a combination of post-Covid problems + the costs of fighting the Russian invasion) is so blatantly partisan and dishonest that I stopped reading at that point.
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