Joe Biden has been president now for 100 full days. Under normal circumstances, a milestone such as this might occasion an issue by issue evaluation — a laundry list of things Biden has done wrong.
We could mention how, by his poor diplomacy, Biden created a new humanitarian crisis at the southern border. We could talk about his embrace of toxic, divisive culture wars and his intentional destruction of girls’ and women’s sports; his appointment of the unqualified abortion fanatic Xavier Becerra to head the federal Department of Health and Human Services; his continued attempts, purely ideological, to make nuns fund birth control and Catholic hospitals provide medically unnecessary transgender services.
We could also bring up Biden’s irresponsible scaremongering over COVID-19 vaccinations, which began during his campaign and continued with a needless freeze on Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose vaccine. His exhortations now to get a shot cannot make up for the vaccine skepticism he actively encouraged whenever he thought there was something to gain from it. Only one person has done more than Biden to discourage people from getting vaccinated, and that is Kamala Harris, his vice president, who said, “If Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it.”
The least of Biden’s faults is that he now takes credit for what others made possible, both the economic recovery (well underway before he took office) and the administration of vaccine shots, which were already being given at 1 million per day as of his inauguration. And we haven’t yet even mentioned here his monstrous and almost wholly unnecessary spending of trillions of dollars of borrowed money to fund pet Democratic projects and reward supporters.
But the case against Biden isn’t about one thing or another that he has done. It is about his broader attempt, after winning a no-mandate election with no coattails in Congress, to transform the nation radically while mollifying the public with lies and propaganda.
Biden is not a bombastic fabricator like the man he replaced. Rather, he is discriminating and clever with his deceptions, as his April 28 speech to Congress made clear. With a soft voice and a smile, he is grabbing the inch that voters gave him and taking miles and miles of freedom and independence away from those who, by their votes, showed that they barely trust him more than Trump.
Biden cannot keep his story straight, changing it again and again. He cannot reconcile his claim to have defeated COVID successfully with his accompanying warnings that people will still have to wear masks, stand at a distance, and keep their businesses closed indefinitely. Biden has been wrong about the virus every time he has spoken about it, yet he wants credit for something he seems to know nothing about. When someone in his administration dares to tell the truth about the virus — his CDC director commented months ago that schools could safely reopen — his White House enforcers shut them down (under teachers union pressure).
Biden cannot reconcile his claim of a strong and recovering job market with his simultaneous assertion of a desperate need for a national economic overhaul. He aims to weaken the economy with gimmicky and politically correct impositions upon businesses, green new deals, and “buy American” rules, for example, that will destroy rather than create jobs.
Biden presents himself as the friend of job creators, providing them with the COVID-era help they need. But he leaves out that whatever he ostentatiously gives with one hand, he will seize with the other. If he really wanted to help businesses, he would not press to raise their taxes.
When Biden said in his address that “unions build the middle class,” he lied yet again, this time by using the wrong tense. It is arguable — that is, debatable — that unions built the middle class in another era, the same way the Romans once built the aqueducts. But just as no one wants to bring back the Roman Empire, so nearly no one in today’s America wants to join a union. Workers sensibly turn up their noses at the idea of paying an outside organization for the privilege of giving up their own right to negotiate with their employers. Private-sector unionization is today at its lowest point since records started being kept, not for lack of access, but for lack of interest. Yet again and again, Biden shows that the unions mean more to him than the workers ever will.
Nowhere is that clearer than in his advocacy for the PRO Act. Who would be so daft as to try to destroy the gig economy, a godsend that has helped millions of families stay afloat and navigate COVID-19 lockdowns? Biden wants to turn back the clock to 1921 with his assault on contract labor. In order to placate moribund labor unions, he would hold back the growing numbers taking their careers into their own hands. His PRO Act would do at the federal level what even California voters recognized and rejected at the state level as an exercise in economic self-wounding.
When Biden said, “We beat the NRA,” that “mass shootings and gun violence declined” as a result of the 1990s assault weapons ban, he was again not telling the truth. After the 2004 expiration of that law, which banned certain rifles based on cosmetic features, the rate of gun violence continued its precipitous long-term decline for more than a decade. Rifles, then as now, were used in only a tiny portion of gun crimes, despite the sale of more than 100 million of them this century alone. There is no evidence that school shootings became more frequent in that period, either, despite common misperceptions.
Gun controls do not prevent shootings, and neither do Biden’s campaign promises to defund police. His White House’s bizarre use of the phrase “police violence” to describe the clearly justified shooting that recently prevented a murder in Columbus, Ohio, evinces Biden’s feckless response to a massive national violent crime wave that he and other Democrats encouraged. Biden’s only response so far has been to blame the police and place more departments under investigation.
The news media, unable or unwilling to look at Democratic presidents with a critical or even perceptive eye, give Biden a free pass for a broad-based radicalism that his narrow election victory does not justify. Congress needs to ignore the gushing comparisons to FDR, to step up and block the power grab by this soft-spoken demagogue and his party.