August 2021 will probably be remembered as the month when Joe Biden’s presidency was holed below the waterline. September is the month when it started to sink.
Biden is beset by several disasters at once. All the blame is his, for they flow from his dumb, stubborn, and ideological moves immediately after he was sworn in. First, his border crisis has graduated into a catastrophe.
Migrants are flooding across the trickle of the Rio Grande at sometimes hundreds an hour, and 10,000 or more of them now wait in a filthy shantytown under the international bridge in Del Rio, Texas. The city’s authorities are overwhelmed. There is no news yet of a cynically opportunistic visit from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to pose for a grief-stricken photo like the one she set up when the president was a Republican. Back then, many of these migrants were living in better conditions throughout South America. But after Biden told them during his presidential campaign that “you should come,” they accepted his boneheaded and reckless invitation.
The humanitarian situation is so bad and border officials are so overwhelmed that Biden is deporting some migrants back to an earthquake-stricken Haiti, where many of them haven’t lived for 10 years or more. They’d have preferred to remain in Mexico, which, coincidentally, was former President Donald Trump’s policy, while their cases were adjudicated.
Meanwhile, the disaster Biden created in Afghanistan continues to unravel apace. The deadly, disorderly, and dishonorable rout he made inevitable there will be a source of lasting shame for the United States and will inspire future terrorist attacks. More immediately, it has European allies, both in Britain and on the continent, openly doubting American resolve and reliability.
To compound matters, Afghans whom Biden brought back to the U.S. were, in many cases, random people taken off the street and entirely unrelated to the American war effort. To inflate the numbers of people he was seen rescuing — remember his administration’s boasting about the scores of thousands and its ludicrous braggadocio about being as admirable as the Berlin airlift? — Biden shipped out people who weren’t in danger from the Taliban while leaving behind tens of thousands who were and still are.
Biden’s incompetence — nay, his negligence, because incompetence at least implies an honest effort — is entirely to blame for both of these disasters. But it gets much, much worse.
We thought we had seen the greatest possible depths of presidential pettiness. But Biden has outdone everyone, including his famously thin-skinned predecessor. Just last week, Biden’s administration abruptly and without warning decided to withhold desperately needed treatments for COVID-19 from the states where they are most in demand. Not coincidentally, most of them are states governed by Republicans.
In Florida, for example, which is experiencing a high volume of cases despite its high vaccination rate, Biden’s administration has seized control of the distribution system for monoclonal antibody treatments and dramatically scaled back the number that will be made available to less than half of existing demand. The administration’s stated excuses for this are not remotely believable. There is no shortage of the treatments elsewhere, and this is a straightforwardly vindictive decision. He will let Florida’s hospitals be overwhelmed, and more people will die needlessly, apparently because Florida’s governor refuses to comply when Biden demands that he impose needless mask mandates on schoolchildren.
Biden’s cruelty in arbitrarily depriving people of a cure to a disease that will hospitalize or kill them is outrageous even in the lamentable catalog of his odious decisions. It is worse than anything his predecessor did, including the acts for which he was twice impeached. It is a deadly abuse of power by a president unfit to govern the country.
No wonder Biden’s approval ratings are collapsing. But there is a silver lining. Biden, or whoever makes decisions for him, has so fallen out of favor that no Republican or centrist Democrat will feel pressure to help pass his inflationary, unnecessary, and radical $3.5 trillion spending bill.
