Former President Donald Trump’s friends and foes alike can agree on this: He fulfilled an astonishing number of promises.
During his first year in office, he signed a $1.5 trillion tax rate cut, killed some 1,500 meddlesome regulations, greenlighted the Keystone XL pipeline, scrapped Obamacare’s individual mandate (but not the entire program), curbed southern border crossings, erased the ISIS caliphate, and much more.
Joe Biden’s presidency after one year is something completely different. His parade of shattered pledges makes him America’s promise breaker in chief:
- “With unity we can do important things,” Biden said in his inaugural address. That echoed the giant, national hug around that his campaign revolved.
But rather than bring Americans together, Biden has split blacks and whites by embracing critical race theory. He has cleaved “domestic terrorist” parents and local school boards that they have challenged. Biden has pitted the vaccinated against the unvaccinated.
And just last week, he equated roughly half of all Americans with Confederate President Jefferson Davis because they favor election integrity and oppose his calls for junking the Senate filibuster and for nationalizing state and local voting systems.
A Jan. 12 Quinnipiac survey of 1,313 adults found that 42% of respondents think Biden has united America, while 49% call him divisive.
- Biden promised a return to “normal” after the unpredictable, often volatile Trump era. Americans of all stripes now wonder what’s so normal about 7% inflation, soaring energy prices, broken supply chains, scores of cargo ships marooned off the coast of Southern California’s ports, and “Wild West”-style freight train robberies in Los Angeles.
“Our shelves in our stores look like the Soviet Union in 1972,” former Walmart CEO Bill Simon told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto: “This is a shocking and unmitigated disaster.”
Bare-shelf Biden also has done a heckuva job with the southern “border,” along which an estimated 1.776 million illegal aliens have been caught on his watch.
Meanwhile, 16 Democrat-run cities suffered record homicides last year, while “Brandon” dozed in Delaware for 28% of his first year as president.
- Biden repeatedly promised that he would “shut down the virus.” Judging by the stunning 1,483,656 new COVID-19 cases that emerged on Jan. 10 alone, Biden clearly blew it.
Much of that is beyond Biden’s control, of course. Viruses do not obey executive orders. They do not even speak English, as far as science can tell. COVID-19 is a tiny, invisible monster that does whatever it wants.
However, Biden must take full responsibility for the shortages in COVID-19 testing kits and infrastructure. The need for this capability was as surprising as turkey on Thanksgiving. And yet Biden foolishly rejected offers last fall to increase test supplies. That would have helped meet the recent explosion in omicron-fueled demand.
Biden also has been so obsessed with vaccine mandates, mask orders, and related heavy-handedness that he is presiding over a shortage of lifesaving monoclonal antibody therapies.
While GlaxoSmithKline’s sotrovimab boasts 97.3% effectiveness in the United Arab Emirates, that drug was virtually unheard of in America until lately.
“We saw tons of coverage on this treatment as early as July,” one frustrated U.S. expatriate in the Persian Gulf told me. “How did [COVID-19 czar Anthony] Fauci, [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], and the Biden administration miss this?”
- “We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again,” Biden promised at his inauguration. These words proved bitterly ironic amid the breathtaking catastrophe that was Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
His surrender of U.S. citizens, green card holders, and loyal Afghans to the bloodthirsty Taliban was bad enough. Even worse, Biden’s failure to coordinate with British commanders in Kabul and his dayslong refusal to answer Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s urgent phone calls trashed America’s “special relationship” with London.
Not to be outdone, Biden’s inability to inform France about a subsequent U.S.-U.K.-Australia pact, which cost Paris a submarine contract, led the Quai d’Orsay to recall its ambassador to Washington for the first time since 1776.
Joe Biden has kept one promise, however: He’s not Donald Trump.
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