President Joe Biden’s inauguration was just 13 months ago, and he is already a failed president.
Biden’s main campaign pitch was that he would “govern as an American president” and unify the country.
It seems he forgot his own words.
Biden first broke his unity promise in Congress. He championed a so-called infrastructure bill that was a trojan horse for Democratic social spending and Green New Deal initiatives. The $1 trillion price tag exacerbated inflation, which is now the highest it’s been in 40 years. Now, American families are paying the price, and their savings are wiped out.
Bipartisanship was out when Biden and Democrats tried to ram through another massive trillion-dollar spending bill on entirely partisan lines.
Biden’s divisiveness extended to the federal agencies and bureaucracy, where law-abiding citizens opposed to his policies suddenly found themselves in crosshairs.
Last fall, the National School Boards Association likened parents concerned over public education to “domestic terrorists.” That portended the DOJ’s creation of a special task force to target “domestic extremism,” which will monitor and target Americans based on their speech.
Biden’s promise to “end” COVID meant a nationwide vaccine mandate for businesses and a campaign with Big Tech companies to censor information that questioned his official COVID policies.
If COVID was his real concern, the president would have closed our southern border. Instead, he did the opposite and reversed President Trump’s successful policies. Last year, U.S. Customs and Border officials reported the highest influx of drugs and illegal aliens at the southern border ever.
Biden has treated law-abiding citizens as enemies of the state while refusing to prosecute actual criminals. How’s that for unity?
Meanwhile, the United States has cowered on the world stage. Our haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan led to Afghans falling from airplanes, the abandonment of American citizens and scores of poorly vetted refugees being settled in communities across the country.
America’s adversaries have delighted in our weak leadership. Vladimir Putin last week launched an invasion that has forced nearly half a million Ukrainians to flee their country.
Biden will blame Putin for oil and gas price increases. The president will omit his own policies which made us dependent on Russia for oil and gas.
On his first day in office, Biden shut down the Keystone pipeline and barred drilling on federal lands. Later, he greenlit Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline. It’s little wonder that Biden refuses to hit Putin where it hurts by crippling Russia’s energy sector, even after the invasion. The reality is as sad as it is maddening: we’re funding Putin’s war thanks to Biden.
Biden has succeeded in one important thing: uniting Americans around his own divisiveness. Nearly seven in ten Americans have little to no confidence in his ability to bring the country together.
If the president wants to salvage his term, he will offer a major apology and course correction during his speech.
Jim Banks represents Indiana’s 3rd congressional district in the House of Representatives.