Biden Has Shown Us That His Promises Are Worthless

A few weeks from now, Joe Biden will stand before the American people and make his case for adding another $3.5 trillion in spending to the $1.9 trillion the federal government spent in March and the $550 billion more it hopes to spend by the end of the summer. As is now customary, the president’s presentation will be chock-full of performatively dropped g’s, of sigh-laden appeals to the “folks,” of labored, down-home clichés, of emphatically whispered entreaties, of absurd straw men, and — if he encounters even the slightest resistance — of brash assurances that none of the objections that have been raised could possibly come to fruition.

Those of us who have lived through the last two weeks should refuse to be fooled again.

Joe Biden ran for president promising, “I’ll always tell you the truth.” But the debacle in Afghanistan has put an end to all that. In July, Biden broke out his usual “Are you stupid?” mien to insist that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “not inevitable”; he swore that there was “zero” chance that Americans would “see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan”; and he assured the nation that the Taliban was “not even close in terms of their capacity” to “the training and capacity of the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] and the training of the [Afghan] federal police.” Given what we now know, there are only two possible explanations for why Biden said all of this. The first is that he was lying. The second is that he’s a fool.

Quite rightly, we are currently focused on the fallout from Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. But it is worth our remembering that, in his discussions of the economy, Biden has struck an almost identically Panglossian tone. “It’s highly unlikely,” the president said in July, that the United States will see “long-term inflation that’s going to get out of hand.” In fact, Biden added, “if your primary concern right now is inflation,” what you really need to do is consent to plans to spend another $3.5 trillion, which, he predicted, not only “won’t increase inflation” but will actually “take the pressure off of inflation.”

Translation: Worry not, for inflation is nowhere near the gates, and it’s not going to get there any time soon.

Biden is not a man who speaks carefully. As a direct result of his decisions about Afghanistan, Americans are stranded, our allies are outraged, our reputation is diminished, and the Afghan people have been left once again at the mercy of a cabal of cut-throat tyrants. In response, Biden has insisted that all of this was inevitable, despite his having promised precisely the opposite beforehand. We should remember as much when, in the coming weeks, we listen to him contend ridiculously that “if we increase the availability of quality, affordable child care, elder care, [and] paid leave, more people will enter the workforce”; we watch him pretend that he always expected the U.S. to be experiencing 5.37 percent inflation by the first summer of his term, even though his own White House budget office predicted inflation of just 2.1 percent in 2021 and 2022; and we sit through press conference after press conference at which he asks us to believe that the real inflationary risks come not with a New Deal–sized federal splurge, but with Congress’s declining to authorize one.

At some point, the more sensible members of Biden’s party will come to recognize that they have tied themselves to a buffoon. Barack Obama famously warned his fellow Democrats that they should not “underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up,” and yet, for the last six months, that is precisely what they have done. The results have been deleterious. In the space of a fortnight, the president’s approval rating has dropped dramatically — so far, in fact, that he may even be underwater in his home state of Delaware — and an environment that was already looking promising for Republicans has begun to look downright appealing. Knowing what they now know, do the many swing-district Democrats who eked out victories in 2020 really want to throw in their lot with this guy?

If they do, they cannot say they were not warned. From the moment that he won the nomination, there have existed two cases for Joe Biden, one plausible and one absurd. The plausible case was that, as a relatively inoffensive mediocrity, Biden would be able to win an election against Donald Trump. The absurd case was that Biden was a smart, wise, decent, sober, incisive, even-tempered, and politically moderate man who would excel at being president of the United States. Until the last week, the fact that so many ostensibly intelligent people felt obliged to make the latter case could be explained away as a hangover from the derangement of the last five years. But that excuse no longer holds water. Abandon hope, all ye who follow now.