President Biden hasn’t the slightest clue what he should do or say on the topic of COVID-19. He is profoundly out of his depth, he is hopelessly hamstrung, and, as is richly deserved, he is beginning to pay a steep political price for the mountain of cheap, glib, opportunistic nonsense in which he indulged during his campaign. Rarely in American history has a disapproval rating been so assiduously well-earned.
It is not President Biden’s fault that COVID-19 remains with us. The virus does not care if a given government is run by Democrats or Republicans. But while it is not political, it has been politicized, and now the bill for that politicization is coming due. On the trail, Biden promised that he would “shut down the virus, not the country”; he vowed to follow the data and listen to the scientists; and he described his predecessor’s decision to limit travel from certain African and Middle Eastern countries as “hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.” As president, he has presided over more COVID-related deaths than his predecessor; he has allowed himself to be captured by monomaniacal, neurotic, agoraphobic pantywaists; and, in a particularly delicious turn of fate, he has been left relying on precisely the blunt instruments that he once insisted would do nothing to stop the spread of pandemic. Fools rush in, says the song. And Joe Biden is nothing if not a fool.
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