Most U.S. commanders in chief who fail, fall victim to events and circumstances. But President Joe Biden is one of the few failures who succumbed to disasters of his own making.
A CNN survey of this fall has found that 55% of all voters rate Donald Trump’s presidency as a success while only 39% say that about Biden’s tenure in office.
By contrast, 61% see Biden’s presidency as a failure and only 39% rate it as a success.
So let’s review the reasons Biden failed, noting the paradox that they were all his fault —that is: self-inflicted mortal wounds.
We begin with one of his first mistakes: The wholesale, panicked flight from Afghanistan, leaving behind at least 13 U.S. servicemembers, who were killed, and upwards of $100 billion in state-of-the-art weaponry and a brand-new military base right on China’s border.
Withdrawing might have been the right decision. Fleeing was not.
Domestically, running a deficit of $3 trillion the year after COVID-19 struck and when the economy was still soaking up the three trillion dollar deficit from Trump’s last year in office, has to rank as a major blunder.
It stretched the economy to the limit and created a demand for goods and services out of all proportion to available supply.
Labor costs soared and so much money was chasing so few products that huge inflation was the inevitable result.
With supply chains ravaged by the almost total cessation of economic activity during the height of the epidemic, there was no way the economy could recover in time to produce the goods and services the extra deficit demanded.
With no money to soak up the demand, inflation skyrocketed.
There was no need for these deficits.
Trump’s last budget had activated all the stimulus the economy could handle.
All Biden’s deficits did was to race the motor and cause inflation.
And so, inflation which had been absent from the economy for 40 years returned to haunt it and has not abated since.
The third unforced error of the Biden years was the moratorium it imposed on our lives for two years.
While we were grappling to grasp the causes of the coronavirus pandemic, it is understandable that we resorted to the knee-jerk reaction of closing schools and businesses for month after month to stop its spread.
But when clinical data indicated that young people were not vulnerable to the disease the ongoing lockdowns and school closures created such social and economic harm that an entire generation may never recover.
Fourth on my hit parade of errors is the end of welfare reform.
Millions who had been weaned off government dependence went right back on the dole with no work requirement or time limit.
Herbert Hoover’s warning that government benefits would encourage idleness — absurd at the time — became true as tens of millions of able-bodied young men and women left the labor force and never returned. The resulting labor shortage continues to plague the economy to this day and, perhaps more importantly, drains the social ethic of self-sufficiency.
Fifth, the pressure of the mob baying at his window and the demonstrations on college campuses induced Biden to abandon the 80-year-old policy of supporting Israel.
In doing so, he encouraged evil to flourish and paid a price in innocent lives that may not have been fully reckoned yet.
Sixth, Biden functionally almost eliminated our police forces, hobbling them by understaffing, sapping their morale by always siding with the accused against them, and denying them the protection that their job necessitates.
But perhaps his greatest domestic failure was the decriminalization of crime.
By eliminating any mandatory sentencing and allowing the release without bail of even hardened repeat criminals, and denying us the power to deport criminals, Biden has made the fight against crime an impossible one to win.
Seventh, there was no moral or constitutional requirement to end the protection afforded women in our schools or workplace.
By treating real women and those for whom the gender was an acquired taste the same, Biden effectively ended the civil rights protections that had helped women achieve equality to men.
Eighth was Biden’s decision to asphyxiate our economy by stopping oil drilling offshore, in Alaska, or through fracking. By neutralizing our biggest geo-political asset, Biden humbled our economy and stunted our growth.
Ninth, Biden unleashed the full force of our government against our own citizens who were protesting, without guns, against the 2020 election.
He shattered the societal norms that temper our political discourse and created a class of political prisoners akin to those ensnared by the Palmer Raids of the 1920s and the McCarthy era of the 1950s.
Tenth, subject to a coming Court decision, he allowed a regime of government censorship to pervade social media, distorting free speech to allow the government to stamp out opinions about politics, and even medicine with which it disagreed.
Eleventh, Biden ended 70 years of racial neutrality in government decisions allowing racism and racial criteria to dominate federal aid programs and scholarships.
No longer was our law be color blind. Jim Crow came back, but in reverse.
Twelfth, Biden tried to lock parents out of public education depriving them of a voice regarding the curriculum or textbooks our young children were mandated to read in school.
By exiling mom and dad from the classroom Biden corrupted an entire generation of young people, doing so by legitimizing material that has been traditionally viewed as obscene for decades.
Finally, whether because of China's influence or just bad policy, Biden has almost deliberately undermined our ability to compete in high tech, AI, and even in renewable energy by sabotaging our pursuit of the rare earth minerals that enable progress.
He has gone a long way toward ceding our nation's future to Beijing.
This catalogue of horrors constitutes the worst record in the history of the American presidency.
Dick Morris is a former presidential adviser and political strategist. He is a regular contributor to Newsmax TV. Read Dick Morris' Reports — More Here.