A record of failure after failure follows the infirm president into retirement, a record that will define his wretched actions in office
Gold Star mother details Biden's legacy stained by Afghanistan withdrawal
Paula Knauss, whose son Ryan was killed during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, joined 'Fox & Friends First' to discuss Biden's legacy as he is poised to deliver his final foreign policy address.
As President Joe Biden prepares to depart for Delaware, many wish they could say "Joe, we hardly knew ye," but sadly the halting steps and the ghastly record of the departing president will oblige objective historians to taunt Biden’s supporters for as long as they read. Biden’s handlers have done all they could to obscure this reality since President-elect Donald Trump’s rout of Biden’s designated successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, in November. That election was a decisive verdict of the citizenry on Biden’s hapless presidency. But if your friends and family are trapped in a deep blue bubble, refusing to admit the facts, trying to argue the opposite, keep a list handy.
The major bookends of Biden’s presidency are the disgraceful scamper out of Afghanistan with its tragic loss of life at Abby Gate and the abandonment of American citizens, Green Card holders and Afghans eligible to immigrate to the U.S. because of their service to our troops and California’s Chernobyl of the past two weeks.
The images of Afghans fleeing the Taliban falling from the sky as American planes took off will forever define this low point in American history. Biden ignored his generals and set an arbitrary deadline of September 11, 2021, for complete withdrawal before realizing the asinine and offensive play for some sort of "significance," and moving the new deadline up to August 31, 2021.
That made the unprepared American military and State Department fail faster than anyone had believed possible and also meant leaving billions of dollars' worth of weapons as well as all those abandoned people behind. Afghanistan descended into darkness on Biden’s watch. President George W. Bush brought freedom for much of the Afghan population, especially its women, and kept terrorists on the run. Biden shut down that honorable effort, and tyranny returned without even half or a quarter of the country free from barbarism.
President Joe Biden should be remembered as one of the worst American presidents. FILE: Biden speaks during the annual Tribal Nations Summit at the Department of the Interior in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The other bookend is the fires that ravaged and continue to threaten Southern California this month. This catastrophe, second only to 9/11 in domestic devastation, was willed by the ridiculous policies of federal, state and local bureaucrats. It was on Joe’s "watch," which was more like an intermittent slumber, but it’s his to explain in his memoir.
Like Biden’s first-day-in-office decision to effectively open the southern border to all comers by repealing via executive order all of Donald Trump’s successful efforts to close it during the first term of "45-47," the fires reflect the deep ideological extremism of the Biden appointees. The face and figure of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defines Biden’s border policy along with hapless "border czar" Kamala Harris.
The consequences of this abdication of control of the border as well as the surreptitious flying into the country of hundreds of thousands of migrants will have "long tail" effects for a generation that begin with the immediate consequence of cost and crime. America used to know how to assimilate immigrants, but it is unclear if our failing public education in blue cities will do that job now. Certainly, many millions should never have ever been permitted entry. Trump has a giant clean-up on his hands caused directly by Biden and his subordinates. End of that story.
Then there is the inflation which has plagued us since Biden, in a fit of FDR cosplay, signed the ill-named "The American Rescue Plan Act," which, like the similarly deceptively titled "Inflation Reduction Act," pumped trillions of unnecessary spending into the hands of Americans who tried to use their windfall to purchase goods that were in short supply.
Too much money chasing too few goods is the classic statement of inflationary conditions. Biden created them. Inflation followed. It ticked up again in December to 2.9%, reversing course and alarming economists who know that inflation ravages the middle class and the poor.
What did all those trillions in deficit spending buy? What physical manifestations of the spending can you point to? There are a few dozen EV charging stations, but generally it disappeared into pockets and then to purchases of everyone — including fraudsters — but not to infrastructure of any significance. Never has so much been spent on so many for so little.
The bipartisan "Chips Act" was another big spend, and it may yield some excellent results down the road, but we need Trump’s signature ruthless demanding of delivery to get the microchip plants built. Biden got promises. Trump will demand construction and operation. Hapless Joe signed the law, but it was Congress that worked it out.
Biden gutted our defense budget, and thus our ability to deter enemies, lowering it to below 3% of GDP (the Department of Defense projects the exit Biden budget for 2024 spending on the military to be 2.7%.
Biden's presidency was marked by catastrophe, including the California wildfires. A firefighter battles the Palisades Fire in Mandeville Canyon Saturday, Jan. 11, 2025, in Los Angeles. (Jae C. Hong/AP)
Meanwhile, the spending ordered by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has soared and his nation’s military ambitions have spread out across the world, its fleet expanding as ours shrinks. Biden created a recruitment crisis which left every branch of the service save the Marines far short of its enlistment goals. As Biden leaves, the ragtag Houthis continue to hold our Navy hostage to target practice. Deterrence failed comprehensively under an administration that rehabbed "appeasement" for a second go-around and, of course, it failed. Comprehensively.
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I could go on. Historians will write the detailed autopsy of a failed American regime but we all know that history reduces all but a handful of presidencies to a paragraph, and Biden’s short graph will conclude that he was either the worst presidency of the post-World War II era or, at best, tied with President Jimmy Carter for that title.
The very worst part of the Biden years was the deep lie about his fitness for office. He is now quite obviously impaired mentally and has been physically infirm since at least 2022, and perhaps earlier. The scale of the cover-up will emerge.
Unable or unwilling to curb his subordinates, the Biden years will be remembered for the politicization of the Department of Justice into a weapon deployed against political opponents, the years of disgraceful "lawfare" unable to be hidden behind the deceitful "threat to democracy" and rise of fascism idiocy that is the meat and grog of the crazed 5% far left of our political class. Biden may not have been aware of this in all its details because of his failing health but, again, it happened on his watch.
As did the second Russian invasion of Ukraine (the first occurred when he was vice president) and the attempt to micromanage the Ukrainian and the Israeli war efforts leading to long, drawn out and devastating conflicts still ongoing as he leaves office. A hostage deal in Gaza may be unfolding even as Biden leaves for Delaware, a deal that makes the Carter comparison complete, as the Iranian theocrats fear Trump as much as they feared the arrival of President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, which led to the end of the long ago Iranian hostage crisis on the day the Gipper was sworn in.
Biden’s is an abject, utter failure of a presidency — that is the only honest conclusion a fair observer can reach about the Biden years. The only good that has come of it is the return of Donald Trump, whose Inauguration cannot come soon enough. Trump’s second term is Joe Biden’s signature achievement, and thus it shall ever be so.
Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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