President Joe Biden delivered a partisan rant on Thursday night unlike any State of the Union in history. It was a campaign speech — and a poor one, at that — rather than a presidential address to the elected legislature.
His predecessor — whom Biden attacked repeatedly — loved a good fight, but Trump’s addresses always had unifying themes. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) cheered in 2019 when Trump paid homage to women in Congress.
Trump’s masterful 2020 speech was overshadowed by the fact that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) tore it up when he was done. Just as Pelosi ripped apart a piece of paper, Biden stood at the podium and tore apart a troubled nation.
If you want to know the real state of the union, look at the southern border. On the one hand, our economy is growing rapidly enough, and unemployment is low enough, to draw millions of migrants from all over the world. On the other hand, the Biden administration is refusing to enforce the law, using the power and resources it already has, to deter illegal migrants. The result is chaos, crime, and crowding — not just at the border, but in cities around the nation.
Or look at housing prices. For those who already own homes, the housing shortage is a boon. For those who do not, the Fed’s high interest rates, which are a reaction to Biden’s inflationary fiscal policies, are keeping ownership out of reach.
Democrats can point to the fact that inflation has slowed since its peak. But the fact is that prices for essentials — food, fuel, housing, education — remain stubbornly high, leaving middle-class lifestyles out of reach for middle-class people.
That is not, as Biden claimed, because rich people and corporations don’t pay their “fair share” (though Biden’s son faces criminal prosecution for not paying his). It is not a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis of government, and of the redistributionist and regulatory policies that aim at utopian equality but just create less freedom and more misery.
Biden boasted Thursday about his misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which spent massive amounts of money on 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations. He neglected to mention that few of those stations have been built in two years, because unlike Trump, Biden won’t cut through bureaucracy or government regulations to get things done.
Somehow, Biden says, he’s going to cut U.S. emissions in half in the next six years. Is he planning another pandemic? Or perhaps he hopes the country will divide in two, allowing him to fulfill his climate promises through secession?
It was jarring to hear Biden start his address by referring to foreign policy, notably Russian President Vladimir Putin, who remains the Democratic Party’s bogeyman (after Obama’s appeasement and, before that, soft-on-Soviet postures).
There is hardly an area of government where the president has more power than in foreign policy. And there is hardly an area of government that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. has screwed up as completely as he has American foreign policy.
There were plenty of partisan attacks from the podium, which provoked an unusual amount of heckling from the back benches and the gallery. But the low point of Biden’s speech was his attack on the Supreme Court justices seated in front of him, who were not allowed to respond. Biden repeated Barack Obama’s ugly attack on the Court in the 2011 State of the Union. So much for “defending democracy,” which was supposed to be one of the messages of the speech.
The real state of the union is confused. We are still the greatest nation on earth, but we are unsure of ourselves. We are led by cynical people who were never held accountable for their anti-democratic machinations against Trump, and who have launched a cultural war against their own country. A generation of Americans has grown up without God, without love, without children — but with ubiquitous devices, loaded with apps and algorithms that are easily manipulated.
We need a restoration — not of the 1950s, as Democrats like to imagine Republicans want, but perhaps of the 1980s, a time of bright neon American self-confidence. Even Joe Biden was better then — more swagger, and less bitterness.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
