A Failed Presidency

Failed foreign policy, failed legislation, failed policies, and the worst President of my lifetime.

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As Inauguration Day approaches, it’s only appropriate to look back on the administration that is coming to an end. President Biden came into office undoubtedly at a chaotic moment. COVID was still on everyone’s minds, riots had just erupted across the country, and the Capitol building had just been ransacked by people who believed the 2020 election was stolen.

It would have been great if President Biden had come into office and calmed the raging seas. He didn’t need to perform miraculous work, he simply needed to be moderate and steady. Instead, he was the worst president of my lifetime, and his presidency was undoubtedly an utter failure.

Foreign Policy Failures

Afghanistan

The debacle that was the Afghanistan withdrawal was the moment that Biden’s approval nosedived and never recovered. In a real sense, it was the day that his presidency was doomed to continue past 2024. I also wrote a newsletter as the withdrawal was happening (which you can read here) expressing just how angry I was.

I then followed that newsletter up the following week with another one that laid out why I was so opposed, not just to the way that the withdrawal was handled, but the fact that the United States was withdrawing at all (you can read that newsletter here: be warned I believe it is my longest newsletter to date). Finally, a year later I wrote another newsletter describing the situation in Afghanistan after a year of America’s absence and the toll on the people of Afghanistan. Three newsletters on the same topic… it’s safe to say I was worked up about this.

I won’t rehash all of my arguments here, but needless to say, I think this was one of the worst episodes in American foreign policy history. It was an embarrassment that displayed nothing but weakness to our adversaries while abandoning people we called allies. And, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, this was all on President Biden. Foreign policy is the area within our Constitutional structure in which the President has immense power and President Biden failed to use it.

Ukraine

The other major foreign policy event of President Biden’s administration was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If America had stayed strong in Afghanistan, would Putin have invaded Ukraine when he did? While we will never know for certain, since it’s a counterfactual, I can’t help but believe that the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan made Vladimir Putin much more willing to take this aggressive action.

Putting that aside, my beef with President Biden’s handling of Ukraine differs from many conservatives who are against sending any aid altogether. I, on the other hand being the foreign policy hawk that I am, think Biden was too slow and did not commit enough to sending aid to Ukraine especially early on in the war.

I actually would have understood (I would have disagreed but understood) a policy of sending limited or no aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia. I think this would have resulted in Russia taking over Ukraine, but you can make the calculation that such a result wouldn’t be that damaging to the United States.

However, President Biden’s approach was the worst of all worlds. He provided military aid only after refusing and slowly walking in fear of “provoking” Russia. He initially did not send HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) only to reverse that decision later. He refused to send Patriot air-defense missiles only to reverse that decision later. He refused to send cluster bombs to Ukraine only to reverse that decision later. He refused to allow the US to send Abrams tanks to Ukraine only to reverse that decision later.

Each one of these actions, if taken sooner, could have made a difference in the war. His indecisiveness has prolonged the war and allowed Russia to beat down the Ukrainian defenses continually. There’s no guarantee that sending more aid sooner could have made the difference, but I think it was worth a shot.

Legislation Failures

President Biden added to his foreign policy failures by passing atrocious legislation.

American Rescue Plan

This was the second “COVID-relief bill” that followed the CARES Act from March 2020 under the Trump administration. While on the surface these bills are seemingly similar, the major difference between them is the time in which they were passed. March 2020 was a significantly more uncertain time regarding COVID with literally the entire country shut down. The sole goal of the bill was to keep people alive.

The American Rescue Plan, on the other hand, was passed almost a year after COVID shut everything down when the economy was not in sheer survival mode like the previous year. It was utterly insane to dump another $1.9 trillion into the economy, especially in the form of stimulus checks sent to individual Americans. While I think inflation was inevitable due to supply chain issues, this bill poured gasoline on the fire.

Inflation Reduction Act

In response to the inevitable inflation, the Biden administration, along with Democrats in Congress, decided to pass the “Inflation Reduction Act”. At the time, I wrote that the name was a mere marketing ploy and should be entirely ignored, and I stand by that criticism. This bill was essentially a bag full of progressive policies relating to environmentalism and healthcare in the guise of “inflation reduction.”

In my piece at the time, I concluded with the following:

Increased tax enforcement, more subsidies, price caps, and general federal entanglement in the economy have never served the American people well and won’t be any different this time around.

It is almost three years later and I believe those words have been proven true.

CHIPS Act

Another piece of legislation that the Biden administration passed which I disagreed with was the CHIPS Act passed in August 2022. While this bill was more bipartisan (17 Republican Senators voted in favor of it, including Mitch McConnell), it was an immense project of government intervention in the economy. In fact, tens of billions of dollars worth of government intervention.

The proponents of the bill claimed this was necessary because of the national security concerns with not having substantial chip production facilities in the United States. However, as is always the case when the Federal Government starts handing out money, there were many strings attached to the money, which make the building of these facilities more expensive and more of a headache for companies.

For example, there are demands for companies to elaborate on an “equity plan”, “encouragements” to buy American (read: more expensive) materials, and bureaucratic red tape that companies must heed, among other complicating factors. If semiconductor chips and manufacturing facilities were such a dire national security threat, then I’m not sure why the Federal Government would feel the need to add onerous requirements.

Not to mention the economic reality that the government does a worse job of evaluating economic investments than private companies, but is great at dangling money leading to misallocated resources.

Policy Failures

Student Loan “Forgiveness”

Very few policies have made my blood boil quite like this one. As I said at the time:

“First, let’s start with the most important aspect of this policy: it’s completely unjust. While debt “cancellation” or student loan “forgiveness” may sound nice, the reality is that the debt is neither canceled nor forgiven. Rather, the money owed has been transferred from the individual who contractually agreed to pay it back to American taxpayers who made no such agreement… Second, the Biden administration’s claim that the HEROS Act gives it authority to cancel student loans is a stretch, to say the least… Third, the policy itself is regressive… the poor and lower-middle class account for less than 20% of total student debt…. Fourth, the policy will incentivize (or at the very least not disincentivize) institutes of higher education from continuing to charge astronomical rates…. Finally, the amount of student debt is such a crisis that we must force taxpayers to cough up hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for it but not enough of a crisis to make sure it never happens again. That is insane.”

So, yeah. I still feel that way. This was fan service to people like President Biden’s staffers who had a million useless degrees for prestige's sake but weren’t making enough money to pay them back at the expense of the millions of Americans who didn’t go to college. Just horrendous stuff.

Pardon of Hunter Biden

Lest he be accused of not finishing how he started, President Biden decided to enact one more bad policy by pardoning his son, Hunter Biden, in the last couple of months of his administration. The pardon itself was bad enough, but the statement explaining the pardon that the Biden Administration put out made it so much worse. President Biden blamed the Department of Justice’s process (the one that was under his authority) as being infected with politics which “led to a miscarriage of justice.”

I guess we are just supposed to ignore the fact that Hunter Biden was convicted by a jury of his peers.

If President Biden was worried about potential future charges that the incoming administration could pit against Hunter (as the statement claimed), then he could have pardoned Hunter for everything except for what he had already been convicted of. Instead, he included those charges.

Oh, and this was after lying to the American people for years by saying he definitely would not pardon Hunter. Good stuff.

Immigration

There was a reason that immigration played a huge role in the 2024 election - because the Biden administration’s policies were atrocious. In an effort to be different than Trump before him, President Biden reversed the “remain in Mexico” and “safe third country” policies which were designed to prevent people with bogus asylum claims from chilling in the US.

These policy reversals, along with the general belief that the Biden administration would be softer on immigration, led to a massive influx of illegal immigration. It got so bad that the Biden administration had to reverse course and reimplement Trump-era policies just to stymie the flow. While this was eventually the right call, the three years of bad policy before led to millions of illegal immigrants already being in the country. In a lot of ways, the damage is already done and the cost to fix such a mistake has only increased.

Mental Decline

All of this is assuming that Joe Biden has even been mentally capable of being in charge which cannot be taken for granted. If it is the case (which I highly suspect) that Joe Biden has been unable to handle the job of being president leading to people around him making most, if not all, the important decisions, then that is an abomination to our Constitutional order. The American people elected Joe Biden to be the president, not the people around him.

No matter, one thing can be said about whoever has been making the important decisions, they have failed over and over and over again.

God Bless,

Hunter Burnett