Only nine months into his presidency, President Joe Biden has already managed to fail disastrously on just about every front.
The coronavirus pandemic is just as big of a problem now as it was when he first took office. His chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal has turned into the most humiliating foreign policy defeat in decades. The immigration crisis at the southern border — a crisis of his own making — continues to escalate. And his over-the-top domestic spending plan is dividing his party and stonewalling his entire agenda.
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Over at National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that these failures stem from Biden’s dependence on the media. In many ways, Dougherty is right. The media cared about a fake story alleging Border Patrol agents “whipped” Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas, so the Biden administration suspended the agents, and the president personally vowed to make them “pay.”
The media wanted to move on from Afghanistan, so Biden did as well. He has not disciplined a single one of the military officials who bungled our exit and got more than a dozen U.S. troops killed. He has not held a single press conference to update the public on what’s happening in the region, even though hundreds of Americans are still stranded in the terrorist-controlled regime.
I’d go a step further. I believe that Biden’s inability to govern has even more to do with the fact that his administration is dependent on social media. Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, spends more time on Twitter than just about anyone else. This might not seem like a big deal — until one realizes that Klain and the rest of the Biden team’s Twitter activity is literally shaping the administration’s decisions.
The news cycle about Border Patrol agents on horseback “abusing” migrants is a great example. The story got its start on Twitter after a few blue-checks incorrectly claimed they saw the agents using their horses’ reins as whips. Additional photographic evidence proved this was an outright lie, but the issue had become a big enough controversy that the Biden administration had to satisfy its Twitter audience. The result was Biden publicly rebuking the agents involved and even absurdly changing immigration policy to forbid agents from using horses at the border.
The problem with this strategy is that Twitter is not real life. What Twitter thinks about policy is almost never representative of what the electorate thinks. Ask one person without a Twitter account whether they heard about the viral Border Patrol story last week and I guarantee you the answer will be no.
This is a big part of the reason why Biden’s approval ratings continue to tank. Trust in the president’s ability to handle the coronavirus pandemic, for example, is at an all-time low not just because the virus is still around, but because his messaging is completely inconsistent with what the public wants to hear. His administration seems to have assumed that since a majority of Twitter’s pundits think vaccine and mask mandates are necessary, the rest of the country would agree. However, a recent poll proves that the public is split right down the middle on the mandate. There is no consensus on this issue, yet Biden’s team has convinced itself there is because they spend all day on Twitter.
The White House needs to log off and start paying attention to what’s really happening in this country. There is a massive disconnect between what the administration thinks is important and what the public expects from its government. Until that divide is addressed, the Biden administration will continue to fail.
