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THE WHITE HOUSE ‘CRISIS’ CRISIS. President Biden’s White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, made news this week when she tried to explain that her boss, when he referred to the “crisis” on the border, did not actually mean there is a “crisis” on the border.
Remember that on Saturday, the president publicly used the word “crisis” to describe the border. He was answering a question about why he decided not to increase the number of refugees allowed into the United States — a decision he would backtrack on just hours later. But at that moment, Biden described his thinking this way: “We’re going to increase the number [of refugees]. The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people, and we couldn’t do two things at once.”
There was simply no doubt that Biden referred to the specific situation of young migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as a “crisis.” Indeed, that is what it is. And yet on Monday, Psaki insisted that is not what the president meant at all. It started when a reporter said to Psaki, “President Biden, over the weekend, called what’s happened at the border a ‘crisis.’ Is that now the official White House position, that there is indeed a crisis at the border?”
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Not at all, said Psaki. The U.S. has in fact made progress in housing young illegal border crossers, she explained. “The president does not feel that children coming to our border, seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships, and other dire consequences, is a crisis,” Psaki continued. “He does feel that the crisis in Central America, the dire circumstances that many are fleeing from…that is a situation we need to spend our time, our effort on.”
Of course that was not what Biden said when he referred to “the crisis that ended up on the border with young people.” He meant the crisis on the border. But Psaki’s explanation served to emphasize how deeply determined the Biden White House is to deny that there is a crisis on the border.
The reason is that the border crisis is a crisis of Biden’s own making. The White House has no problem at all talking about crises, as long as it can blame them on other people. In fact, Psaki herself talks about lots of “crises” virtually every day from the White House podium.
On Tuesday, Psaki discussed “addressing the climate crisis.” She also did it on Monday, and in fact mentions the climate “crisis” frequently. Then there was the “crisis in Central America.” Last Friday, she declared gun violence “a public health crisis.” On Thursday, she discussed “the child care crisis created by COVID-19.” Last Tuesday, she brought up the “maternal health crisis.” The week before, Psaki stood by while Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo declared “a crisis in semiconductor manufacturing.” The week before that, Psaki was discussing a general “public health crisis.”
Indeed, the Biden administration came into office declaring crises right and left. A few days before the inauguration, incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain said Biden faced “four overlapping and compounding crises.” By that he meant “the COVID-19 crisis, the resulting economic crisis, the climate crisis, and a racial equity crisis.”
The bottom line, the thing to remember, is that Team Biden is happy to talk about crises — as long as they haven’t been created by Team Biden itself.
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