This month, the Biden administration abandoned the pretense of enforcing existing immigration laws, instead embracing a de facto open border between the United States and Mexico. The result has been a debacle.
With the sunsetting of Title 42, a pandemic-related provision that allowed the administration to remove immigrants quickly from the southern border, the Southwest has been inundated with immigrants from Central and South America. At its peak in early May, there were more than 10,000 migrant arrivals per day, overwhelming the government’s ability to process asylum claims quickly. The Biden administration has resorted to mass releasing immigrants into the interior of the country. Republican governors, notably Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, have increased the busing of immigrants into northern, Democratic-run cities. This has prompted outcries from liberals such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, whose city simply does not have the resources to handle the deluge. As if that was not enough, two children have died in federal custody this month, and the government has nabbed dozens of people from its terror watch list who were trying to sneak into the country.
TIM SCOTT PICKS UP FIRST SENATE ENDORSEMENT AHEAD OF WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCEMENT
The situation is, in a word, a crisis, born entirely of the Biden administration’s decision to unravel various Trump-era provisions that kept the flow of migrants to a minimum. President Joe Biden did away with former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which required migrants to wait outside the U.S. while their asylum claims were processed. As word spread through Central and South America that the Biden administration was loosening restrictions, the mass migration began.
Crisis is the brand of the Biden administration. A similar pattern has repeated itself time and again: The administration puts together an ill-conceived plan despite warnings that it will backfire, the plan backfires, the administration denies that it is backfiring until it is too late, and then it meekly blames somebody else.
Consider inflation, which has been driven in part by the reckless spending of the administration. Biden was warned that too much spending would generate inflation — warned, not just by Republicans but by Democrats such as Larry Summers — but he didn’t listen. For months, his team insisted that inflation was transitory, but when forced to admit the obvious, it pathetically blamed “Putin’s price hike.”
Afghanistan is another example: Intent on pulling the last remaining troops, whatever the cost, the administration was caught totally unprepared for the chaos that came next. The Afghan army collapsed in a matter of days. America’s Afghan allies were left at the mercy of the Taliban, which also nabbed American military equipment. American citizens were left stranded. The administration’s response was to blame Trump for committing to a withdrawal plan, as if the execution was not the actual problem.
This is exactly what Biden promised would not happen when he ran for president in 2020. The country was tired of bouncing from crisis to crisis under Trump. You never knew what Trump would say or tweet at any given moment, and a sense of national exhaustion had set in, even before the coronavirus lockdown. In his typical fashion, Trump used the lockdown to spar with the media in front of the cameras and make ridiculous speculations off the top of his head. Enough was enough. Give Biden a shot, the people collectively resolved. But he’s been no better.
What is going on? Is the American government too difficult to manage? There is certainly a case to be made that the administrative state is now so vast and byzantine that no president can bend it to his will. But there is a more immediate reason for the failures of Biden and Trump: They are both just bad at being president.
Trump’s fundamental problem is his extreme inattention to detail. He never made sure that those around him were competent and shared his values. Having surrounded himself with second-raters or those who actively sought to keep him from getting what he wanted, he always struggled to effectuate his will. Likewise, Trump never figured out how to handle the foreign policy establishment. He talks endlessly about the “witch hunt,” but he never stopped giving fuel for the fire. For instance, early in his administration, several private conversations Trump had with foreign leaders leaked to the press. The president should have taken the hint to watch what he said on the phone, realizing his calls were not actually private. But that didn’t stop him from mouthing off about the Biden family to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which led eventually to his impeachment.
As for Biden, even at his best, he was not all that great. As former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served under both former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has noted, Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Anybody who has followed politics over the last 30 years knows this is not a controversial statement. Biden always came across as an amiable and arrogant blowhard, big on bluster but short on thoughtfulness. People of that quality are best suited to stay in the Senate, the institution to which Biden had been consigned by the people of Delaware for 35 years until Obama unleashed him upon the country when he nominated him to be vice president in 2008.
And that was Biden before his decline. To say that he has “lost a step” since leaving the vice presidency six years ago would be putting it charitably. In public, he’s a shadow of his former self. The self-aggrandizing swagger is long gone, replaced by a shambling gait and confused diction. His staff micromanages every aspect of his public appearances, down to giving him in advance the questions he takes from journalists. He rarely makes any appearances where he might go off-script. He has had no solo news conferences this year.
It hardly requires a huge leap of logic to assume that if this is how Biden is in public, it must be how he is in private. Which in turn means that he’s not up to the job, either. If Trump does not have the personal discipline to manage the government, Biden does not have the mental stamina. Without presidential supervision, decision-making in the Biden administration is outsourced to God knows whom in the administration, and the result has consistently been chaos bred by incompetence.
And yet both men are considered likely to be the candidates in next year’s election. What a shame that would be for the people, left to choose between two proven incompetents.
The Democratic Party has already cast its lot with Biden, or at least the elites have. The party base seems to want an alternative, but the leaders have circled the wagons around his candidacy. They fear a primary battle would lead to chaos and give Republicans the upper hand in the general election. Better to stick with Biden, even if he’s not up for the job.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But Republicans still have a choice. Trump is, of course, running for a second term. To borrow a phrase from Republican politics after the Civil War, he’s “waving the bloody shirt.” He’s hoping that Republicans will still be angry over the “witch hunt,” the “hoax,” and the “rigged election.” Yet Trump never explains why next time will be any different — because he can’t. To answer that question is to admit by implication that he failed to handle the job last time around, and he doesn’t want Republicans to realize that next time won’t be any different, either.
The presidential office may be too big for any one person to handle. But it is definitely too big for Biden and Trump, who will only bring more chaos to an already overwhelmed nation.
Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College.
