This week’s White House report card finds President Joe Biden the butt of jokes for his trip and fall during the United States Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.
While he had a good excuse, pointing to sandbags placed in his path on stage, for many, the image of him on the ground reinforced concerns that Biden is old and feeble, an image he doesn’t fight back on enough.
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In a story this week, Secrets quoted two former Clinton aides who now work at the Brookings Institution that said the president has to prove he’s not over the hill. “In politics, appearance is reality, or at least an important part of it. Physical and mental fitness are threshold qualifications for the presidency, as moral fitness used to be,” they said.
John Zogby, the Democratic pollster and one of our weekly graders, said that the public should be cheering Biden’s success this week in getting a debt ceiling increase through Congress and recording a surge in jobs. But instead, the focus is on the fall.
MOMENTS AGO: President Biden takes nasty fall at Air Force Academy graduation
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 1, 2023
“That trip (as in fall) this week just gave folks too much to talk about,” he said in grading the week a C-plus.
Conservative Jed Babbin agreed in grading a D. “Eighty-year-old President Biden took a hard fall and had to be helped to his feet at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony. The rest of his week was made up of a bunch of metaphorical falls and one almost-victory,” he wrote.
John Zogby
Grade: C+
Sometimes a president can’t catch a break.
This week featured another great jobs report — 339,000 new jobs as opposed to only 190,000 expected; the Dow Jones up 2.15%; wages up.
President Joe Biden, working with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, marshaled a bipartisan debt ceiling and budget deal through both houses. It is hard to make a big deal out of folks only doing what they are supposed to do, but they did it and kicked the can two years down the road before they’ll have to face the situation again.
But the president is still haunted by those pesky approval numbers which are going down (41% approval average) when they should be going up. And that trip (as in fall) this week just gave folks too much to talk about. Isn’t anyone paying attention to the jobs report?
Jed Babbin
Grade: D
Eighty-year-old President Biden took a hard fall and had to be helped to his feet at the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation ceremony. The rest of his week was made up of a bunch of metaphorical falls and one almost-victory.
The stink of Biden family corruption is much more than noticeable around the president than it was even a few weeks ago. The FBI admitted it had a (so far uncorroborated) report that Biden had been involved in a $5 million bribery scheme when he was former President Barack Obama’s veep, but refused to produce it under a congressional subpoena. Only after FBI Director Christopher Wray was threatened with contempt of Congress did he reluctantly agree to provide the document.
Meanwhile, the National Archives is reportedly refusing to produce documents on first son Hunter Biden’s international influence-peddling. There’s a whole lot of smoke, so there’s a fire underneath it. The Justice Department is slow-rolling prosecution of Hunter because its politicization is at a disgustingly high level under Attorney General Merrick Garland and Wray.
LGBTQ “pride” month began this week, so the federal government followed the path it had laid out before Bud Light, Target, and a few other clueless companies followed it. The “pride” flag was on display on federal buildings and embassies overseas. Drag queen events, however, were canceled at a couple of military bases because a few Western senators complained. Who ever thought those events were a good idea?
Biden had limited success in the debt fight, a bill which carries the ceiling for another $4 trillion and beyond the 2024 election. The bill again proves the federal government’s financial incontinence, but nobody cares. Biden’s victory — in which he claimed he made no compromises — had several compromises with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that were in the range of poor to barely OK from a conservative standpoint. The only good thing in the bill is that it avoided a default on America’s debt.
Look for more reckless spending and vote-buying by Biden leading up to the presidential election.
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John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Survey and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His weekly podcast with son and managing partner and pollster Jeremy Zogby can be heard here. Follow him on Twitter @ZogbyStrategies
Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him on Twitter @jedbabbin
