“Orange man bad” is the leitmotif of Biden administration messaging and policymaking. If you want to know what President Biden is doing, check what President Donald Trump did, and it’ll either be the opposite or be presented that way.
The fountainhead of this strategy is the belief (or implicit claim) that Trump corrupted everything he touched; merely by adopting a given policy, he made it toxic. This derangement notably led some opinion-mongers to abandon long-held positions and excoriate what they had previously advocated. Once Trump agreed with them, they had to disagree with themselves. It was unedifying to watch, and it is unimpressive now that Biden similarly acts as though the worth of a policy or message correlates inversely to what was done and said by his predecessor.
Navigating only in the rearview mirror creates problems. Looking forward, you can see where you need to go. Biden, by contrast, is putting the nation into reverse and veering off course.
I’ve written before about his pretense that pandemic policy today is 180 degrees different from Trump’s. Actually, it’s largely the same. The president and his acolytes claim there was no vaccine or program to beat COVID-19 until he came along on Jan. 20. But a million vaccine shots (Biden’s supposedly ambitious 100th-day goal) were being administered on the day he swore his oath of office. The pandemic had peaked three weeks earlier than that.
Children sometimes play “opposite day,” a game in which they say the reverse of what they know to be true. It’s not a game presidents should indulge in. But Biden’s determination to reverse whatever Trump did guides his climate policy. He has rejoined the useless and anti-American Paris climate accord and is crushing American energy production in ways that actually make climate pollution worse. Likewise, in the Middle East, Biden performed a showy handbrake turn away from Trump’s startlingly effective policies and is now sucking up to Iran and snubbing Israel.
Perhaps most absurdly, Biden is playing the same opposite game on immigration, with the result that he’s rekindling a problem that had been brought under some control. Trump’s efforts to stanch illegal immigration were not always coherent, but they were fundamentally right. He knew that if you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country. Border security agencies wanted a wall, and Trump built hundreds of miles of wall. Would-be illegal migrants were discouraged from heading north from Latin America. When it became clear they’d be turned back, many didn’t come.
But Biden, perversely, is signaling that he wants illegal immigration as much as Trump opposed it. Predictably, he’s stopped building the wall, leaving construction materials junked in the desert. But he’s doing much more than that — actually encouraging illegal immigrants to rush the border. One of Biden’s first acts was to suspend deportations for 100 days. Even though a federal court slapped down this executive order, border-hoppers got the message, and they’re flooding north.
Some 78,000 people tried to cross the border illegally in January, double the same month in 2020, and, as the Washington Examiner’s Byron York noted, the White House responded not by saying the illegals shouldn’t come but by asking them to delay until a proper welcome could be prepared for them. The Biden administration has nothing against lawbreaking, per se, it just wants to get ready for the influx and avoid embarrassing scenes on TV.
Anna Giaritelli, the Washington Examiner’s Homeland Security reporter, writes that smugglers are now bringing much larger groups of 100 or more migrant children and families to the border, overwhelming the authorities. The Border Patrol saw a dramatic uptick roughly from the time Trump appeared headed for election defeat, which stoked expectation of an administration that would open its arms and the nation’s floodgates to people who, according to law, should not be allowed in.
Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, refuses to acknowledge that this is a crisis, instead calling it a “challenge.” His first responsibility is to avoid embarrassing his boss. But he provided the “tell” when, after repeating that illegal immigration was a “challenge,” he added, “I have explained that quite clearly.” It was like listening to President Barack Obama’s rhetorical tick, “let me be clear,” which always preceded his main message. The Biden administration’s main message on illegal immigration is that its policy is being challenged but has not created a crisis.
To acknowledge the truth that Biden has in short order revived a crisis would concede that crude anti-Trumpism is a bungling approach to government. But Biden can’t or won’t admit that because being not Trump was why he was elected. It’s the raison d’être of his presidency.
