President Biden has had a tough first year in office. During his campaign he declared that any president who was "responsible" for over 220,000 Covid deaths should not remain President of the United States.
Altogether in 2020 there were about 385,000 deaths attributed to Covid. More than 386,000 have been reported in the first year of the Biden presidency, 166,000 deaths more than the number he set as disqualifying Mr. Trump to be president.
Moreover, it must be noted that Mr. Biden has had the advantage of vaccines, therapeutics and a much better understanding by our medical professionals of how to treat the disease. Yet, 166,000 more people have died during his tenure than did during Mr. Trump's last year.
During the campaign he promised the American people that, “I’m not going to shut down the country, I’m not going to shut down the economy, I’m going to shut down the virus!” But of course he hasn't.
Should he be blamed for this? No, it's not his fault or anyone's (except the Chinese) that the virus continues to plague us. What he should be faulted for is hubris and hypocrisy. He made a promise that he had no power to deliver on, blamed Trump for a failure that was not Trump's fault, and refuses to apply the same standard to himself that he set for his predecessor.
An honorable man, having declared Trump "responsible" for 220,000 Covid deaths and thereby unfit for office would apply that same standard to himself and resign or at least apologize, but Mr. Biden will apparently do neither.
Instead, we're subjected to a constant stream of excuses. After only one year in office his presidency has become the "We didn't see it coming" presidency.
As Jim Geraghty writes at NRO, they didn't foresee Omicron spreading so rapidly and weren't prepared with test kits for it. They didn't foresee the Taliban taking over Afghanistan so quickly. They didn't foresee inflation coming or lasting so long. They didn't foresee the supply-chain crisis coming. They didn't foresee the labor shortage coming or the hordes of migrants at the border.
It's hard to imagine how brutal the media would be, how brutal candidate Biden himself would be, if the Trump administration described itself as unable to foresee so many difficulties.
Surely they would declare Mr. Trump and his leadership completely inept, and they'd have good reason to do so.
