It'll come as no surprise to readers of Viewpoint that I'm not sorry to see Joe Biden and his administration leave Washington. What kind of president Donald Trump will be, I can't predict, but he can hardly do worse than Mr. Biden.
Mr. Biden's administration was deeply disappointing, although no one who's been paying attention over the course of the last sixteen years should've been surprised at this. Mr. Biden has demonstrated himself throughout that time to be a venal, unprincipled man whose chief concern was himself and his family.
Mr. Biden has corrupted the executive offices he's held, allowing his family to peddle influence abroad to enrich themselves and then awarding them "pre-emptive" pardons on his way out the door to protect the family from accountability.
Moreover, his administration's attempt, at Mr. Biden's behest, to destroy Donald Trump through criminal indictments that would never have been brought against anyone else has besmirched trust in American legal institutions. Not only has this "lawfare" been brought to bear against Trump but also against many of his associates and some ordinary people who on January 6th were guilty of nothing more serious than trespassing on federal property.
He campaigned on bringing us together, on being a unifier, but he repeatedly disparaged ordinary citizens who disagreed with him, implying that they were "fascists" and at one point explicitly calling them "garbage."
The outgoing president was not only personally corrupt, he was lawless in other ways as well. He refused to obey the law requiring him to control the border, he refused to heed the judgment of the Supreme Court which ruled that his plan to pay off student loans was unconstitutional, and he absurdly announced last week that he was declaring the ERA to be constitutional and the law of the land.
His Attorney General's use of the FBI to harass ordinary citizens at school board meetings, branding those concerned parents as terrorists for expressing angry opinions at those meetings, was a disgrace, as was the DOJ's harassment of pro-lifers, and the pressure the Biden administration applied on social and other media to restrict the circulation of opinions at odds with the administration's narratives.
Mr. Biden and his aides lied to us repeatedly about matters great and small. Among the former were Mr. Biden's insistence that he would never pardon his son, that he never talked to his son about his business dealings, that Donald Trump called Neo-nazis "good people" after Charlottesville, and that Mr. Biden himself was cognitively sound. Anyone who offered a contrary opinion, as did special prosecutor Robert Hur, was smeared in the media.
The Biden administration coddled the progressive left and their most absurd ideological conceits such as DEI in general and the trans ideology in particular. The administration and the party have been congenial to some of the most vicious antisemitism we've seen in this country since the 1930s, and they also did enormous damage to our economy by trying to impose their green energy agenda on businesses and consumers and by restricting our ability to drill for fossil fuels.
Ironically, the Biden administration's commitment to green energy, particularly offshore wind energy, is endangering the Right whale and has caused the deaths of countless migratory birds.
Reckless infusions of trillions of dollars into the economy drove inflation up over 20% during the Biden presidency and caused mortgage rates to jump from 2.8% to over 7% which has erected a huge impediment to young first-time home buyers.
Mr. Biden's disastrous Afghanistan pullout and his ridiculous talk about how a minor incursion by Russia into Ukraine wouldn't be so bad encouraged Vladimir Putin to launch a massive invasion in 2022. Biden's reluctance to give needed military supplies to both Ukraine and Israel has prolonged both of those conflicts, needlessly increasing the death toll. He released billions of dollars to Iran when that terrorist state was all but moribund from the Trump sanctions. The infusion of cash allowed the Iranians to get back on their feet, finance more bloodshed in the Middle East, and accelerate toward their goal of achieving a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, at home, our own military preparedness and recruitment have been allowed to wane.
Finally, it's doubtful that Mr. Biden, who spent 40% of his time in office on vacation, was even the person running his administration. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said that when he asked the president why he signed an executive order freezing the exports of natural gas crucial to Europe Mr. Biden was unaware that he had in fact actually done so.
I can't think of any positive accomplishment for which President Biden will be remembered, and he may well be regarded by future historians as perhaps the worst president of the modern era. It's hard to feel regret - at least it is for me - that he and his associates are no longer in charge.
