By his own standard, Joe Biden has failed a simple test of presidential leadership. Two years ago today, in the midst of a global pandemic and a presidential campaign, Joe Biden slammed President Trump and said he should “stop blaming others.”
“The President needs to stop blaming others and do his job,” Joe Biden said in a tweet.
The President needs to stop blaming others and do his job.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 21, 2020
Yet throughout his presidency, Joe Biden has been in a perpetual state of finger-pointing, blaming anyone and everyone else for his failures.
“I know that families are still struggling with higher prices. I grew up in a family where if the price of gas went up, we felt it,” Biden said on Twitter on Wednesday. “Let’s be absolutely clear about why prices are high right now: COVID and Vladimir Putin.”
I know that families are still struggling with higher prices. I grew up in a family where if the price of gas went up, we felt it.
Let’s be absolutely clear about why prices are high right now: COVID and Vladimir Putin.
— President Biden (@POTUS) April 20, 2022
For weeks now, Biden has been trying to create the narrative that Putin is to blame for gas prices being so high. It’s not working. Even Biden’s most reliable cheerleaders in the media have acknowledged that inflation and gas prices were going up well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Last year, Biden even tried to blame Trump for his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, insisting that he inherited a deal negotiated by Trump and had to see it through. Even the New York Times didn’t buy that argument. “The Biden administration was right to bring the war to a close,” they wrote. “Yet there was no need for it to end in such chaos, with so little forethought for all those who sacrificed so much in the hopes of a better Afghanistan.”
The United States was exporting more oil than it imported for the first time in 70 years by the end of 2018. When Joe Biden took office, he quickly sought to kill America’s energy independence. One of his first acts as president was to kill the Keystone XL pipeline and issue a moratorium on new oil and gas drilling leases. This naturally reduced supply and drove prices up. Rather than taking responsibility for gas prices going up, in August 2021, Joe Biden blamed OPEC for rising prices and called on them to increase production.
And what about the border crisis? Guess whose fault that is? According to Biden, it’s not his fault but Trump’s.
“When I was vice president, I focused on providing the help needed to address these root causes of migration. It helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave. Our plan worked, but the last administration shut it down,” Biden said last April.
I’m not sure what Biden meant by saying that the Obama administration’s policies worked, but Illegal border crossings plummeted during the Trump administration—an undeniable result of Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigrants. The border wall also proved to be successful in blocking illegal crossings. On Tuesday, the U.S. broke past records by reaching one million migrant encounters at the Southern border in just the first six months of the fiscal year—three months quicker than the previous year.
Joe Biden seems to be unable to accept responsibility for his failings. To use his own words, he needs to stop blaming others and do his job.