Matthew Continetti writes about President Biden’s failure to achieve one of his most important campaign promises.
Higher prices, a broken border, raging wars, violent campuses—is this what Joe Biden promised Americans four years ago?
Quite the opposite: In his 2020 convention address, Biden said that he would lead America away from Donald Trump and toward “a different path,” where “together” we would “take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light.”
Leave aside, for a moment, the garbled metaphors and syrupy language. Consider instead how far away America is from Biden’s gossamer vision. Here is a man who pledged a restoration of national unity and global tranquility if he became president. Not only has he failed to achieve his goals. His very policies put them out of reach. We were promised competence. We got chaos.
Back in 2015, Jeb Bush warned his fellow Republicans that his billionaire rival for the GOP presidential nomination was “a chaos candidate. And he’d be a chaos president.” Republican primary voters ignored him. Trump won the nomination and the presidency. His years in office were tumultuous, to say the least. Yet today’s electorate views the instability that Trump brought to Washington differently than the disorder that Biden unleashed at home and abroad. Once there was a single “chaos president.” Now there are two.
My colleague at Commentary magazine, Abe Greenwald, points out that the past three-and-a-half years have seen a whittling away of the arguments Biden used against Trump. Biden said Trump and his family business was corrupt—only to find himself embroiled in his own family scandal. Biden flogged Trump’s mishandling of classified presidential records—only to have a special counsel investigate him for a similar offense. Biden described Trump as a sower of discord—only to preside over an America coming apart.
