Michael Goodwin of the New York Post ponders America’s position in the world with Joe Biden as president.
As metaphors go, it will be hard to top President Biden falling up the steps of Air Force One. He went down not once, not twice, but three times before scrambling to his feet.
That was bad enough, but a silly White House excuse made it worse. Wind gusts knocked him over, an aide claimed, apparently with a straight face.
The one hopeful sign is that nobody blamed Donald Trump. If that thinking is contagious, there might be hope for the new president after all. Otherwise, there are reasons to fear America is headed off the rails and into the weeds.
Up to now, the theme of the Biden administration has been that whatever Trump did, they will do the opposite. The approach worked wonders during the campaign, but “opposite day” is a child’s game, not a sensible governing principle for the world’s superpower. …
… The result is blunder after blunder, at home and abroad. The most obvious example is the reckless rhetoric and idiotic policies stoking the migrant surge on our southern border. Similarly, the stunned gibberish from Biden aides after Chinese diplomats lectured and humiliated them last week is a sign of global trouble to come.
Connecting the dots of these and other mistakes suggests Biden took office while suffering from two major illusions. The first was that everything Trump did was a failure.
You could believe that only if you got all your ideas from Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and MSNBC. The Dems never recognized Trump’s legitimacy and the never-Trump media twisted the news instead of reporting it, creating a dishonest narrative of events. When Trump succeeded, they called it failure.
These distortions shaped Democratic talking points, and Biden, apparently lacking any ideas of his own, simply parroted them.
