Biden’s Ideology is the Problem, Not His Age

Polls show that Americans increasingly regard Joe Biden as a failed president. But while Biden’s shortcomings are often attributed to his age, the truth is that Joe Biden’s problem isn’t that he failed at implementing his party’s agenda, but rather that he succeeded at implementing his party’s agenda. The issue isn’t incompetence—it’s that he faithfully pursued the Democrats’ policies priorities which predictably led to disaster.

Democrats can replace Biden or not. Any Democrat who pursues the party’s radical agenda will lead America down the same ruinous path.

The seeds of Biden’s failure are found not in his own dementia, but in the derangement of his entire party since the 2016 election: the Green New Deal, “Abolish ICE,” the Russia Hoax hysteria, the “anti-racism” and DEI movements, and the kneejerk opposition to Trump’s successful foreign policy.

The Biden administration has merely brought these anti-Trump manias to fruition in federal policy, with catastrophic results.

The three primary crises of the Biden White House—the struggling economy, the southern border invasion, and the crumbling of America’s strength on the world stage—have all stemmed not from presidential mismanagement, but from the left’s obsessive desire to undo every Trump policy and replace it with something close to the polar opposite, no matter the cost.

On the economic front, Biden’s tenure has been defined by historically high inflation, which has now reached a cumulative rate of nearly 20 percent. This inflation, which is an albatross around Biden’s neck, is the direct result of his adoption of the far-left priorities of his party in Congress, as embodied through a series of massive spending bills packed with DEI initiatives and hundreds of billions of dollars for environmental craziness straight out of the Green New Deal.

Elected Democrat officials also vehemently opposed Trump’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline construction and regulatory policies that led to American energy independence. That opposition later became the basis of a series of Biden executive orders canceling the Keystone project and implementing a host of other anti-oil and gas initiatives that sent energy prices soaring, further fueling inflation.

The same pattern holds true for the disaster Biden has unleashed on the border. Under President Trump, Democrats became militantly open-border. They universally called for mass amnesty. Democrat senators demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) be abolished entirely.

Biden’s immigration policies are simply the natural extension of this insanity, faithfully implemented by the Biden administration. Biden reversed nearly every policy that secured the southern border during the Trump years immediately upon taking office—including stopping border wall construction, reducing deportations, and ending “Remain in Mexico” (a policy which ended the practice of “catch and release” into the United States and instead forced illegal aliens to wait for their court hearings in Mexico).

Biden also mandated a functional shutdown of ICE, going so far as to implement what the administration calls “protected areas” in which ICE is not permitted to enter. During his first 100 days in office, Biden issued 94 executive orders overturning the immigration policies of the Trump administration and advancing the party’s open borders agenda.

The results of these actions speak for themselves: since Biden took office, nearly nine million illegal aliens have been encountered by U.S. border officials—and that figure only accounts for those who were caught. Hundreds of individuals on the FBI’s terrorist watch list have likely entered the country completely undetected, and the country could be severely at risk.

Biden has also been a disaster on the foreign policy front. Thanks in large part to his abandonment of Trump’s foreign policy, war is now raging not only in Ukraine, but also in the Middle East—imperiling American safety and security and ushering the world into a state of global chaos.

The most glaring example of this disastrous record is Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021, leading to the death of 13 U.S. servicemembers. Biden was so determined to stick it to Trump that he led the country into its greatest military embarrassment since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Biden wanted the talking point that he had done what Trump had not. And in the end, that’s exactly what happened: he ignored reality and charged ahead with a withdrawal despite warnings of disaster from his military advisors.

Once again on foreign policy, Biden has taken his cues from far-left Democrats. During the Trump years, Democrats in Congress were openly antagonistic toward Israel and supported an emboldening of the Iranian regime. Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, for example, openly encouraged Biden to “reverse” Trump’s Middle Eastern peace deals, and strongly criticized Trump’s withdrawal from the disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal. Biden came in and reversed virtually every Middle East policy he could—and now the region is in flames.

It is important for American voters to understand that the primary problem isn’t Biden. The fundamental problem is the party. These outcomes would have been the same even with a younger, less feebleminded president who pursued the same failed agenda.

Republicans should certainly campaign on Biden’s obvious signs of mental and physical decline. But the stronger—and ultimately more effective—line of attack for conservatives this election season will be hammering the fact that Biden’s disastrous and failing presidency is a result of his willingly and faithfully implementing a long list of far-left demands presented to him by progressive activists who now wield control over the entire Democrat Party.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.