2022 Was a Horrendous Year for Biden – The American Spectator

It’s hard to imagine that Joe Biden could have had a worse year than his inaugural one as president in 2021.

In case anyone needed a reminder of just how dreadful it was, that was a year under his “leadership” in which inflation rose to 7 percent — its highest level in 40 years. It was a year that saw unleaded gas prices increase by a whopping 50.8 percent from 2020, as the average price of gas skyrocketed to $3.30 a gallon.

It was a year that saw illegal immigration reach its highest point in U.S. history, with ​border apprehensions of lawbreaking migrants reaching close to two million in fiscal year 2021, compared to just 646,822 total encounters in fiscal year 2020.

It was a year that saw U.S. Customs and Border Protection seize 11,201 pounds of fentanyl — compared to just 4,791 pounds in 2020, an increase of 133 percent. The deadly synthetic opioid crisis is currently the No. 1 cause of death for U.S. adults ages 18–45.

2021 was also a year that saw 13 U.S. service members senselessly killed, billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons and aircraft left behind, and Biden relinquishing control of both the U.S. embassy and Bagram Air Base to the Taliban.

It was a year that saw over 400,000 Americans die from COVID under Biden’s watch and a year in which Biden threatened to unconstitutionally take away jobs from millions of Americans if they refused to take an experimental vaccine that does not actually prevent anyone from catching COVID.

And it was a year in which Biden held the fewest number of solo or joint press conferences of any president since Bill Clinton’s lame-duck year in 2000.

But apparently “Mr. Unity”’s disastrous first year in office — one in which he fell not once, but three times up the stairs on Air Force One, was just a warm-up act for his greatest hits of 2022.

Leaving aside that the 2022 version of Biden seems unable to figure out how or where to walk off the stage after delivering his latest gaffe-ridden speech, or that it’s probably no longer safe for him to be riding a nonstationary bike, or that he literally needs one of his staffers dressed up as the Easter Bunny to shield him from a sycophantic press, the simple fact is that Biden has been such an embarrassment at home and abroad that it’s hard to know which self-inflicted catastrophe to even begin with.

As was expected, the Biden White House’s foreign policy has been nothing short of a chaotic disaster.

Thanks to Biden’s evident mental decline, apparent weakness on the world stage, and disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin sensed no greater opportunity to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And while Russia may be losing the war, Biden’s economic sanctions have done little to deter Putin’s feckless behavior.

It’s anyone’s guess how this ends, but 300 days later, the war still rages on — resulting in the deaths of 6,826 Ukrainian civilians, including 428 children, and an additional 10,769 Ukrainians were reported to have been injured.

As it stands, the U.S. has now provided Ukraine with more aid ($48 billion) than all European Union countries combined. It is not entirely clear how that money has been used. But Biden appears poised to send another $45 billion in emergency relief as part of the 4,155-page boondoggle of an omnibus bill that Congress has passed despite no one having read a single word of it.

Meanwhile, Biden has done nothing to hold China accountable for unleashing the China Virus on the world, even as Chinese President (or dictator) Xi Jinping continues to show aggression toward Taiwan, and as Xi has sought to build a stronger economic alliance with Russia — including increasing its imports of Russian oil, gas, and farm goods.

Instead of showing any curiosity into examining the origins of the virus, Biden has been careless with his rhetoric, incorrectly saying on three separate occasions that the U.S. would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan if China attacked the island — a direct contradiction of official U.S. policy toward Taiwan.

On the domestic front, things are not going much better for Biden.

There have now been over 2.3 million border encounters in the fiscal year 2022, including 227,000 border encounters in September. And this past July, Customs and Border Protection reported seizing 2,071 pounds of fentanyl — a record high and a 60 percent increase from the previous record that was already set in April of this year.

That’s enough fentanyl to kill every single American. But Biden doesn’t seem to care. His administration is content to let Title 42 run its course, which will likely further exacerbate problems and embolden violent criminals, human traffickers, and drug cartels to pour across our border.

In June, U.S. inflation reached a new 41-year high of 9.1 percent, but that didn’t stop Biden from piling onto the 31 trillion debt by signing the monstrous $739 billion so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” which will do nothing to stop inflation or prevent climate change — unless, of course, one considers hiring 87,000 new IRS agents to harass Americans and cutting the temperature in the year 2100 by approximately 0.0009 degrees Fahrenheit to be significant progress.

And thanks to Biden’s war on the energy industry and the canceling of oil and gas leases, including killing a one-million-acre oil lease in Alaska, gas prices have continued to reach record highs this year, with the national average spiking as high as $4.58 in May. Rather than drilling our own oil in the U.S., Biden would rather deplete our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and beg the Saudis and thugs like Nicolás Maduro to pump more oil.

But remember, it’s all Putin’s fault, Biden assures us.

Surely, all of these self-inflicted disasters couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the man currently occupying the Oval Office, the geniuses in the leftist corporate media keep telling us.

So another dreadful year has come and gone for the teleprompter president who has somehow only done seven formal interviews this year and has managed to make Jimmy Carter’s presidency look like George Washington’s.

But here’s the good news: when the 118th Session of Congress commences early next year, Republicans will have a majority in the House. Let’s see if they actually do anything with the gavel.

David Keltz previously served as the Press Secretary for the Attorney General of Indiana and was a speechwriter in the Trump Administration. His writing has been published in The American Spectator, RealClearPolitics, American Greatness, The Federalist, the American Thinker, and the New York Daily News, among other publications.