It’s easier to talk about running a marathon than to run a marathon. In the same way, it’s easier to talk about being president than being president.
President Joe Biden is learning this simple lesson the hard way, like so many others. In the presidential campaign of 2020, as the Democratic nominee for president, Biden took a cheap shot at President Trump. He said, “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” At the time the U.S. had recorded 220,000 Covid deaths.
With the announcement that Covid deaths have now surpassed the toll in 2020 with 350,000 since Inauguration Day, perhaps Biden should take his own advice and resign, or at least eat some humble pie with his Thanksgiving dinner. According to The Wall Street Journal, “It would seem that Mr. Biden has done no better than Donald Trump in defeating Covid despite the benefit of vaccines, better therapies, and more clinical experience. The left politicized Covid by holding Mr. Trump responsible for a disease that was always going to be hard to defeat.”
Biden didn’t stop there. He had the audacity to say in the same campaign, “If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive.” WSJ editorial board says, “That was as false as anything Mr. Trump ever said, but most journalists and experts agreed with the basic premise: Mr. Trump had blood on his hands. The world’s medical journals called for Mr. Trump’s defeat.”
A New England Journal of Medicine editorial headlined “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum” called the Administration “dangerously incompetent” and declared “we should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.” WSJ says “No wonder so many conservatives don’t trust these health experts.”
Mr. Biden famously promised “to shut down the virus, not the country,” and he accused Mr. Trump of having “no plan.” Mr. Trump did downplay the virus in the early part of 2020, apparently to avoid widespread panic, and he needlessly put himself in the middle of almost every debate over the disease and possible treatments, instead of letting his medical experts carry the debate. But time has shown some of his experts, notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, have made a mess of misinformation on their own.
Little or no credit has been given the Trump administration by this current White House occupant for developing the Covid vaccines and a distribution plan. But they have largely followed that plan and used those vaccines on their own. One has to wonder, however, how much the Biden administration contributed to the pushback against the vaccines by so many Americans by their draconian vaccine and mask mandates. Americans have a history of pushing back when the federal government tries to take away our liberties.
The U.S. led most of the world in vaccinations this past spring. But the more Biden demanded people get vaccinated, the more Americans became skeptical of the same vaccines, though they were developed under the Trump administration. When the more transmissible Delta variant arrived, Biden had no plan to deal with its rapid spread. By late September, daily deaths exceeded 2,000 – more than twice as many as a year earlier – under Trump.
Biden played the blame game, attacking popular governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott. He particularly attacked unvaccinated conservatives, yet blacks and young people have also shown reluctance to get vaccinated, and no one believes most of them are Republican. Furthermore, his vaccine mandates have served to further polarize the country, exactly the opposite of what he was elected to do.
WSJ editorial board says, “We recount all this not to blame Mr. Biden for this year’s Covid deaths. The truth last year and this year is that the virus is impossible for any politician to control, much less eliminate. Mr. Biden used the illusion he could vanquish the virus to win election, and he is now paying a political price because he hasn’t.” Buyer’s remorse, anyone?
