President Joe Biden‘s administration is coming to an end, though he and his aides remain adamant he is running through the political tape before President-elect Donald Trump‘s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025.
Democrats, who are in some cases not upset with Biden for his decision to seek reelection this year despite concerns about his age and mental acuity, have been underscoring what they consider to be his political and policy achievements, including legislation and positive economic indicators.
“He deserves a lot of or a ton of credit for the things he did,” Democratic strategist Stefan Hankin told the Washington Examiner. “After the 2022 election, if Biden had been like, ‘Hey, I said I was going to be a bridge. I’m stepping back, have a primary, it’s not going to be me,’ I think his numbers now feel safe to say they’d be better than where they are now. It’s tough to get much lower, but it would be a very different narrative that we’d be talking about.”
However, as Democrats implore Biden to forgive more federal student loan debt and protect illegal immigrants from Trump’s proposed mass deportations while he is still in power, you could be forgiven for forgetting some of the other controversies from the president’s first and only term.
Here are five of Biden’s biggest controversies from his four years in office:
Calling inflation only ‘transitory’
Republican strategist Duf Sundheim conceded there has been “widespread dissatisfaction with governments around the world,” with the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy to Brazil, Chile, Honduras, and South Korea all experiencing significant political change or upheaval during Biden’s administration.
At the same time, “it’s hard to imagine an administration that has missed the mark on more major issues than the Biden administration,” according to Sundheim.
“Inflation, the border, Afghanistan,” he told the Washington Examiner.
In particular, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen‘s insistence that inflation would be “transitory” encapsulated criticism that Biden was out of touch and incapable of effectively managing the economy with Bidenomics.
“I really doubt that we’re going to see an inflationary cycle,” Yellen told reporters during a White House briefing in May 2021. “We expect somewhat higher inflation over the next several months for a variety of, essentially, technical reasons because of something called ‘base effects’ that, in year-over-year comparisons right now, the months in which prices fell the most are moving out of the average, and that leaves us with a number — with the months in which they were rebounding toward more normal levels. But that’s a transitory thing, not something that’s associated with a buildup in wage pressures.”
The consumer price index rose to 2.7% last month compared to November 2023, an increase from 2.6% in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021 was about 1.4%.
Refusing to call the southern border a ‘crisis’
A second Republican strategist, Brad Todd, agreed Biden may have regrets dating back to early in his administration, including his first day back at the White House, particularly regarding immigration policy.
“He signed EOs to open the border and drive up energy prices the first day, and that put him on a path to fail,” Todd told the Washington Examiner.
Biden was criticized for refusing to publicly recognize the problem at the southern border as a crisis, even after illegal crossings reached their peak of 250,000 during his administration last December.
“I’m not trying to be cute here, but I think the fact of the matter is: We have to do what we do regardless of what anybody calls the situation,” Biden’s former border czar Roberta Jacobson told reporters during a White House briefing in March 2021. “The fact is we are all focused on improving the situation, on changing to a more humane and efficient system. And whatever you call it wouldn’t change what we’re doing because we have urgency, from the president on down, to fix our system and make sure that we are better at dealing with the hopes and the dreams of these migrants in their home country.”
Biden’s early immigration policies ranged from stopping the construction of Trump’s border wall, ending his predecessor’s travel restrictions from some heavily Muslim countries, protecting so-called Dreamers who arrived in the United States while younger, and directing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize violent offenders of immigration laws before he started adopting tougher positions, such as issuing an executive order this June that provided officials with the authority to deport asylum-seekers without processing their claims.
Watch-gate after deadly Afghanistan withdrawal
Biden undermined his reputation for empathy and compassion in 2021 after he was photographed checking his watch multiple times during the dignified transfer of remains, the ceremony in which U.S. service members who have died abroad return home, for the 13 soldiers who were killed in a terrorist attack amid the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden has acknowledged and taken responsibility for the “messy” withdrawal that August after the U.S.-supported Afghan government imploded “more quickly than we had anticipated,” with 11 Marines, one Army paratrooper, one Navy corpsman, and 170 Afghan citizens dying in the ISIS-K attack near Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate.
However, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby dismissed criticism of the withdrawal as chaotic, despite conceding the “first few days were very, very tough” and “hectic,” citing a lack of force presence at the airport.
“We got them there within 48 hours, and about 72 hours after that, that airport was basically, for all intents and purposes, American property, surrounded by the Taliban and ISIS-K,” Kirby told reporters during a White House briefing in April 2023 after the release of the after-action review. “They not only had to run an airport, get the radars up and going, do air traffic control, get planes coming in and getting them loaded, have medical screening, have security vetting, have diplomatic presence on the ground to make sure that we’re putting the right people on planes, but also defend that airport from external threats. That’s pretty remarkable.”
“So, for all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch,” he said, regardless of images of Afghans plunging to their deaths from the wings of U.S. airplanes.
Supposed ‘summer of freedom’ from COVID-19
Many of Biden’s controversies concerned foreign policy, from rankling France with his nuclear submarine agreement with Australia and the U.K. in 2021, downplaying the importance of a “minor incursion” into Ukraine by Russia before saying Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” in 2022, his fist pump with Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman later that same year after arguing the kingdom should be a “pariah,” permitting a Chinese spy balloon to traverse the country in 2023 before pausing shipments of heavy bombs to Israel amid its war against Hamas this year.
However, domestically, aside from his pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, this month, his most politically damaging controversy was not expeditiously delivering on his promise to lead the country out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Joe Biden’s approval rating polling started plummeting after his “summer of freedom” speech in June 2021.
“America is headed into the summer dramatically different from last year’s summer: a summer of freedom, a summer of joy, a summer of get-togethers and celebrations,” Joe Biden said during his remarks. “An all-American summer that this country deserves after a long, long, dark winter that we’ve all endured.”
Robert Hur investigation into ‘elderly man with a poor memory’
Amid special counsel Jack Smith‘s federal investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed now-former special counsel Robert Hur in January 2023 to investigate similar allegations against Joe Biden after his personal attorneys advised the National Archives and Records Administration the previous November that intelligence material and briefing memos pertaining to Iran, Ukraine, and the U.K. from before his presidency had been found at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. More documents were later found, including at his home in Delaware.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
After a yearlong investigation, Hur released his report in February 2024, recommending no charges, despite finding evidence that Joe Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” wrote Hur.
