Joe Biden is beginning to feel like an ex-president after only nine months in office. The last two Democrats to occupy the White House, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, arrived with a spirit of renewal, not to mention tremendous legislative ambitions. Biden came in with a spirit of reversal: he was not Trump. His selling point was ‘competence’. Like Warren Harding a century before, he was meant to usher in a ‘return to normalcy’.
After Covid and its economic consequences, after the riots that raged in the summer of 2020, normal sounded good enough. Yet that was more than Biden could deliver. What everyone had hoped would be the end of Covid has turned into an endless war on Covid instead: more masks, more shots, more closures. The war in Afghanistan which Biden did bring to a close saw our side defeated, our honour stained. Violent crime in many of our riot-ravaged cities is back to levels not seen since the 1990s, while prices in the grocery store haven risen at a pace reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter era.
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