Tag: Gazette

Tomorrow’s the big day for Big Orange. At noon EST on Jan. 20, Donald Trump will take the oath of office to become the 47th President of the United States.

We’ve been here before. The pomp and circumstance (and hysteria) of the first Trump inauguration was eight years ago. Here in Cedar Rapids, I organized a little watch party with some friends at an upscale hotel.

It was just a handful of us, so when the cheers of the crowd on the TV as Trump finished his oath were supplemented by a smattering of applause behind us, I was taken by surprise as I turned in my chair to see almost two dozen hotel guests and staff members standing behind us, having joined in watching the occasion.

That wasn’t my favorite moment from the 2017 coverage. That honor goes to the telling of a story by Fox News’ Bill Hemmer — not about Trump, but about his (first) predecessor, then-outgoing President Barack Obama — based on an interaction he had during Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009.

Hemmer, who had been in Washington, D.C. covering the occasion, described for his largely pro-Trump audience a moment when he stood on the National Mall next to a 65-year-old Black man wearing an old purple Louisiana State University jacket. The man had driven through the night from Louisiana to witness the inauguration of the nation’s first Black president. As the newly-installed President Barack Obama was introduced, tears of joy and pride streamed down the man’s face.

“Those were moments,” Hemmer said in January 2021 when he shared the same story with Adweek’s TVNewser shortly before President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Clearly Hemmer was quite moved by the interaction. I was (and remain) moved just by his telling of it.

Though I was opposed to Obama’s policies — his opponent’s 2012 campaign was the first experience from my pre-journalism life of grassroots politics — I knew all along that Obama rose to the presidency with an inspiring message and a boatload of enthusiasm. Most who were keen to support the 44th president as he took office were also sure to miss him after he left.

I can’t say the same for our 46th president, whose time in office finally expires tomorrow. Regardless of who was bound to replace him or where one falls on the ideological spectrum, I submit that few Americans will actually miss Joe Biden.

Sure, it’s a harsh thing to say as the “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” takes his leave. But the first draft of history is written while it happens. Time may soften Biden’s legacy, but it won’t change it. It may heal the scars of bad leadership, but it won’t erase the effects of his poor decision-making.

And Biden’s four years in office were riddled with poor decision-making.

On his first day in office, he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline with the mere stroke of a pen, destroying the multibillion dollar investment in the production and transport of crude oil from Canada, a reliable ally whose partnership didn’t carry hefty geopolitical implications.

Had it not been canceled, the Keystone XL pipeline would have likely been completed in 2022. That year, war flared as Russia invaded Ukraine. OPEC+ countries, particularly Saudi Arabia cut oil production to keep prices higher. Gas prices in the U.S. skyrocketed during the summer to over $5.00 per gallon on average.

Biden’s answer was to release a million barrels a day from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve and threaten “consequences” against Saudi Arabia, which fell on deaf ears and were never acted on. So much for a show of strength.

He attempted to halt deportations on his first day in office. By March 2021, illegal border crossings had doubled from only two months earlier. Over the next three years, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol would have over 10.8 million encounters with unauthorized entrants, over triple the number from the previous three years.

Some of the unauthorized entries from those three years were by well-adjusted individuals who saw illegal entry as the better way to establish a life in the United States, thanks to a broken system of legal immigration that has seen no significant reform under the Biden administration.

Some entrants were hardened criminals with existing convictions for rape and murder. Some had already been deported multiple times, yet waltzed back in. Some were children transported by cartel members.

At least 382 people whose names appear on the terror watchlist have been caught attempting to illegally cross the southern border. That’s up from a grand total of 11 during the previous three-year period under Trump.

In a move halted by the Supreme Court, Biden attempted to cancel a staggering $400 billion in student loan debt. A court also pumped the brakes on his subsequent “Plan B” move. Apparently if the law requires student loans to be — get this — repaid, a president and his administration can’t just say, “Nah, you’re good.”

Yet in a series of smaller actions announced during an election year or performed during the final weeks of his lame duck presidency, Biden has successfully managed to wipe away almost $189 million of student loan repayments owed to the American taxpayer.

Politico called it a “parting gift.” Those who paid their own way for college, went into the trades, or — again, get this — paid off their loans in full might call it a parting shot.

Meanwhile, no meaningful reforms have been applied to the student loan system, and the current academic year’s student loan interest rates are at their highest since the Great Recession. Great.

Biden turned his only Supreme Court pick into a DEI stunt by declaring before the search process even began that he would appoint a Black woman. In April 2022, Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed with a metaphorical asterisk next to her name and legacy, denoting that she was judged by the color of her skin and her sex before the content of her character or her judicial merit.

He attempted to enact rules that would allow boys in girls’ locker rooms and force unwilling students to use inaccurate pronouns under threat of punishment in the name of “inclusion.” And had the 2024 election gone a different way, he would have followed through with rules forcing female student-athletes to compete both alongside and against male athletes with distinct physical advantages, ruining women’s sports.

He botched the United States’ exit from Afghanistan with devastating results: A suicide bombing followed by a gunfire attack by members of ISIS-K resulted in the death of at least 169 Afghan civilians and 13 American service members. And a trove of U.S. weapons, ammunition, military vehicles and other tactical equipment worth over $7 billion was left behind to be seized by the Taliban.

According to reports, the Taliban has sold some of the weapons left behind by the U.S. to American adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Those same adversaries preferred for the U.S. to remain “tied down” in Afghanistan, Biden claimed in a speech defending his foreign policy last week.

But if the U.S. military was stretched thin by its commitments to the region, it defies logic that at roughly around the same time, Biden signed off on a defense department policy that would result in the subsequent discharge of U.S. service members leery of the new COVID-19 vaccine who refused to get the jab.

While young adults are the least likely to die from COVID-19 or experience long COVID, studies have shown that males under 25 — a significant portion of the U.S. military — have an increased risk of COVID vaccine-related cardiac inflammation.

Over 8,000 American service members were discharged from the military for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, while the pool of potential replacements is shrinking: Seventy-seven percent of Americans ages 18-24 are unqualified for military service due to obesity, drug use, mental health or chronic illness. Forty-four percent are unqualified due to more than one of those reasons.

Biden spent a significant portion of his Jan. 15 farewell speech warning about “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people.” It was a thinly-veiled reference to the incoming Trump administration.

But he was supposed to be the one who led the country out of the Trump era.

Most Biden voters didn’t actually desire to see Biden as president so much as they desired to see Trump not be president. Biden was just supposed to be the one to hit the reset button, hand the baton to the next generation of presidential leadership, and take a bow.

But he tripped over the button. He dropped the baton. He wasn’t all there upstairs The country struggled, and voters went back to Donald Trump — in larger numbers than the first time.

It will be hard even for supporters to miss a guy whose most impactful decision was also his worst: The decision to run for president.

How Joe Biden will be looked at as a figure in history is up in the air. After all, there was so much to his life in federal politics before he became commander in chief. Between the swearing-in of a just-widowed 30 year-old senator in a Delaware hospital following a car accident and an elderly president’s final trip on Marine One is a federal career totaling almost a half-century.

But we all know the most consequential part of that career. No matter how or if Biden’s legacy continues, his presidency will finally meet its end.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com