No, dear reader, Biden isn’t ‘Worst pres. EVER’
A reader of this column, Tony Sperandeo, protests that your columnist has been remiss in slamming Joe Biden for his many faults while constantly knocking the other guy running for president. “For a few columns I thought you might be getting reasonable,” Mr. Sperandeo wrote in an email on Wednesday. “But then you slipped back to your normal self. All we ever hear from you is Trump did this, Trump is disgusting, his sons are thieves BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.”
When a letter opens in this manner, my keen powers of discernment quickly conclude that the writer is most likely a Trump supporter.
I further conclude that said writer is probably upset about reading negative references to Trump.
That’s understandable. No one likes to see a political figure one admires taken down in any way, and that was never truer than with Trump supporters.
Those I hear from are committed to him, no matter what.
It seems impossible to offer any facts that might even slightly diminish their positive view of the 77-yearold former Republican president or even modestly brighten their dark view of Biden, the 81-year-old Democratic incumbent.
But, with Mr. Sperandeo, I will give it a try. We have entered a presidential election year. I feel a need to respond.
So, as Groucho Marx used to say, “Pardon me while I have an interlude.” This won’t take long.
First of all, with regard to Mr. Sperandeo’s complaint that “all we ever hear from you” is negativity about Trump. That’s way out there in imagination land.
I make reference to Donald Trump from time to time — as I did in Wednesday’s column, referring to the former president as an insurrectionist — but this column sticks mainly to local topics. I don’t recall referring to Trump’s sons recently, either.
Mr. Sperandeo’s letter listed several points about Biden that he feels I have overlooked.
“For the record,” he wrote, “nothing about the Bidens and their thievery.”
That’s not much to go on. By Bidens, I assume he means father Joe and son Hunter. Republicans keep trying to have the sins of the son visited upon the father, but there’s no evidence that the president did anything wrong. House Republicans admitted as much at a news conference in May.
Still, they have launched a groundless impeachment inquiry, trying to connect Joe to Hunter’s foreign business dealings and sleazy trading on the family name. This looks like nothing more than cheap Republican payback for the two Trump impeachments and his four criminal indictments. Mr. Sperandeo asked why I haven’t commented on this. Well, sir, now I have, and there you go.
“How about Joe’s problems?” Mr. Sperandeo added. “Three million illegals let in since his election.”
By “illegals,” I assume he means undocumented immigrants who cross the nation’s border with Mexico to escape poverty, criminal gangs and environmental crisis.
The precise numbers are hard to pin down.
While crossings surged again recently, they dropped significantly in certain months last year as immigration policies changed.
The Biden administration ramped up deportations in fiscal 2023 to 142,000, doubling the year before, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Of course, the border problems did not start with Biden. They have been ebbing and flowing for years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, resulting from a failure of Congress to come up with a workable and humane solution.
Being humane is not on the Trump agenda, with his ugly claim that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Vowing to be a dictator, Trump has promised mass deportations, even as economists
keep telling us that the nation’s productivity will not continue to grow without more immigrants.
“Most inflation ever,” wrote Mr. Sperandeo. “Highest gas prices ever.”
Wrong. In the late stages of the Great Inflation period, from 1965 to 1982, prices rose at a rate of more than 14%, according to the Federal Reserve.
The peak of inflation under Biden was 9.1% in June 2022, and it has declined steadily since, with consumer prices increasing at 3.1% by November.
I bought a dozen jumbo eggs at Giant this week for $2.99.
This needs a little more perspective: As we came out of a pandemic, which hurt whole industries and the global supply chain, Russia invaded Ukraine. Prices of gasoline spiked immediately after that horrible war started.
But, two years later, prices have fallen, and Thursday morning,
AAA reported that the national average price for unleaded gas was $3.09 a gallon, the lowest it has been in a year. (It was slightly higher in Maryland, at $3.13 a gallon, some 22 cents lower than a year ago.)
At least one analyst thinks some regions of the country could see the price fall below $3 a gallon this month.
“Worst pres. EVER,” Mr. Sperandeo wrote of Biden. “His poll numbers show him losing to TRUMP.”
Well, you won’t see me declare Joe Biden the worst president ever because I don’t believe he is, and far from it. His weak poll numbers, if you trust them, are more a reflection of how voters feel about his age than about his record.
That record is better than any Trump supporter would acknowledge: Unemployment at 3.7%, with 14 million jobs created since Biden took office; an economic growth rate of as high as 5% in some quarters; no indictments, no questions about his basic decency, no doubts about his respect for democracy.