When Joe Biden gave his inaugural address over a year ago he promised unity, a return to normalcy, and a sound economy.
However, what President Biden has delivered is a series of self-inflicted failures: record high inflation, a broken supply chain, historic crime waves, a border crisis, a grave debacle in Afghanistan, chaos on the world stage, a war on domestic energy production, and more division than we’ve had in generations.
The rosy picture painted by the president in his address last night proves Biden and the Democrats are still foundering in their own delusions. But the American people aren’t fools; they know the state of our union is suffering at the hands of Biden’s weak leadership, divisive rhetoric and broken promises. It seems the only trust that remains is the trust that Biden’s incompetence will make things worse. According to the latest poll from Quinnipiac, just 37% of Americans approve of Joe Biden while 56%, a clear majority, disapprove. A whooping 58% of Americans say the state of our union is worse now than it was a year ago, while a majority of the country views Biden’s first year as a “failure.” This is the state of broken promises.
Inflation is at the highest levels in 40 years, costing the average family an extra $3,500 in 2021, and climbing. Everytime we wince at the gas pump, do a double-take at the grocery bill, and drop our jaws at home prices and rent rocketing to the stratosphere, we feel it. Inflation is wiping out the wage gains and dreams of millions of Americans as Democrat spending sprees diminish the value of each and every dollar they earn.
Americans see how overzealous central planning and authoritarian COVID policies have kneecapped supply chains, leading to product and labor shortages that disrupt everyday commerce. And yet, the tone-deaf Biden administration sent Vice President Kamala Harris to Durham this week to promote unionism as if our labor markets were not distorted enough already.
These self-inflicted crises have only accelerated as Biden’s weak leadership invites chaos on the worldstage. The war in Ukraine did not emerge from a vacuum; it is an obvious consequence of feckless leadership in the White House. Americans find it hard to believe Biden’s sunny take on things while seeing our international adversaries besiege countries on Europe’s doorstep and put their nuclear forces on high alert. It confirms how utterly disastrous Biden is when it comes to foreign policy, from the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, to enabling autocrat bullies like Communist China and imperial Russia.
While those fires burn on the international stage, the threats closer to home continue unabated in the form of a border crisis Biden refuses to acknowledge, let alone fix. Over 2 million illegal aliens have crossed into our country in the last year or more of Biden’s open border policies, straining border patrol and creating the conditions for drug cartels to pump record amounts of deadly drugs like fentanyl into our communities.
Even as drugs are pumped into our neighborhoods, Biden is blocking American energy producers from pumping enough oil and gas to keep prices down and the world less beholden to bad actors like Russia. Instead of increasing domestic energy production, Biden uses a band aid in the form of 50 million barrels of oil from the U.S. strategic reserve – a drop in the bucket – and then he doubles down on climate change initiatives, such as “environmental justice.” These are hardly the priorities of Americans whose quality of life depends on affordable, reliable energy.
That quality of life is damaged further by the crimewaves in cities around the nation as a result of Democrats’ soft on crime policies and complete abandonment of law and order. As we see an uptick in brazen carjackings and organized retail “smash-and-grab” robberies, our own communities in North Carolina struggle to hire enough police officers after years of Democrat-fueled anti-police rhetoric.
For North Carolinians, and the American people at large, it’s obvious that our nation is under a level of strain we haven’t experienced in generations. It’s obvious that the foundation of our union has been eroded and our unity destroyed by the wedge of Woke politics and Democrats’ embrace of fundamentally anti-American concepts. It’s obvious that, despite all the promises, the weak and bumbling Joe Biden has delivered one self-inflicted crisis after another while enabling radical politics that demonize our neighbors and divide our communities.
Biden may paint a rosy picture one year into his term, but the reality is he has only delivered crises, failures, and broken promises. North Carolinians know the state of the union is not strong and they deserve better.
Michael Whatley is the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Pary
