While the mainstream media was triggered anytime President Donald Trump eschewed any Swamp-y tradition, such as the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Joe Biden is largely getting a pass for failing to do such basic things expected of a new president as holding a press conference in his first 40 days or giving an address to a joint session of Congress.
The fact that Vice President Kamala Harris is making calls to heads of government, including Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and French President Emmanuel Macron, is not merely an interesting factoid—it is a troubling testament to the fact that our chief executive is abdicating his constitutional power.
If we were living in relatively tranquil times, such as certain points in the 1950s or the 1990s, that would be troubling, but maybe not catastrophic.
On the contrary, we are now amidst one the most perilous moments in our country’s history.
A rudderless administration can quickly result in mistakes the magnitude of which will have a profound negative impact for generations to come. Sadly, that is happening as we speak: The Biden team is stacking up its shortcomings one on top of another.
A current, major national security calamity is the migrant crisis transpiring at our southern border. President Trump kept his campaign promises, constructed over 450 miles of border wall, stemmed the tide of illegal crossings into our country and strengthened both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Instead of continuing to put America first, as President Trump did, President Biden has hung a preverbal “Free Entry” sign at our southern border, resulting in tent cities of migrants in Tijuana and, as a recent report by Axios showed, an almost-700 percent increase in unaccompanied migrant children being referred by CBP to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Biden is following in the footsteps of another weak, liberal politician, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. Chancellor Merkel effectively annihilated Germany’s border in swinging the doors open to 1.3 million migrants in 2015 and 2016, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The results have been simply devastating.
Even though Merkel and her supporters postured that most of the migrants were highly educated and would quickly assimilate into the German social fabric, that proved to be false. The migrants have been overwhelmingly uneducated and lacking occupational qualifications. Most of the migrants were young men who could not get a job, and their presence has cost Germany over $20 billion per year.
Merkel’s open invitation has resulted in a security crisis, economic crisis and political crisis all at once. The chancellor has been a lame duck ever since her epic migration failure.
Merkel herself has stated that the “situation” of 2015 cannot be repeated. Is there any chance that Joe Biden prevents America from succumbing to the same “situation”?
If the first several weeks of his administration are any indication, the answer is a resounding “no.”
Who does that hurt? Simple answer—all of us who are in this country legally and pay our taxes. And it especially hurts our national security and social welfare agencies, which have already become overstretched (a trend that will only exacerbate).
Longer term, the migrant crisis is sure to hit our working-class population, whose jobs the migrants coming through the southern border will be competing for.
Finally, President Biden is hurting himself by giving more and more strength to President Trump and the MAGA movement, whose border policies are vindicated every day.
One honest look at any recent video of Joe Biden, including his visual feed being cut when he dared to invite questions at the end of a virtual meeting with the House Democratic Caucus, makes clear that the current resident of the Oval Office is not up to the challenge of handling the burgeoning emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Boris Epshteyn is a former special assistant to President Donald Trump.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
