“In India, the world’s largest democracy and home to a great diversity of faiths, we have seen rising attacks on people and places of worship.” These were the words of the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken the other day, as he waded directly into our internal affairs. Instead of dignifying that with a response, let us ask the real question. Which lobby is the US Secretary of State pandering to over there? What would leave the Biden administration so desperate that they have to appeal to a tiny slice of the activist class in Washington for support?
The answer is a tottering presidency and an administration that no longer knows what it is doing. Just over a year into his term, President Biden is overwhelmingly unpopular. On every issue, from the economy to foreign policy and even coronavirus management, the public no longer believes in him. Let alone vote for him in 2024, opinion polls show that a staggering 70 percent of Americans don’t even want him to run! This includes members of his own party. with 51 percent of registered Democrats saying they want their party to nominate someone other than Biden.
All this means that everyone in Washington, as well as everyone else in the political class, is busy running away from the President. His party faces a tough challenge in the midterms elections in November this year, and is likely to lose its majority in both houses of the legislature. Democratic Party colleagues who want to save their political careers no longer seek Biden’s endorsement. In states where his party is hoping to pick up the governorship and a few seats, party candidates have refused to share a stage with Biden.
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How did this happen? It was due to a series of crippling policy failures that left Americans struggling with shortages of basic items, high prices, a new war and a crisis of confidence in all their institutions. It got to a point where the country’s mainstream media, which mostly colludes with the Biden administration, could no longer paper over the problems of real people in their daily lives.
A baby food crisis
“What we are seeing which is an enormous problem is hoarding, people hoarding because they are fearful.” This is what the White House had to say on food shortages, in particular, the crisis of baby food across the United States right now. The current crisis began sometime in February. But even before that, Americans had been reporting shortages of basic items in grocery stores, through October and November last year. The breakdown of the supply chain, from a pileup at the country’s ports to a shortfall in trucking, meant that the US was running out of everything. There was no paper to print books, no rubber for tires, and no wood to make furniture. Some hospitals put out pleas to the local population, asking them to donate crutches and wheelchairs, due to a shortage of aluminum.
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The Biden administration responded with spin, telling people to feel good about the shortages. If there is a shortage, it must be because people have too much money, and they want to buy too much stuff. But by April this year, desperate mothers were lining up all across the country, sometimes driving dozens of miles, to look for a store that still had baby food. Major retailers began limiting how much baby food customers could buy at a time. Most stores were empty anyway.
As prices have skyrocketed, the resentment among the public has grown. Now the Biden administration is pointing fingers at mothers and their babies for hoarding, which makes them sound much more like the regime in say Venezuela or Zimbabwe.
GDP in negative territory, inflation at a 40 year high
In the November 2020 elections, Biden rode to power with a promise to “build back better,” after the devastation brought by the pandemic. But he has failed to pass his economic relief package, despite his party having a majority in both houses. Despite this, he had the low base effect on his side, and the GDP figures for 2021 looked respectable. But it is 2022 now, and the latest numbers show a 1.4 percent annualized decline in the first quarter.
Meanwhile, inflation was shooting up. At first, the administration said it wasn’t real. But people were paying more for everything, from cars to milk, meat and vegetables. By October or November last year, they said inflation was real but only transitory. It would be over soon. By December, the White House put out a series of graphs, concocted by friendly Nobel-winning economists, showing that high prices actually help the poor. By March, inflation soared to a 40-year high of 7.9 percent. This is when the Biden administration announced that it was all Russia’s fault. They dubbed it the “Putin price hike.” It didn’t catch on.
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The inflation has hit 8.3 percent now, while GDP has slipped into negative territory. The New York Times tried to run a story on how the negative data was “masking” Biden’s economic recovery. But while numbers usually don’t lie, regimes and their media often do.
Soaring crime in American cities
As if a baby food crisis, negative GDP growth and a 40-year high in inflation were not bad enough, American cities are at their most dangerous in decades. Murders in major American cities are now up by as much as 44 percent over 2019. In New York City, murders are up 52 percent over pre-pandemic levels. In Chicago, some 50 people were shot only last weekend. This has resulted in emergency measures, such as the city of Chicago imposing a curfew on any minor being out on the streets after dark.
The situation has been complicated by the fact that Biden’s Democratic Party has come to be seen as soft on crime. Indeed, since mid-2020, much of his party’s left-wing activist base has campaigned on a platform of defunding the police, and even outright calls to abolish the police. But crime has risen consistently since then, along with a general breakdown of law and order. Videos have gone viral showing thieves entering stores, filling their sacks with anything they want, and walking casually away. Coordinated robberies, where entire shopping blocks are stormed simultaneously, have become common. The fashionable downtown areas of many American cities now resemble war zones, with glass shop fronts all boarded up to prevent smash and grab robberies. While parking their cars, many people now choose to leave their windows down, so that thieves can see that there is nothing inside. This has left the Biden administration struggling to explain their soft on crime approach, trying to pretend that the far left anti-police elements of their party base do not exist. Or that they never existed.
A military defeat in Afghanistan, and a failing war in Ukraine
“Sanctions never deter,” an embarrassed President Biden told reporters in March 2022, the month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This was of course the exact opposite of their position in January 2022, when Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said clearly that the purpose of sanctions was to deter Putin. Whatever the spin, the American people just have to live with the fact that US sanctions no longer work. Whoever saw images of the US military retreating in defeat from Afghanistan would know that the US is no longer the sole superpower. And this happened on Biden’s watch.
Now the war in Ukraine is going badly. And the American public is paying for the war daily at the pump, where gas prices have doubled. They also paid 40 billion dollars upfront for the war, when Biden hurriedly pushed through his military aid package for Ukraine. This was at a time when American mothers were struggling to find baby food. Remember that the money did not actually go to Ukraine. It went towards buying weapons from American defense contractors. The same defense contractors usually donate to election campaigns of politicians. But top leaders of Biden’s Democratic party insisted that giving $40 billion to defense contractors was a Christian religious duty on the part of ordinary Americans. They quoted the Bible inside the House to make their point.
Meanwhile, Russia continues its advance inside Ukraine. America’s NATO allies continue to buy oil and gas from Russia. In fact, US sanctions had the opposite effect. It made relatively cheaper Russian crude more attractive in the global market. In 2022, Russia is running a current account surplus of $96 billion, nearly four times higher than the same period in 2021. And President Biden now says that Ukraine might have to give up territory to Russia after all.
Allegations of personal corruption
Amid all the bad news, the Biden administration is also struggling to fend off allegations of corruption. Hunter Biden, the President’s son, is under investigation for tax fraud running into millions of dollars. And then there is the so-called “laptop from hell,” something that Hunter accidentally left behind at a repair shop in Delaware. It contains a huge cache of emails that suggest Hunter might have sold access to his father back when Joe Biden was vice-president in the Obama administration. In turn, Joe Biden’s son was paid huge sums of money to sit on boards of companies run by Ukrainian oligarchs, or firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
What makes the situation even more sinister is the fact that when the laptop was first revealed in October of 2020, just before the presidential election, it was dismissed as fake news by mainstream media. A class of ‘experts’ labeled the laptop as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. This was followed by a severe clampdown by Big Tech, which banned people from sharing the story on any major social media platform. Since then, the laptop and the emails have been found to be genuine. A large section of the public now sees it as a deliberate cover-up on the part of media and tech companies to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
A failed ‘Ministry of Truth’
In April 2022, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a new body to be known as the “Disinformation Governance Board.” Its apparent purpose was to identify “disinformation” on various issues and treat those accused of spreading “disinformation” as security threats. Not surprisingly, many commenters immediately described it as an attempt by the Biden administration to silence critics. They called it a ‘Ministry of Truth,’ from Orwell’s dystopian novel.
It also did not inspire confidence that the new Board was supposed to be headed by one Nina Jankowicz, an expert seen as highly partisan. From her social media footprint, she appeared to have amplified allegations that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, as well as some rumors targeting Trump that turned out to be false. In one video, she even demanded the right to edit tweets by ordinary users that she thought lacked context, which many Americans found chilling. It got so bad that the Department of Homeland Security finally had to disband the Board after facing a month of all-around ridicule. The Biden administration is now firmly in retreat, on all fronts.
Most of the failures of the Biden administration have followed a similar path. Start by denying that anything is wrong. Then, bring in friendly media and experts to whitewash people’s concerns, or “fact check” them away. And when it is too late, point fingers at others.
The Biden administration cannot rescue its political capital by bashing India. They might win some applause from the fringe left activist class that is still looking to squeeze out some favors from their administration. They might even appease some American religious lobbies that fund conversion and missionary activity within India. But it is much more likely that issues such as food shortages, inflation, soaring crime, failed wars and corruption will dominate the polls.
In recent months, the American liberal media, which is friendly to the Biden administration, has published a spate of articles blaming India on a number of issues. They blamed India for buying Russian oil, even though Europe was buying more by several orders of magnitude. First, India was hoarding vaccines, now wheat. Now they say India is intolerant towards religious minorities. These distractions won’t work for American liberals. They will still have to answer to ordinary Americans for those food shortages.
Abhishek Banerjee is an author and columnist. He tweets @AbhishBanerj.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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