In Review | Joe Biden’s First Year

It has been a little over a year since Joe Biden’s presidential tenure began. These days, a year is a long time in politics, with the news cycle always speeding up and the attention spans of the public being ever more TikTok’ed. Therefore, it might be useful to review Biden’s achievements and remind ourselves of the things we witnessed throughout the past year that we might have forgotten about. Thus, below is a (non-comprehensive) list of some of the highlights from a year of our dear ‘most popular’ president in US history.

An Executive Presidency

In the first two weeks of his presidency, Biden signed 28 executive orders, far outpacing his predecessors all the way back to the quasi-imperial tenure of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many of these orders focused on rolling back Trump-era policies and realigning the US political superstructure towards a more progressive trajectory. Perhaps most significantly, Biden halted the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and applied to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, from which the US had withdrawn under Trump. A number of the executive orders also involved action related to the Covid pandemic.

Biden’s ‘strong’ arrival came, of course, in the wake of the January 6th Capitol breach, which followed several months of controversy regarding Biden’s presidential legitimacy. Signing as many executive orders as possible might have been useful for Biden not only to draw a thick line between himself and Trump, but also to create the perception of a president who is firmly and incontrovertibly in control.

The Gas Crisis

By May 2021, the US was facing steep rises in energy prices; an issue highlighted and underscored by the Colonial pipeline being hacked for ransom. The attack caused local gas shortages and elevated prices somewhat. However, these effects were minor in comparison to the overall trend that had been in place almost since the beginning of Biden’s presidency. Sharp rises in gas prices were attributed to Biden’s environmental policies, in which he reneged on the aim of his predecessor of the US becoming an energy-self-sustaining country even at the cost of non-compliance with emission reduction targets. Biden’s supporters claimed instead that the US President had little control over gas prices in the short-term, and that the price hikes were the result of things gradually returning to normal after the effects of the first year of Covid.

The Official Press

Later in May, Biden’s administration found itself in the middle of a major press-related controversy. At the centre was a White House policy that required reporters to “submit quotes from interviews with Biden administration officials to the communications team for approval, editing, or veto.” The rule was not created by Biden, but according to the New York Post, his administration began relying on it much more than Trump had ever done.

This controversy, however, was just a minor part of Biden’s much wider plan for tighter information control. In July 2021, news emerged admitting frankly and openly that the US government cooperates with major online media companies to curate and block online content. To this day, these measures include government “flagging” of content it wants removed from major platforms. In a press conference, Biden’s Surgeon General Vivek Murthy commented on the findings of a new ‘guidance’ titled ‘Confronting Health Misinformation’ which featured ‘recommendations’ on what different companies and institutions “can” do to filter information online to exclude unwanted “problematic” sources and influences.

The Afghanistan Withdrawal

In summer 2021, the US famously withdrew its military presence from Afghanistan after 20 years of on-and-off warfare and state-building. The country was identified in 2001 as the site where the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been planned by the militant group al-Qaeda. Even though al-Qaeda’s local presence was reduced to negligible levels after a few months, the US continued to be involved in Afghanistan, as the Taliban — an organisation aiming to establish an Islamic state in the country — became the primary target instead, with the US throwing its weight behind a less conservative, non-Islamist government.

Two decades later, it was clear that the Taliban was not disappearing, and in 2020 the Trump administration negotiated an agreement with the Taliban that would ultimately end the war. The execution of this withdrawal, however, would fall on Trump’s successor. Despite delaying Trump’s plan in the name of being better prepared, Biden’s withdrawal was an unequivocal disaster. In the process, the US-supported Kabul government collapsed within days and the Taliban gained almost complete control over the country. While this was not too surprising, the evacuation involved leaving tens of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment behind for the Taliban to arm themselves with. In addition, as many as 9000 US citizens were reportedly left behind when the US military left on August 31st. The withdrawal also saw a terrorist attack in which at least 170 Afghan civilians and 13 US troops were killed. The whole operation was reported to have been unprepared, chaotic, and without properly coordinated oversight.

Regardless of having performed remarkably poorly in this situation, it is to Biden’s credit that he did not decide to renege on Trump’s deal altogether and continue the US occupation of Afghanistan. Ending the US’ longest and long-lost war is indeed a great achievement on its own, despite all the unfortunate circumstances that accompanied it.

A Locked-down Country

Throughout 2021, Biden and his administration were firmly on the side of the perpetuation and exacerbation of existing Covid-related restrictions. While the first year of draconian and totalitarian limits on people’s basic freedoms took place under Trump’s watch, this was an area in which Biden decided not to distance himself from his predecessor. Nevertheless, governors of several US states came out in direct opposition to Biden’s approach, with August 2021 in particular marking a stand-off between the Biden administration and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on the issue of Covid in the Sunshine State. Amid a surge in reported cases, DeSantis had scrapped the vast majority of Florida’s restrictions including mask mandates and resoundingly rejected lockdowns, arguing that a rise in Covid incidence was a seasonal affair and that non-pharmaceutical interventions had proven ineffective.

A Welcoming Country

Since the spring of 2021, Biden’s Vice-President Kamala Harris had been tasked with addressing the US’ border crisis. Even throughout the pandemic, the southern border had no shortage of people trying to cross into the US without official authorisation. The year 2021 had seen a dramatic increase in “land border encounters” in the US’ southwest, with videos of crowds under a border bridge in Del Rio, Texas, waiting to be processed by immigration authorities making headlines. In September, the Biden administration found itself in conflict with Texas Governor Greg Abbott on the border issue, who, accusing the Biden administration of being in “complete disarray” regarding the crisis, announced he would start the construction of a $3 billion wall on the Texan border.

A Diluted Currency

Rising prices have been perhaps one of the most publicly noticeable features of the Biden era. Continuing with the staggering pace of ‘money-printing’ inaugurated by his predecessor at the start of the Covid pandemic, the President has now found himself facing official inflation numbers unprecedented in recent decades. Throughout 2021, the story kept changing. At first, the claim was that inflation simply was not there, with headlines reading: “No Inflation Worries”. “Is it time to worry?” became the headline shortly afterwards. By the end of summer, concerning numbers began to surface; and when autumn shortages hit the US, lower supply of goods put additional pressure on prices of everyday items that were already being inflated by rapid money creation. By November, inflation reportedly surged “to its highest since 1990” as Biden tried to claim in his defence that disposable incomes of regular Americans were on the rise. Real wages, however, were in fact declining when adjusted by current official inflation statistics.

As the public nowadays find themselves regularly reminded just how much of a theft inflation is, it is not clear where this train terminates. Is there any prospect of the dollar as a reserve currency returning to a more stable state, or will this end in a massive tragedy and a monetary reset of some kind?

Rebuilding the US

In November 2021, Biden signed into law his signature legislation: an infrastructure bill. Included in it is the goal to repair much of the roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, pipes, cables, and other infrastructure that, in many cases, has become considerably aged and dilapidated in the US. Unfortunately, little scrutiny has predictably been put on the bill thanks to the ‘bipartisan’ support that it gathered, with the criticism it did face concerned primarily with the bill’s price tag — over $1 trillion.

Despite Biden’s success with his infrastructure bill, he has faced difficulties pushing through a related piece of legislation: the (in)famous Build Back Better Act. As part of Biden’s overarching Build Back Better plan, the bill would apportion huge amounts of money to a variety of programs and social services provided by the US government. The most significant amounts of money would be spent on the advancement of green energy and climate change legislation, and on child support services including tax credits. The original total price tag was $3.5 trillion, a figure which was then being negotiated down in Congress. However, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin then suddenly rescinded his support of the bill with prejudice. Since Biden would need the backing of all 50 Democratic Senators to push the bill through, Manchin put Biden’s effort’s in this direction to rest for the time being.

The Most Popular President in History

In early 2021, when the fame and flavour of Trump was still the bread and butter of daily news, the powers that be, including the corporate press, were firmly behind Biden. Throughout the year, however, and as the President proved to be unpredictable or completely absent at times — and ever less in control of his agenda or administration — his own party along with the press started to turn against him. Whereas in spring last year any criticism of Biden would be instantly ‘deboonked’ and fact-checked to death by loyal journalists, he is not able to inspire them to hold the line a year later. Articles critical of Biden and in open disagreement with his actions and rhetoric are not rare anymore. It is clear that the winds have changed.

Similar developments have been underway when it comes to Biden’s popularity among the public. While he was once famously being proclaimed the most popular president in American history (usually due to the fact that he had received the highest number of raw votes in the 2020 election), his approval ratings have been on a steady decline ever since. By autumn 2021, Biden was about as popular as Trump had been during most of his presidency, but the numbers keep declining still. 

As of mid-February, Biden’s approval rating stands at 14% net disapproval, with even his most staunch supporters admitting that he has “struggled” in the mission he set for himself of bringing America together. Instead, President Biden has been successful in exacerbating the current conflicts. When it comes to the culture war, some US citizens are now even pondering the notion of burying the axe by splitting the country apart in a bid to avoid some kind of civil war scenario. While such considerations are admittedly not mainstream (yet), these discussions illustrate to what extent things are simply not going Biden’s way, to say the least.

Let’s see what the next year has in store for us and hope for the best.