President Joe Biden is the oldest person to ever assume office at 78 years old, as of January 20th, 2021. While age is something that should be celebrated, senility is not. President Biden’s term in office, which has been a mere eight months to date, has been a total disaster, and now he is paying for it with a dropping approval rating. Between the high levels of inflation, the crisis at the southern border, and the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Biden presidency has been nothing but an utter failure.

The high levels of inflation that have continued to plague America over the last year-and-a-half, have accelerated to unprecedented heights under the Biden Administration. In June and July, the inflation rate reached a 13-year high of 5.4%. If the country continues to see this rate, we may soon look like Germany after World War I, going to the supermarket with a cart full of money. I would contend that a large sum of the inflation is a result of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. This was the act passed without any Republican support by a group of liberal Democrats and signed by President Biden. While the original House version of the act attempted to allocate $1.9 trillion to help the economy, the revised version was supposed to abridge the deficit problem, so it got revised to a mere $350 billion. I’m not an economist, but it should be common sense that if you flood a government with more and more spending, you will eventually run out of money, prompting the need to print more cash, devaluing the currency overall. With another few large spending projects looming around the halls of Congress, such as the omnibus bill and the new “infrastructure” plan, I do not see any recess in this economic downturn, but only an accentuation of it.

One of the other major failures of this administration is its handling of the southern border. In a study released in August 2021, migrant encounters at the Southern border are at a 21-year high. In July 2021 alone, 199,777 illegal migrants were encountered while crossing over the U.S. border. This is the highest since March of 2000, when there were 220,063 encounters. Assuming this statistic has been somewhat consistent throughout 2021, that would add up to more than 1 million immigrants crossing into this country with another half a million or so to still come. The U.S. cannot handle this surge of immigrants. We do not have the infrastructure to maintain this influx of people. We must also guard against allowing in unvetted people due to the crime and drugs they may bring with them. In March 2021, a video was captured along the southern border where a coyote trafficker dropped a child over the border fence on its head. These are not the types of people we want in America. Whether you support loose immigration laws or tight ones, the U.S. has laws that need to be enforced. This is not a question of political affiliation, this is one of upholding the oath which the president swore to.

Finally, the biggest mistake of this administration was its Afghanistan withdrawal. As I stated in my last article U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Afghanistan Merits Praise, not Blame, I do not believe that this administration warrants complete blame for the fiasco, but on its face, it was a yucca flats level disaster. To illustrate how botched the withdrawal was, within 24 hours, a government that we put 20 years’ worth of money and resources into building fell apart. Helicopters could be seen picking people off rooftops to evacuate them out of the country to safety, which heralds a memory of the 1975 Saigon evacuation. The fact that the evacuation even got to the point of lifting people off rooftops is a problem all by itself. As the U.S. continued to remain in the country in order to evacuate, the Taliban came riding through the country unopposed and unscathed. Much like the former administrations’ goals in Afghanistan, President Biden kept moving the goalpost further down the field. At first, he wanted to prevent the Taliban from taking over, then he wanted to prevent them from taking the city of Kabul, the capital. By the time he issued his goals, they had already beaten him to the punch, leaving him a small airport to evacuate his troops and allow fleeing Afghanis to grab onto the bottom of the planes and fall to their inevitable deaths. This evacuation was one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the last twenty years, and I do believe it will hurt the administration going forward, possibly leading to the Democratic Party losing Congress in next year’s midterms.

In conclusion, this administration has been horrible, hence the quickly faltering approval ratings. They may soon face their own doom if they continue down this track. In states like Virginia, where Biden won by 10 points, the governor’s election is heating up to be a tight race. Even if the Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin loses, it’s sure to be a closer margin than normal, which could be a good indicator for next year’s midterms. While I am sure that some of the failures of this administration are out of its control, President Biden must stop blaming everybody else and take responsibility. After all, as President Harry S. Truman said, “The buck stops here.”