By Post Editorial Board
It’s New Year’s Day, time to take stock of 2023 and consider what lies ahead for 2024 — and for President Biden, his grim past presages a harsh future in a reelection battle for the ages.
Biden took office with expectations high: He was the man who would return us to politics as usual after the disruptions of the Trump years.
He would oversee a period of healing and reconciliation and get the country back on the right track.
How’d that work out, Joe?
From his first days in the Oval Office, he pursued an agenda 100% driven by the most radical elements within his party.
On the border, the economy and foreign policy, he followed cues from online activists and insurgent hard-left electeds like AOC and Rashida Tlaib.
He imposed policies that have done this country grave harm and continues to mock and disparage anyone who dares to point out that this doddering emperor has no clothes.
The past year revealed, in all their full and ugly panoply, the consequences of Biden’s ignorant, arrogant philosophy (if you can call it that).
Consider the migrant crisis, which he and the open-borders enthusiasts in his Cabinet manufactured.
The past year was an utter catastrophe, as illegal migrants — including scores of names on the terror watchlist — streamed into the country.
The official tally for fiscal 2023 is 2.47 million encounters at the southern border (with at least 1.7 million “gotaways,” migrants seen but not apprehended, since 2021).
That doesn’t even begin to take into account those never spotted by CBP — or the 483,404 who have streamed in since the end of fiscal 2023.
The strain from these unprecedented influxes is overwhelming tiny towns at the border, trapping Americans in Mexico and straining the fiscal health of cities as far away as New York to the breaking point.
Yet Biden remains utterly indifferent, only offering bogus “action” like last week’s pointless Blinken-Mayorkas “mission to Mexico” that simply puffed the ego of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador while doing nothing to slow the illegal tide.
Then there’s the centerpiece of Biden’s re-election campaign, “Bidenomics.”
The president and his flunkeys in the press insist that Biden’s economic stewardship has somehow been good for average Americans, that it is building the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up.”
No: Prices are up 17.4% since Joe took office.
When you isolate key expenses, the picture’s even worse. Food is up 20.3%; rent is up 18.6%; electricity is up 24.3%.
Indeed, despite the economically illiterate insistence in some quarters of the media that we have conquered inflation, it’s still very much alive, averaging an eye-watering 5.5% year over year for every year of Biden’s tenure.
That’s even as real hourly wages are lower: $11.39 when Biden came in vs. $11.07 now.
Things have gotten so bad that more than a third of Americans said they would skip giving gifts this holiday season.
If that’s economic success, we’d hate to see failure.
And this is what Biden’s running on, proving he’s as out of touch on the economy as he is on . . . well, everything else.
But please don’t imagine Biden’s confined his destruction to our domestic situation.
On Oct. 7, Hamas overran the Israeli border and committed a terrorist attack of unmatched savagery, butchering babies, murdering the elderly, raping and pillaging and burning.
Iran — the country Biden desperately wants as America’s BFF — played a major role in the attack; even now its proxies menace the region with attacks on commercial shipping and US military assets while Tehran ramps up to nuclear breakout.
This was, of course, directly invited by Biden’s supine posture toward the regime.
That culminated mere weeks before Oct. 7 with a $6 billion payoff for US hostages held in Iran.
And even now Biden can barely summon up the will to offer the limpest of responses, as he busily slanders Israel and does everything in his power to shackle our most reliable regional ally.
He’s as culpable for the Hamas attacks as he was for Putin’s brutal Ukraine war: Biden touched off that conflagration by implying the United States and her allies wouldn’t respond strongly to a “minor” incursion.
All this is to say nothing of the endless drip-drip of evidence implicating Biden and his cut-rate Cosa Nostra in personal corruption around first son Hunter and brother Jim’s influence-peddling business.
Or his administration’s beyond-extreme positions on gender butchery for kids and woke nonsense in education.
Given such abject failure, it’s no wonder Biden’s political prospects look so grim.
In poll after poll, his job approval rating is deep underwater — by an average of -15.5 points, per RealClearPolitics.
Ask whether the country is on the right track, and you see an even more disastrous lack of confidence in Sleepy Joe, with almost 68% on average saying America is going the wrong way.
Most incredibly of all, Donald Trump — against whom the media, the FBI and various prosecutors have been arrayed since his election — is now running neck and neck with Biden in general-election polling or actually beating him.
Proof positive Biden has failed beyond redemption.
And no, it’s not due to sinister disinformation plots. Or Russian meddling. The president’s own policies are responsible.
As bad as his 2023 was, his 2024 is set to look a lot worse.
So congrats, Joe.
It took some work, but you’ve really outdone yourself.
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