The more things change, the more they stay the same, at least when it comes to how President Joe Biden has conducted himself in office.
His administration has really just been a redux of former President Barack Obama’s, during which Biden served as vice president, of course.
The results of both administrations will be the same: Donald Trump as president.
Trump’s election in 2016 was in response to the Obama-Biden administration. Americans grew sick and tired of their leftist, globalist policies on illegal immigration, government spending, foreign policy and much more.
The first sign of the people’s dissatisfaction with the direction Obama and the Democrats were taking the nation came in the historic tea party-fueled landslide midterm election of 2010. The GOP picked up a net 63 seats in the House and control of that chamber after the Democrats had only taken it four years before. Then Republicans flipped the Senate in 2014, with nine new seats.
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Obama did win re-election in 2012 over moderate Republican Mitt Romney, albeit by a narrower margin than his 2008 victory.
But in 2016, Trump won the White House over Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, by flipping Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida into the GOP win column.
Things appear to be shaping up this year as they did then. Polling in the swing states favors Trump at this point.
DID YOU KNOW: Most recent polling from @EmersonPolling/@thehill has President Trump leading in ALL 7 SWING STATES:
📈 Arizona — TRUMP +4
📈 Georgia — TRUMP +8
📈 Michigan — TRUMP +2
📈 Minnesota — TRUMP +1
📈 Nevada — TRUMP +3
📈 Pennsylvania — TRUMP +3
📈 Wisconsin — TRUMP +2 https://t.co/TEJKR7ZQYw— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) June 20, 2024
The issues driving the political climate are clear and favor Trump.
Illegal Immigration
In April, Gallup reported that for the third straight month, Americans said immigration was the most important problem facing the nation.
Just this week, to commemorate the 12th anniversary of then-President Obama launching his Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, Biden announced his policy to create a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants who married Americans.
Obama launched his DACA plan in June 2012 as he faced re-election. The hope was to shore up Latino support, particularly given the Democrats had not passed immigration reform despite having control of the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and the presidency for the first two years Obama was in office.
The 44th president then went a step further in November 2014, announcing the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, which would have allowed 4 million people who were parents of U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents to remain in the country, according to Reuters.
The Supreme Court blocked that executive action from going into effect.
Like Obama, Biden has done everything he can do by executive action to promote illegal immigration.
On his first day in office, he reversed Trump’s key border policies, including “Remain in Mexico,” and the result has been a flood of migrant crossings.
According to Customs and Border Patrol, there were a record 2.48 million total encounters at the nation’s southern border in fiscal year 2023 alone, a half-million more than all four years under Trump combined.
Altogether, CBP has reported more than 8.2 million border encounters since October 2021, a number that does not include the 1.6 million estimated so-called gotaways that evaded apprehension.
Government Spending
But it’s not just the border. Like Obama, Biden has gone on a deficit spending spree, and it has led to a 50-year-high inflation spike and a 20-year-high in interest rates.
During the Obama administration, the nation experienced its first $1 trillion-plus federal government deficits. Shortly after he took office, the Democrats passed the $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
They then enacted other stimulus laws that totaled over $1 trillion more, according to the Manhattan Institute.
For all four years of Obama’s first term, the federal deficit exceeded $1 trillion.
Finally, with Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, they passed legislation implementing spending cuts and the deficit dropped to below $440 billion by 2015.
According to the Manhattan Institute, altogether, the Democrats added $4.6 trillion in new deficit spending while Obama was in office.
Biden has followed Obama’s example by strapping the nation with trillions in new deficit spending, such that interest payments on the federal debt are expected to top $1 trillion per year by fiscal year 2026.
Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office increased the 2024 deficit projection by $400 billion to a total of $1.9 trillion. A main cause of the increase is as much as $211 billion in student debt “cancellation” Biden made by executive action.
Some major new spending passed by Democrats under Biden included the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
In April 2023, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, working with the investment firm Goldman Sachs, updated their estimated cost of the latter bill’s “green” initiatives from $385 billion over a 10-year period to more than $1 trillion.
For further perspective, total federal expenditures in fiscal 2023 were $6.1 trillion, not far behind the $6.6 trillion spent in 2020 during the height of the pandemic.
Compare that with a pre-pandemic $4.4 trillion with a $984 billion deficit in fiscal 2019 under Trump.
Foreign Policy
Foreign policy was a disaster under Obama, and it is under Biden, too.
The Obama administration was marked by war in Ukraine and chaos in the Middle East, and so is Biden’s presidency.
Obama’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq led to a power vacuum that the Islamic State caliphate in Iraq and Syria filled.
He also bent over backward to appease Iran in an attempt to get the nation to agree to a nuclear weapons deal that had no real teeth. To get on Tehran’s good side, Obama released tens of billions of dollars to the regime.
Biden has followed Obama’s example.
During his first year in office, he ordered the rapid withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, which left a power vacuum that the Taliban has filled.
After Trump brought Iran to its knees with crippling sanctions, Biden changed policies.
The Biden administration did not enforce economic sanctions on Iran, allowing China and other nations to buy the rogue nation’s oil.
In April, the president changed course, somewhat, after Iran attacked Israel, but Chinese companies are still free to buy Iranian oil with no financial repercussions from the U.S., The Washington Post reported.
As during Obama’s administration, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Putin no doubt detected a lack of resolve and leadership because of the way Biden pulled out of Afghanistan.
Trump calls his foreign policy “Peace through strength,” the same philosophy that guided Ronald Reagan during the Cold War in the 1980s. There were no new wars under Trump. The U.S. military decimated the Islamic State and kept Putin in check as well as North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Further, peace was breaking out between Israel and its neighbors with the Abraham Accords. Now the region is at war.
Conclusion
Policies and leadership matter. The U.S. and the world are much less secure after three-and-a-half years under Biden.
The upside is just as Obama ushered in Trump the first time, his former vice president will do the honors for the second time.
