President Joe Biden just had another very, very rough week according to CNN.
And things just keep getting worse for the embattled Democratic Party leader.
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“President Joe Biden has had a very tough week,” CNN’s segment on Thursday titled “Week From Hell” began.
In the background, CNN listed the setbacks faced by the White House and the Biden agenda just this week.
- Supreme Court blocks vaccine mandate
- Testing shortage, CDC confusion
- Inflation accelerates
- BBB stalls in Senate
- Fears of Russia invading Ukraine
- North Korea launching missiles
- Approval at 42%
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You can watch the brutal segment here —
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden promised to break through the congressional logjam. End the pandemic. Get the economy back on track.
Days before he hits his one-year mark in office, this torrent of bad news is gnawing at the foundational rationale of Biden’s presidency: that he could get the job done.
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Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said Biden’s sweeping promises have collided with the realities of enacting change in a divided Washington where his party has only the slimmest margins of control in Congress.
“I don’t think there’s any way to reach any other conclusion than he’s overshot here,” Engel said. “It’s important to separate the politically possible from the politically desirable.”
Biden’s troubles extend back to August, when the administration executed a chaotic and deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the president’s professed competence was already under question as migrants multiplied at the southern border with no clear federal plan in sight. It deteriorated further as inflation that was supposed to be “transitory” only intensified at the end of the year.
“I’ve been hired to solve problems,” Biden said last March during his first press conference in office. Yet they’ve proven persistent.
The difficulty of navigating Washington’s vexing partisanship and the unpredictability of the presidency should have come as no surprise to Biden, a senator for more than three decades who also spent eight years as vice president.
Biden hasn’t gotten sympathy from the frustrated public for being unable to solve his predicament.
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Even with the now widespread protection of vaccination, new scenes of long virus testing lines and sold-out grocery store shelves hark back to the chaotic earliest days of the pandemic and drag down the nation’s psyche.
The administration is going all-out to counter that mindset and demonstrate it’s on top of the virus.
Rep. Peter Meijer, R-Michigan, said Biden had cultivated “sky-high expectations when he inevitably cannot meet them.”
“If you want to be FDR,” Meijer added, “it’s probably a prerequisite that you have a mandate. On the same ballot that elected Joe Biden into office, the Dems nearly lost the House.”
Biden’s handling of the economy has brought its own set of challenges. The president has presided over decent job creation but also over renewed fears of out-of-control inflation.
Biden tried to tamp down concerns about inflation this summer, insisting that it was the predictable result of restarting the economy after the pandemic and that rising prices would soon fade.
“Our experts believe and the data shows that most of the price increases we’ve seen were expected, and expected to be temporary,” he said in July. “The reality is, you can’t flip the global economic light back on and not expect this to happen.”
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But inflation only multiplied as the summer ended and oil prices rose. That prompted the president who has promised a future without fossil fuels to make a record-setting release from the U.S. petroleum reserve to help tamp down the cost of gasoline. Even so, inflation in December reached a nearly 40-year high of 7% annually.
And Friday marked the first time in half a year that families are going without a monthly deposit from the child tax credit, which had been seen as a legacy-making program for Biden but has emerged instead as a flashpoint over who is worthy of government support.
The high prices slashed into public confidence in Biden. Just 41% of Americans approved of his economic leadership last month, down from 60% in March, and below his overall dismal approval ratings.
At the same time, amid the rise of new COVID-19 variants — first delta and now omicron — Biden’s approval rating on handling the pandemic fell from 70% early in his presidency to 57% in the December survey.
The White House shrugged off the setbacks as a part of the job for a president aims high.
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“You do hard things in White Houses,” press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday. “You have every challenge laid at your feet, whether it’s global or domestically. And we could certainly propose legislation to see if people support bunny rabbits and ice cream, but that wouldn’t be very rewarding to the American people.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article