This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden has agreed to debates with former President Donald Trump where he is expected to lay out his second term agenda.
Beyond expanding federal regulations and forcing his green agenda on the nation, Biden is hinting of higher taxes and even more illegal immigration.
The week was a mixed one again for the president. Inflation showed signs of leveling off, but it appears that the higher prices it brought will not come down. The White House was also rebuffed again by Israel in its continued effort to smoke out Hamas terrorists in Gaza. And the presidential polls, while tight nationally, are looking bad for Biden in the battleground states that are expected to determine the outcome.
Conservative grader Jed Babbin highlighted Biden’s plan to let the Trump tax cuts expire, and that could hit the less wealthy. Democratic pollster John Zogby agreed that the public is focused on Israel and the economy and not the Trump trial sideshow despite the best efforts of the media and White House.
Jed Babbin
Grade: D-
It was another one of those weeks for President Joe Biden and the kakistocrats — persistent inflation, a huge surge in illegal aliens coming into the U.S., and a new plan to waste more money on climate change.
Inflation came in at over 3% again, more than the administration’s economists had expected. It’s a constant tax that takes money from everyone who buys anything. Meanwhile, Biden plans to raise taxes even higher if — heaven forbid — he is reelected. There’s more talk in the White House about expiring the tax cuts OK’d by former President Donald Trump and adding more taxes on people who make less than $200,000 a year — which Biden promised to ban. There are also plans to tax gains on unrealized income. That is, if your house is worth tens of thousands more than you paid for it, you’d be taxed on the gains before you sell it.
Meanwhile, the surge in illegal migrants is the highest since before Biden became president. That news is accompanied by two other facts. The first is that more than one million “gotaways” — those who have slipped past the Border Patrol to smuggle fentanyl or commit terrorism — have come in since Biden took office. And more than half of the new migrants are unemployed and likely happier on welfare.
Then there’s Biden’s plan to spend more than $7 billion on charging stations for electric cars, which consumers don’t want because they work poorly in winter, take too long to charge, and are otherwise impractical.
Biden also moved to protect himself from embarrassment, asserting executive privilege over the recordings of special counsel Robert Hur who looked into claims the president improperly hoarded highly classified information in his Delaware garage. According to the Wall Street Journal, hiding the recording and its evidence of Biden’s mental failings, is totally bogus. Biden wants to conceal his mental decay from the public.
Finally, Biden has agreed to debate Trump in the presidential race. The first debate is set for June 27 before two of CNN’s biggest Trump bashers. The only question is whether Biden’s hidden earpiece will flood his ear with so much in response to Trump that he’ll be too confused to say anything.
John Zogby
Grade: D
Welcome to a nation where words like “tawdry,” “sordid,” “scurrilous,” “shameless” and its twin “shameful,” no longer exist. It is a wide-open field for bad behavior.
Just like it’s difficult to know anymore what is a foul or not a foul in the NBA, everything is out there and becomes a partisan battle to determine what is legal or illegal, moral or immoral, simply right or wrong. The TV networks are gleefully covering former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial where the star witnesses are tried and true liars. Unlike in war or school shootings, these media don’t even read the prompter boilerplate warning that “what you are about to see may be disturbing.”
After Trump, Hunter Biden’s trial begins very soon, and, right after that, we have the first presidential debate. All part of the same continuum. This is all very sad to me but the report card must go on.
President Joe Biden received some modest good news on inflation and the stock market reacted immodestly, shooting past 40,000 for the first time. But he still trails a man who is on trial for allegedly paying hush money and cooking the books to make it look like a legal fee — one legal fee he happened to have paid.
But I honestly don’t hear anyone talking about the trial at all. Instead, it’s all inflation, Gaza, climate change, crime.
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Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him on X @jedbabbin
John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Survey and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His podcast with son and managing partner and pollster Jeremy Zogby can be heard here. Their firm polls for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Follow him on X @ZogbyStrategies