Now The New Yorker turns on Biden: Slams his 'jumble of aspirations and haze of uncertainty' after NYT and WaPo attacked him
The New Yorker published a piece Friday describing the Biden presidency as a 'haze of uncertainty' and a 'jumble of aspirations' that are far from what is politically possible to achieve.
'The Biden Presidency, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, remains a jumble of aspirations—and retains a haze of uncertainty about how to achieve them,' Susan Glasser writes. 'Much of his political problem, it seems to me, is a vast gap between his articulated goals and what is politically possible.'
Still, in the editorial entitled 'It's Too Early to Consign Biden to the Ash Heap,' Glasser says that conservatives declaring the Biden presidency 'dead' is as overstated as liberals dubbing him the second coming of FDR.
'The warning lights are undoubtedly flashing red for Biden right now.'
A slew of critical news coverage from the mainstream media and record-low approval polls are the latest evidence the United States is souring on President Joe Biden.
A new Harvard/Harris poll indicated Trump, for the first time, has overtaken Biden in approval ratings for the first time since he lost the 2020 election, with Biden dipping to 46 percent and Trump rising to 48.
But, Glasser notes that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had low approval ratings early in their presidency and both went on to become popular two-term presidents.
'The failed-Presidency crowd sees this as the inevitable outcome of a leader who strayed from the promise of his campaign to oust Donald Trump—to return America to competent, sane governance—and instead embraced a politically impractical vision of a progressive utopia,' the piece continues.
'The general feeling among Democrats these days: Is it time to panic yet?'
Still, it praises Biden for his 'relentless diplomacy' as the progressive agenda that could define his presidency hangs by a thread in Congress.
Congress is soon set to vote on a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that progressives have promised to vote against if it doesn't come to them in tandem with a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. Moderate Democrats, meanwhile, have said they could never support such a high price tag for the second spending bill.
Meanwhile, Congress may be forced to shut down next week unless they pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling that Republicans have vowed to oppose.
'The difficult truth is that, should Congress fail to pass Biden's bills this fall, it would, in fact, be the kind of political blow that few new Presidents can recover from, the New Yorker piece states.
But, to Biden's credit, Glasser writes: 'He has not, Ã la Trump, taken to Twitter to denounce the dissenting members of his party as 'dinos,' ... He has not fired anybody or started lining up primary challengers to his own party's members of Congress who have angered him. He has not called up MSNBC hosts in a panic for advice.'
Meanwhile, Biden is being squeezed on all sides by a pandemic he promised would be essentially over by this time and is still killing 2,000 per day, a widely-condemned withdrawal from Afghanistan and a surge of migrants at the southern border.
The New York Times published two pieces on Wednesday comparing Biden to former President Donald Trump despite the former building his administration on the promise he would be different than his controversial Republican predecessor.
The pieces cite Biden's handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the ongoing border crisis, pointing out his falling back on policies and decisions even he himself maligned while Trump was in office.
An article titled 'Biden Pushes Deterrent Border Policy After Promising 'Humane' Approach,' begins by reflecting on scenes that have surfaced this week of border agents on horseback forcefully rounding up and charging at migrants trying to cross the chest-deep waters of the Rio Grande.
'The images could have come straight from former President Donald J. Trump's immigration playbook,' the news story notes.
Biden got some unflattering comparisons to President Trump from top media organizations this week while polls show American voters may like him less than the Republican
Biden has tried to distance himself from Trump's harsher border policies
It comes a day after the Washington Post's White House bureau chief slammed the president for shutting down questions from American reporters during the president's meeting Tuesday with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The Times's border story published on Wednesday points out that the Biden administration promised a more 'humane' approach to tackle immigration, but is ramping up its use of a Trump-era COVID rule to expel asylum-seeking migrants on the spot - specifically, to clear some 15,000 mostly Haitian migrants out from an encampment under the Del Rio bridge in Texas.
'The deportations are a stark example of how Mr. Biden... is deploying some of the most aggressive approaches to immigration put in place by Mr. Trump over the past four years,' the story claims.
It quotes Latino civil rights leader Marisa Franco, 'The question that's being asked now is: How are you actually different than Trump?'
An op-ed published the same day is topped with a scathing headline aimed at Biden: 'The UnTrump Presidency Slams Into Trumpness.'
'Biden isn't drawing an emphatic enough contrast with Trump,' author Frank Bruni writes, observing that Biden's deportation of Haitian migrants has invoked comparisons to his predecessor.
Biden's handling of the border crisis prompted one immigration advocate to ask: 'How are you actually different than Trump?'
'The kind of border bedlam attributed to Trump's incompetence and insensitivity has returned and once again dominates the news,' Bruni writes.
Bruni also notes Biden's decision to withdraw the US military from Afghanistan by August 31 caught allies by surprise.
'He pulled out of Afghanistan without the degree of consultation, coordination and competence that allies expected, at least of any American president not named Trump,' he writes
With the abandonment of thousands of Afghan allies, Bruni said, Biden also failed to live up to the empathetic image he's crafted to distance himself from the cold, caustic perception of the Trump administration.
On Tuesday the Washington Post, another legacy media organization, also joined in criticizing Biden.
White House bureau chief Ashley Parker also invoked Trump on Tuesday night after Biden met with Johnson in DC.
Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal and abandonment of US allies there has also prompted comparisons to Trump
'Worth noting that Biden ran for office promising to restore democracy after 4 years of Trump. But today it was the British leader, NOT the American one, who spotlighted a key tenet of a flourishing democracy - respect for a free press - by taking questions from his press corps,' Parker tweeted.
Biden did not recognize any American reporters for questions during an Oval Office meeting with Johnson - and his aides cleared out journalists as they tried to query the president.
White House staff even interrupted Johnson as they pushed to get reporters out of the room, shouting over the British prime minister as he and Biden sat in their chairs, watching the chaotic scene unfold as aides ushered journalists out of the Oval Office.
As reporters were ushered out, CBS White House reporter Ed O'Keefe shouted a question to Biden asked about the situation on the US-Mexico border. The administration is facing backlash and criticism following images of US Border Patrol agents on horseback using whips to round up migrants or prevent them from stepping onto American soil.
The Washington Post's White House bureau chief Ashley Parker was critical of Biden in a Tuesday night tweet
President Joe Biden holds a bilateral meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the Oval Office at the White House
But White House aides yelled 'thank you' and 'let's go' to the press in the room, herding them out as Biden appeared to try and address the issue.
Between the shouting of his aides and the president's wearing a face mask, it was impossible to make out the majority of what Biden said.
The newspapers' attitude toward Biden is reflective of the country's larger discontent with the president amid multiple crises.
Support for Biden dropped dramatically to 46 percent as of September following the nation's chaotic exit from Afghanistan, crisis at the southern border with Mexico, and deadlock in Congress over his infrastructure bills, according to Harvard/Harris data.
Meanwhile, Trump's approval ratings remained at about 46 per cent since 2020 and surpassed Biden after rising to 48 per cent in September.
'The mounting issues on all fronts have led to the surprise conclusion that Trump is now seen as being as good a president as Biden, suggesting the honeymoon is being replaced with buyer's remorse,' Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard/Harris survey told The Times.
A new Harvard/Harris poll found that most people are regretting voting for President Biden as his approval ratings fell over the summer while Donald Trump's ratings saw a small uptick
The poll comes as Biden held talks with feuding Democrats at the White House on Tuesday in an effort to reach an agreement on the $1.1 trillion infrastructure deal and the second $3.5 trillion bill containing new social spending.
It also stands in the wake of a new migrations crisis in Texas as thousands of migrants, mostly from Haiti, cross the Rio Grande and settle in camps outside of the city of Del Rio.
As well as revelations that the US mistakenly killed 10 people, including one aid worker and seven children, after a botched done strike meant to kill an ISIS-K terrorist.
The Harvard/Harris poll also found that 55 per cent of people believed former Vice-President Mike Pence was a better vice president than his successor, Kamala Harris, and that 63 per cent of people thought Mike Pompeo was a better secretary of state than Anthony Blinken.
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