The Biden presidency retcon

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

President Joe Biden's reelection campaign has two great liabilities: the crisis on the southern border and stubbornly high inflation.

The costs of feeding, housing, educating, and providing healthcare for immigrants released into the United States by Biden is bankrupting big cities and small towns across the country. Grocery, energy, and health insurance prices are causing similar strain on household budgets. Higher interest rates, caused by inflation, have made the key elements of the American dream, home and car ownership, more unaffordable than ever.

When asked by pollsters, voters consistently name these two issues, immigration and inflation, as the two most important when choosing who to vote for this November, and voters overwhelmingly give Biden poor ratings on both. According to the latest Harvard University poll, 61% disapprove of Biden's handling of inflation, with 64% disapproving of his handling of immigration.

Biden has clearly earned his negative assessment on both issues. On the border when Biden took office, fewer than 2,500 immigrants were being encountered daily on the southern border. After just one month of Biden's catch-and-release border policies, that number rose to over 3,500. At the time, Biden claimed this was just a "seasonal" fluctuation that "happens every single solitary year." But then the numbers kept rising, hitting 5,775 a day in March and then steadily rising to an all-time high of 9,741 encounters a day this past December.

These are record-high numbers. And Biden has released more than 3 million of them into the country, overwhelming not just border communities but big cities like Denver and small towns like Whitewater, Wisconsin.

On inflation, prices rose just 1.4% in the 12 months ending in January 2021, and it was the 11th consecutive month that annualized inflation was under 2%. But then Biden threw gasoline on an already recovering economy by passing a $2 trillion spending plan. Inflation took off, rising to an annualized 5.4% in June 2021 and peaking at 9.1% in June 2022. The inflation rate has since come down, but because inflation is compounded, consumers are still feeling the pain from the huge spike Biden caused.

These facts are all extremely inconvenient for Biden, and so he is now borrowing a tactic used by Hollywood when a story previously told becomes inconvenient for the narrator. Biden is now trying to achieve "retroactive continuity" between his past actions and current reality. Retconning, Merriam-Webster Dictionary tells us, is when an author revises "unpopular elements of a work" with a "general disregard for reality."

Biden's "general disregard for reality" was on display this week when he claimed in the Rose Garden that inflation was already skyrocketing when he took office, a statement that anyone with even a passing familiarity with history knows is untrue. Pressed to explain this falsehood the next day, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did not admit Biden was wrong but instead tried to spin a tale where "the disruption of the supply chain" and "Russia's war in Ukraine" were the sole causes of inflation and Biden's policies had nothing to do with it. But Russia didn't even invade Ukraine until February 2022, when inflation had already hit 7.5%. The Biden retcon timeline simply makes no sense.

On immigration too, Biden is trying to rewrite history. For the first three years of his presidency, Biden denied there was a crisis on the southern border. Now, suddenly, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is singing a different tune. Just days after telling the New York Times that the southern border was not in crisis, Mayorkas told NBC's Meet the Press there "certainly is a crisis" and then in the very next sentence said, "We don't bear responsibility for a broken system."

But Mayorkas's flip-flop raises the question of when exactly the southern border became a crisis, as a quick look at the numbers shows it wasn't in crisis when Biden was sworn into office but is now. Mayorkas may want to blame Congress for the border crisis, but again, the data show Congress has given Biden more money to detain immigrants than Biden asked for. It is the dozens of unilateral executive actions promoting leniency on border security, actions Biden used to brag about but has now suddenly forgotten, that are to blame for the border crisis. Voters know this.

Biden may still manage to cobble together enough votes from those voters who prioritize abortion above all other issues and those who are understandably turned off from seeing Donald Trump in the White House again. But win or lose, the press has an obligation not to let Biden rewrite history.