The presidency of the United States is a position unlike any other. In addition to commanding a powerful military and influencing a great economy, the president’s words can have a great impact on the world. As a nation, we are now paying the price for the reckless, partisan and destructive rhetoric of Joe Biden. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the carnage he has inflicted on our southern border.
The situation at the border has veered from the tragic to the absurd. During the utterly fictitious scandal over federal agents on horseback allegedly whipping Haitian migrants, members of Biden’s party in Congress made some shockingly irresponsible and racially inflammatory comments. This was no doubt done to shift attention away from the administration’s incompetence at the border and put critics on their heels, no matter the damage done to our already polarized society. It was a scenario tailor-made for a wise leader to enter the fray and bring calm and perspective to the situation.
Instead we got Biden, amplifying the overheated charges and vowing that the agents on horseback would “pay” for their misdeeds before an investigation into the charges had even begun. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tried to recover with some boilerplate language about the professionalism of the agents, but the damage was done. Why would people sign up to protect our borders again, or stay on the job with “leaders” who will stab them in the back and throw them to the wolves because a small but angry mob on social media put their feelings ahead of facts?
The consequences of Biden’s cowardice go beyond crippling the morale of our immigration enforcement agents. Journalist Lara Logan reported, after observing how Biden reacted to the horseback incident, human trafficking cartels are instructing their smugglers to force Border Patrol agents to react or appear to use excessive force and then record it. The cartels will then feed recordings to the U.S. media to force more agents off border duty.
In an era of faux victims like Jussie Smollett and Bubba Wallace, Biden has given media-savvy cartels a golden opportunity that they will exploit to boost their profits and increase the human misery at the border.
This is far from the first time Biden’s loose language has negatively impacted our country. While Biden and his water-carriers now claim that the waves of people showing up in Texas this year is a seasonal phenomenon, they were more likely responding to his clear invitation to them to “surge the border” once he was in office. The call was probably little more than a self-serving attempt to throw red meat to the anti-borders progressive base during a primary debate. That Biden didn’t know or didn’t care about the reverberations of that statement beyond our borders is further indictment of his fitness for office.
In addition to the very real damage he is causing the country, Biden’s words take the unnecessary step of insulting the intelligence of the American people along the way. This can be seen throughout his administration, such as when Mayorkas repeatedly insists that the border is closed. The border is not closed, and we see evidence of that fact every day.
Another insult was the elevation of Kamala Harris to the sham position of “immigration czar” and deploying her to Central America to search for the “root causes” of the immigration surge to our border. Harris did not have to travel to the Northern Triangle at all, as the root causes reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. They are the words and actions of a chief executive with a radical and destructive immigration agenda.
Biden’s greatest supporters, predominantly the corporate news media, pushed his candidacy last fall by citing his decades-long tenure in the Senate as proof of his qualifications for the presidency. This is actually one of his greatest weaknesses in the White House. Membership in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body means you are one of 100, and the impetuous words of a random senator usually incur no penalty.
The situation is far different in the White House, where a president’s words are scrutinized by cartels, legitimate and illegitimate asylum seekers, and outright enemies of America. They will act on those words to their own benefit, and our country and its people will usually bear the burden.
Despite the cliché, words are not cheap. They are quite costly when those in high office choose them so poorly.