North Texas Daily

Joe Biden has now been president for a full month. Recently, he held a town hall at CNN where he, as Joe Biden is wont to do, stuck his foot in his mouth several times. Two instances stand out immediately: Joe Biden’s claim that the nation “didn’t have” the coronavirus vaccine when he came into office and his claim that people in the Black and Hispanic communities don’t know how to use the internet to find out where to get vaccinated.

Not only are both of these claims extraordinarily false, but they are equally laughable. Biden not only received his vaccine a month before taking office, but it was covered on national news. His statement regarding Black and Hispanic Americans is not only extraordinarily patronizing, suggesting we need an education campaign because these communities can’t use the internet, but it’s also extraordinarily racist.

This is symptomatic of a larger problem with the first month of Joe Biden’s presidency. Biden is lying and misrepresenting his agenda as president. In December, Biden promised to deliver 100 million doses of vaccine in his first 100 days as president. That’s 1 million doses per day, which was already happening during the final days of the Trump administration. In short, Biden’s promise was to continue the work that President Trump already started. Not only this, but his rhetoric regarding vaccine production and distribution now mirrors the same rhetoric that Biden criticized during the Trump administration: the timeline for the vaccine was too fast, untested and risky.

Biden’s statement in his town hall regarding the faulty ability of Black and Hispanic Americans to go online and figure out how to get the vaccine also causes some serious questions about his supposed commitment to racial equity and equality. Can a man who thinks racial minorities are so dumb that they can’t use Google really be in the fight for racial justice? Can a man who said you can’t go into a gas station without having a slight Indian accent be the face of the push for equality? Can a man who said that Barack Obama was the first clean and articulate Black man to run for office really get behind Black Lives Matter?

Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he merely misspoke, we must first ask “what on earth was he trying to get at in the first place,” and secondly, “even if this is just a symptom of foot-in-mouth disease, can someone who makes such horrible remarks so frequently really be the face of the movement?” Keep in mind, it wasn’t all too long ago that his own Vice President was reminding him on the debate stage that he used to praise two segregationists in the US Senate.

Finally, Biden has broken one of the key promises he made to the American people during the campaign: he would not be a radical. With so many of the Democratic candidates embracing radicalism, such as now-Vice President Kamala Harris embracing abolishing private insurance, Beto O’Rourke proposing gun confiscation and the entire Bernie Sanders campaign, the Democratic Party base and independents looked to Biden to return the nation to a sense of normalcy, and Biden’s response was “I am the party.”

Biden began breaking that promise right away, canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline and killing thousands of jobs, rescinding the Mexico City policy and promising to codify Roe v. Wade into law despite being a “very devout” Catholic. His support for a $15 minimum wage, which he acknowledges should legitimately worry small businesses, and his push for the so-called Equality Act, which would force the progressive view of sex on workers, medical professionals, parents and children also add to this. Make no mistake, Biden is governing as a radical.

Biden campaigned on several issues during his campaign: he would change the trajectory of the pandemic, stand up for racial equality and govern as a moderate. He has instead continued the course set by Trump, continued by in his sloppy language concerning minority Americans, and has governed in the exact opposite way in which he said he would on the campaign trail. Biden’s first month has been little more than a betrayal of his campaign rhetoric and promises. On the bright side, that’s one month down. We just have 47 more months to go.

Featured Illustration by J. Robynn Aviles