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I once again offer my annual lists of the 10 best and 10 worst things the president did this year. Regular readers know I have been highly critical of President Biden during his first year in office — so, in the spirit of the season, we’ll start with the best things he did:

10. He launched the first test of a new system to defend Earth from a killer asteroid. On his orders, NASA launched a rocket into space testing “whether a spacecraft can nudge a celestial body in a way that will alter its orbit.”

9. He twice launched airstrikes against Iranian proxy forces in Iraq and Syria. He continued the Trump policy of taking military action against Iranian-backed forces who threaten or attempt to kill U.S. personnel.

8. He became the first president to resist Turkish pressure and officially acknowledge its 1915 genocide against Armenians. His statement sent a clear message that the United States would hold even allies to account for abuses of human rights.

7. He recovered the majority of the ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline to a Russian hacking collective. After the company paid ransomware attackers who shut down its computer systems and caused fuel shortages up and down the East Coast, the Biden Justice Department followed the money and seized 63.7 bitcoin, valued at about $2.3 million.

6. He sidelined the court-packing movement on the left. Biden created a commission that included sensible liberals and conservatives which steered clear of taking a position on the most controversial ideas for changing the court.

5. He elevated Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the “Quad”) among the United States, Australia, India and Japan. After eight dormant years under President Barack Obama, the Quad was reinvigorated by the Trump administration and raised to a ministerial-level meeting. Biden elevated it further to an annual leader-level meeting, rallying the Indo-Pacific democracies to counter China and help lead Asia in the direction of peace and security.

4. He stepped up U.S. support for Taiwan. He invited Taiwan to participate in his 110-nation Summit for Democracy, invited Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to his inauguration, invited Taiwan to share its expertise at the Global COVID-19 Summit and continued to provide Taiwan with the defense capabilities it needs to defend itself against Chinese aggression. And his administration worked hard to beat back efforts by the People’s Republic of China to squeeze countries to de-recognize Taiwan.

3. He announced a historic trilateral security agreement with Australia and Britain to counter Chinese hegemony. The new AUKUS pact will help Australia develop nuclear submarine capabilities that will allow it to project power in the Pacific, and increases cooperation on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

2. He accelerated covid vaccine delivery at home and abroad. In the United States, more than 70 percent of American adults are fully vaccinated. And his administration provided more than 300 million doses — more than the rest of the world combined — to 110 countries free of charge. He also launched the Global Covid Corps, a coalition of companies that will support vaccination efforts in developing countries.

1. He signed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill into law. Biden campaigned on a promise to usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation. Sadly, this was the only major piece of legislation to deliver on that promise. It will provide non-inflationary, long-term investments in roads, bridges, ports and waterways. Its passage also saved the filibuster, by delivering for Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) — the two lonely Democrats standing in the way of filibuster elimination — and vindicating their effort to reach across the aisle.

Other achievements did not make the top 10. Among the honorable mentions: Biden issued an executive order prohibiting Americans from investing in 59 Chinese firms that allegedly are linked to the Chinese military; he signed bipartisan legislation to ban the import of products produced with Uyghur slave labor; he announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics, a pointed snub to protest the Chinese regime’s human rights abuses without hurting U.S. athletes; and he launched an initiative to find deported U.S. veterans and bring them and their families back to America.

There were also a number of policies that nearly made the list, until Biden reversed himself. He told a CNN town hall that if Taiwan were attacked, the United States would come to its defense — seemingly ending our misguided policy of “strategic ambiguity” — but then the White House backtracked and said there was no change in policy. He called Russian President Vladimir Putin a killer, and promised to oppose the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, but then greenlighted the project — a major victory for the Russian leader. Both of these would have made the 10 best if he had followed through.

The 10 worst things Biden did in 2021

In my last column, I listed the 10 best things President Biden did in his first year in office. Here are the 10 worst (winnowing this list down to just 10 entries was extremely difficult):

10. He canceled Operation Legend amid a record crime wave in U.S. cities. At least 12 major cities broke annual homicide records in 2021. Yet Biden ended the Trump Justice Department’s Operation Legend, which deployed federal officers to aid local law enforcement and helped arrest more than 6,000 criminals. Now, with Chicago suffering the most violent year in a quarter-century, its mayor is requesting federal help to fight violent crime — help that Biden withdrew when he took office.

9. He weaponized the FBI to intimidate parents who show up at school board meetings. Parents are furious about pandemic closures and schools indoctrinating their kids with extremist ideologies. Biden treated them like domestic terrorists.

8. In the midst of a historic labor shortage, he pushed vaccine mandates. Forcing employers with more than 100 employees to fire unvaccinated workers — even if they have natural immunity from previous infection — or impose onerous weekly testing requirements would drive more Americans out of the labor force, at a time when businesses can’t find workers and there are more than 11 million unfilled jobs.

7. His war on fossil fuels helped drive domestic production down and gasoline prices through the roof. Then he begged the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) — a foreign oil cartel — to produce more oil, which will result in the same emissions as domestically produced oil. It’s like the 1970s all over again.

6. He greenlighted Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany. Then Biden inappropriately pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Russian energy dominance over his country. Democrats impeached President Donald Trump for far less.

5. He showed weakness in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine. It’s no coincidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening Ukraine just months after Biden’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan and his capitulation on Nord Stream 2. Then, channeling his inner Neville Chamberlain, Biden offered to hold talks to discuss Russia’s concerns on NATO and the possibility of “accommodations.” Pushing Ukraine to “accommodate” Moscow under threat of invasion would reward Putin’s aggression — and invite more of it.

4. He unleashed the worst border crisis in U.S. history. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported more than 1.7 million encounters with illegal migrants at the southern border, nearly four times the number the year before, the highest annual total on record — including 378,000 who were not from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala. Seizures of deadly fentanyl more than doubled in 2021, and the drug is closely connected to a surge in overdose deaths, which reached a historic high.

3. His $1.9 trillion in social spending disguised as “covid-19 relief” helped unleash inflation and extreme labor shortages. This was the worst fiscal policy mistake in decades, passed with Democratic votes alone. And despite all that “covid” spending, shortages of test kits and treatments persisted as the omicron variant arrived.

2. He failed to deliver on his promise to put his “whole soul” into uniting the country. Biden threatened to veto his own bipartisan infrastructure bill, then went to Capitol Hill and urged members of his own party to take it hostage as leverage to pass Build Back Better. He failed to pass any other major pieces of bipartisan legislation, allowing himself to be captured by his party’s radical left wing.

1. His withdrawal from Afghanistan was the most shameful foreign policy calamity in my lifetime. Biden left hundreds of U.S. citizens and as many as 62,000 of our Afghan allies behind enemy lines, and forced NATO allies to abandon their citizens and allies as well. He put the safety of U.S. service members at the Kabul airport in the hands of the Taliban and Haqqani network, a decision that led to the deaths of 13 Americans in a suicide attack. His “over the horizon” drone strike killed no terrorists but took the lives of 10 innocent people. And he repeatedly lied about the unfolding disaster — declaring that al-Qaeda was “gone” from Afghanistan; that no Americans were having trouble getting to the airport; that no allies were questioning the United States’ credibility; that none of his military advisers had recommended leaving a residual force; and that his Afghan debacle was an “extraordinary success.”

That’s a shameful list, but it only scratches the surface. Among the (dis)honorable mentions: Biden proposed what the New York Times reports were the “highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II”; he increased vaccine hesitancy by insulting the unvaccinated; at a time when the threat from China is rising, he sent Congress a budget that actually cut defense spending after inflation; and he told Putin that 16 areas of the United States’ critical infrastructure were off-limits to Russian cyberattacks — which effectively told the Russian leader that the rest were not.

Little wonder that Biden suffered the fastest collapse in public approval of any president in modern history. When he took office, he had almost 56 percent approval and was 20 points above water. Today, he’s more than 10 points underwater. That’s a 30-point swing in less than a year. No recent president has fallen from grace so far, so fast, so early in his presidency.

Marc Thiessen writes a twice-weekly column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. 

This article was originally published on The Washington Post.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.