A friend of mine has been asking me for months whether or not Joe Biden has topped my list of worst American presidents ever. I have vacillated on this one, since he has lots of competition for that particular condemnation.

Looking at things from, on the one hand, a Marxist perspective on who did the worst to the American people in general, and OTOH, from an unemotional, amoral, Realpolitik foreign policy perspective on what is best for the nation of the United States, Biden is definitely in the Bottom Five. In a couple of ways, he is the clear hindmost of the pack of characters who have been America’s Chief Executive.

Let’s compare Biden to the Worst President Ever according to most historians—James Buchanan. Buchanan earned the moniker because he sat in the White House for four years, and did nothing to try to avert the obviously looming danger of civil war between the two competing, and incompatible, political and economic systems of the North and South.

Buchanan’s worst offense was in ordering massive amounts of Federal weapons, ammunition, and be sent to the South between Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and inauguration in April 1861. He knew the South was going to secede, knew it would provoke a civil war between slave and free states, and provided the the war material the South had to have if it was to have any chance of successfully leaving the union.

IOW, Buchanan made a longer, bloodier civil war much more likely. Hardly good for the American people as a whole, and giving European imperial powers the opportunity to intervene in and exploit other peoples in the Americas while the US was too busy with a civil war to do anything about it, as Mexico would be quick to learn.

No other 19th Century President ever contributed anything as catastrophic to the United States as did James Buchanan.

Does Biden slither underneath Buchanan’s nefarious example? First, let’s go through the presidents who have been around since the danger of war became exponentially worse, as illustrated by the twin horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Truman ordered the atomic bombings of Japan, and led the US to the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union by allowing the mainly American and South Korean forces try to outright conquer North Korea after that country’s initial, and very nearly successful, attempt to forcefully unify the Korean peninsula had been defeated.

It triggered the intervention of Mao’s China, the near destruction of an entire US Marine division, duels between Americans in Sabre jets and Russians in Migs. However, Truman DID back off, firing General Douglas MacArthur when the latter violated presidential orders by bombing China itself.

Domestically, Truman did pass the GI Bill, did integrate the armed forces, and even tried to socialize American medicine. It was the unpopularity of Truman’s imperial policy in Korea, not what he accomplished or failed to accomplish at home, that dropped Truman’s approval ratings to unsurpassed lows at the end of his term.

American capitalism was at its very peak during the terms of the next three presidents. Of the three, it was John F. Kennedy who let himself nearly blunder into nuclear war with the Soviet Union after trying to topple the Cuban government with a botched CIA invasion that led to Castro’s request to the Kremlin for nuclear missiles to be installed in Cuba.

But JFK was smart enough to overrule his more bellicose advisers, and he never pushed the US to the brink of war with more than one nuclear-armed power at a time. Doesn’t seem like much of a much, but Biden hasn’t been elected yet.

Reagan, with the help of Tip O’Neill’s Democrats, set the stage for the neoliberal nightmare we are now experiencing, and had me convinced he was going to nuke the Russians, but that never happened.

Poppy Bush engaged in a couple of small, quick imperial ventures but never tried to push them too far. The same can be said for Bill Clinton, even as he accelerated Reagan’s economic policies at home.

George W. Bush’s presidency was an ongoing festival of horrors, but he never implied his domestic political opponents were enemies of either democracy or the state, and his bloody imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq never once made anyone think he had any intentions of going to war with nuclear-armed powers.

Donald Trump’s biggest claim to fame among anti-imperialists of all stripes is that he was the first President since Jimmy Carter not to involve American troops in any foreign wars. His one domestic policy accomplishment was the biggest transfer of wealth upwards in human history; a combination of tax cuts for the top 1% and the massive bailout of capitalist enterprises during the Covid pandemic.

At least he gave the American people $1800 each during very hard times. Joe Biden only managed $1400 after promising $2000 and never intending to send a dime. Trump also started the process for the withdrawal of all American and other allied imperial forces from the Dubyan and Obaman quagmire of Afghanistan.

Biden, to his credit, completed that withdrawal, but then botched it by refusing to release Afghan government funds held in trust by American banks, and now millions of women and children in that country face starvation. What a guy.

So much for the positive stuff. In foreign policy, other than the Afghan withdrawal, Joe Biden has been an unmitigated disaster for the US Empire as a whole. He continued the Clinton-Obama-Bush II policy of NATO expansion in spite of years of Russian warnings, and egged on the Nazi-riddled Kiev regime into trying to crush two breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine and formally requesting NATO membership.

Biden got what he, and the MIC, wanted. Russia invaded Ukraine, and Biden responded with massive sanctions on Russia that are more properly described as economic warfare. He promised the Western Europeans that America and its despotic Arab allies would make up for any natural gas or oil shortage caused by participating in this economic war against Russia, and the good little imperial puppets seem to have actually believed him. Idiots.

Meanwhile, Biden has sent at least $60 billion worth of weapons and what-all to Ukraine, to the ka-chinging of profits for the MIC, escalating the rhetoric and bringing the US and Russia closer to a shooting war than the two countries have been since Kennedy was President. As if that was not enough, Biden has taken an aggressive, provocative stance towards China.

In response, not to mention self-defense, Russia and China are closer now than they have been since Stalin died in 1953. Biden’s method of economic warfare—seizing the foreign currency reserves of his designated enemies—has forced them to look for mediums of exchange other than the Almighty Dollar, and they have found them.

Russia’s currency is stronger than ever. Russia and China have established a trade network with India, most of Africa, the oil despotisms of the Persian Gulf, and parts of Europe and the Americas that no longer needs the dollar.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Vladimir Putin’s counterstroke to the economic warfare the West calls sanctions threatens to devastate the entire European economy. As Putin, not to mention people in the West with brains, repeatedly warned, it turns out that Russian natural gas and fuel oil simply cannot be replaced in Western Europe anytime soon.

The German government is telling its people not to use air-conditioning, to take sponge baths instead of showers, and the blond bimbo who is the head of the European Union is calling for mandatory 64F(18C) heat temperature settings this winter. The UK lurches towards a general strike. Italians are burning utility bills like American antiwar protestors once burned draft cards. Tens of thousands of French, German and Czech people are taking to the streets calling for an end to the sanctions on Russia and for their countries to leave NATO.

Meanwhile, back home, the inflation that was started by the kleptocratic policies of Biden’s predecessors leaped to over 8% a year in response to the disastrous effects of the losing economic war on Russia. Gasoline leaped up to the $5/gallon range before settling back down to just under $4, still up by at least a third over what it had been. Biden’s Build Back Better is a sick grift for the oil companies. Medicare-for-All, raising the federal minimum wage, and a solution to the grifting operation called student loans are all unrealizable pipe dreams.

And what is Joe Biden’s response? This:

Washington Post Praises Biden Speech Against 'MAGA Republicans ...

Could he have looked any more like Orwell’s Big Brother if he tried? I doubt it. Not only did Biden not admit that the sanctions on Russia have harmed the US Empire far more than they have Russia, he focused on his domestic political opponents, playing Donald Trump’s voters up as an existential threat to their own country, and calling on all other Americans to fear and loathe them.

So much for healing the soul of the nation. I’m not sure what that is and doubt it exists, but this speech with its blood-red backdrop flanked by two Marines in uncomfortable postures was not designed to heal anything. It was clearly designed to distract attention away from Biden’s disastrous foreign and domestic policies, and to focus voters on the only successful political message Biden and the Democrats have had lately—Trump Evil!

Biden’s done a lot of other terrible things, but I’m getting tired of typing and you’re probably wondering when I’ll ever get to the point, so I will.

Joe Biden has managed to accomplish what no other American President has ever been able to do. He has united Russia, China, and India into a trading bloc that immediately rivals the old American-dominated one. He has united nearly all of Africa and Latin America into voting with Russia and China and against the West in the UN. He has given imperial rivals an existential reason to break the supremacy of the dollar in global currency, the longterm effects of which on the American people are incalculable, but definitely bad.

He has severely damaged the economies of every Western European economy with his idiotic economic war against Russia, and made the probabilities of real revolutions in several of those countries dramatically increase.

Biden’s domestic economic policy is to force the country into a recession by raising interest rates so that the wage gains of the pandemic are more than erased by rampant inflation, and to just keep throwing money at the investor class and the domestic occupation army called police departments while blaming Putin or Trump for every negative consequence of his own actions and inactions.

In short, Biden’s foreign policy is the most disastrous of any American president since at least James Madison’s War of 1812, and his domestic policy is the worst since at least Herbert Hoover’s non-response to the Great Depression, and it may turn out to be as bad as Buchanan’s in 1861.

Worst President Ever? Joe Biden is certainly the worst of my lifetime for both the United States and Europe as a whole. Even James Buchanan couldn’t screw up Europe as well as America, but Joe Biden has managed to do just that. So…yep. Worst President Ever.

Thanks for reading and have a nice weekend.

OhioBarbarian's Socialist Newsletter and other Oddities

Is Joe Biden the worst President EVER?