It’s not exactly shocking when a politician’s campaign promises don’t materialize after they take office. But when it comes to something as serious as the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s certainly fair to hold our elected officials to their word — and when we apply that to President Joe Biden, his COVID campaign promises have aged terribly.
Running against then-President Donald Trump, Biden didn’t hesitate to blame the president directly for the state of the pandemic. During an October 2020 debate , Biden referenced the 220,000 Americans who had died of COVID-19 at that time and blamed Trump personally for those deaths.
“If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this,” Biden said. “Anyone that is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.”
“I will take care of this,” he promised. “I will end this. I’m going to shut down the virus, not the country.”
For the sake of our country, I really do wish that Biden had been able to follow through on these promises. But any honest appraisal of reality reveals that the president has failed on all counts.
Joe Biden promised to “shut down the virus” if elected and directly blamed Trump for all the deaths that happened under his administration.
Well, here’s the John Hopkins graph of US COVID deaths. Biden became president in January of 2021. pic.twitter.com/tRBAAvOIr1
— Brad Polumbo ??⚽️ ?️? (@brad_polumbo) December 1, 2021
Roughly 366,470 Americans have died of COVID-19 since Biden’s inauguration, according to the Washington Free Beacon. More Americans have now died of COVID-19 in 2021 — a year in which Biden has been president, except for the first few weeks — than in 2020 under Trump.
What happened to “shutting down the virus,” Joe?
These tragic results come despite the president’s grand campaign promises and despite the fact that the United States has had exponentially expanded access to vaccines and treatments during Biden’s presidency.
Holding Biden to his own words, he has failed — woefully. And if Trump was responsible for the deaths in 2020 and thus disqualified to occupy the Oval Office, well, under Biden’s own logic, he is just as culpable. (Don’t hold your breath waiting on the president to acknowledge this, of course.)
None of this is to say that Biden is actually personally to blame for the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have occurred during his presidency. While his policies have surely played a role, as did Trump’s, Biden is not responsible for these deaths, as they’re ultimately a result of so many factors beyond any president’s control, including the decision of many now-deceased individuals to remain unvaccinated. But Trump was never to blame for the deaths under his watch, either.
Trump didn’t kill people. Biden didn’t kill people. The coronavirus killed people. This is the consistent standard that any intellectually honest person should’ve acknowledged all along.
Yet Biden didn’t hesitate to lump all the responsibility for last year’s deaths on Trump’s shoulders and label him unfit for office. So, it’s perfectly fair for us to ask the president to accept that same responsibility — or admit he was wrong to throw such smears around in the first place.
Oh, and the next time a politician promises on the campaign trail that they’ll easily and quickly solve massive societal problems if just given power, don’t believe them. As George W. Bush famously said in an erroneous but apt rendition of an old cliché, “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo ) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and a Washington Examiner contributor. Subscribe to his YouTube channel or email him at bradpolumbojournalism@gmail.com .
