James Carafano writes at Daily Signal Don’t Blame Trump for Afghanistan’s Collapse. Blame Barack Obama. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw abruptly from Afghanistan, without any discernable exit strategy, has plunged that nation into a bloody, ruinous chaos. After pleading with the Taliban to spare our embassy in Kabul, he has now redeployed 3,000 to conduct a hasty air evacuation of embassy staff.

At this stage, the only good that can come from this debacle is that our leaders might wake up and recognize that the Obama Doctrine of foreign policy is an abysmal failure and must be abandoned once and for all. Tragically, this lesson comes, yet again, at tremendous cost: widescale human misery and heightened threats to U.S. interests.

As we study what’s happened, let’s first dispense with the canards: that this fiasco was inevitable and that it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.

The reality is that, during Trump’s tenure and despite the Afghan government’s many imperfections, Afghanistan had made great strides. The government-controlled most of the country’s territory. There was real economic growth. Women could work. Children could go to school.

Further, the cost of fostering regional stability by maintaining a stable Afghanistan was well within reason. The U.S. was spending less in Afghanistan in a year than we used to spend in a week. American forces were training and advising Afghan forces. Our troops were not fighting wars and taking causalities. This was clearly sustainable.

And how, in heaven’s name, is Trump to blame for Biden’s disastrous decision to cut and run? Trump was negotiating with the Taliban, but there was nothing wrong with that. The negotiations were conditions-based, and Trump made clear the Taliban would be held accountable for their actions. Moreover, Trump’s team made sure that if, in the end, the Taliban proved untrustworthy, the remaining U.S. force had been sized and scoped to present a serious deterrent to the Taliban and be sufficient to protect U.S. interests.

Trump, in fact, handed Biden a problem mostly solved. All Biden had to do was negotiate a lasting settlement from a position of strength or maintain an economy of force presence in Afghanistan if the Taliban failed to deliver. Instead, Biden just decided to call it day and call the troops home regardless of what the Taliban did on the ground.

The Taliban’s offensive should surprise no one, given the conditions handed to them. Why would they not take advantage of Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan? They knew full well the odds that this president would try to stop their orgy of murder, rape, forced marriages, and mayhem was near zero.

Of course, Biden will blame Trump. He will blame the Taliban. He can make all the excuses and spin all the narratives he wants, but a narrative can’t stop a bullet. This is a disaster. The situation did not collapse until he withdrew troops—and it is impossible not to conclude this happened because of what he decided.

Here is the bigger problem. This was not a one-off decision. This is part of a pattern of Obama-Biden foreign policy. And that should surprise no one since the current policies are being managed by much the same people.

In Iraq, after spending much time and effort stabilizing the country, Obama precipitously withdrew U.S. troops. It was like ordering firefighters who had extinguished a wildfire to not stick around after the wildfire in case the blaze rekindles. ISIS mushroomed overnight, creating the largest and most powerful terrorist state in modern history.

In Libya, Obama insisted on leading from behind. And once Gaddafi was gone from the picture, he ignored the spiraling decline in the security situation until our diplomatic facilities in Benghazi were smoking ruins.

This is the Obama-Biden playbook. Disengage in dangerous situations, and hope everything doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket. And when those fond hopes don’t pan out? Time to make excuses; shift blame; do anything but deal with the problem—unless there is absolutely no alternative.

In the face of America’s enemies, the default position of Obama-Biden foreign policy default is accommodation and appeasement. Unfortunately, the bad guys are not stupid. They had eight years to study the Obama playbook, and they know what to do with it: Exploit the deliberate self-weakening.

Biden is carrying on exactly the same foreign policy. Caving to Russia on Nord Stream 2. Refusing to confront China on the origins of COVID-19. Pleading with Tehran to let the U.S. back in the Iran nuclear deal.

No good will come of this.

The Editorial Board presents at Issues and Insights Biden’s ‘Accomplishments’ So Far: A Troubling Tale In 8 Charts.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Months after President Joe Biden supposedly “rescued” the country from the COVID-19 pandemic and promised that he’d bring the country together, how is the nation doing? Well, there are several indicators on the rise. Unfortunately, they are all indicators of trouble.

The news Thursday that the GDP gained 6.5% in the second quarter (the first full quarter since Biden signed his American Rescue Plan) is good. But it is well below economists’ forecasts. The Blue Chip Consensus forecast was above 9%, and other surveys pegged Q2 growth at 8.5%. It was also just barely above the gain in Q1 — which was before any of Biden’s policies had taken effect.

Still, other things are on the rise under Biden, too, many of them well above expectations.

The misery index is up, for example, so is inflation, pessimism, and financial stress. Illegal border crossings are up and murders are way up. Oh, and cases of COVID-19 — the disease Biden said he would slay — are increasing again.

Naturally, while taking credit for the good GDP number, the Biden administration is trying to pin the blame for all these other things on President Donald Trump. But how convincing can that be, when Biden ostentatiously broke with just about every one of Trump’s policies and did so in ways that had an immediate effect?

We’ve put together eight charts that help tell this story, starting with the inflation rate.

Even liberal economists were warning that Biden’s spending spree — coming after two historically large stimulus bills under Trump and long after the COVID recession had ended — would set off an inflation spiral. And what do you know? Energy costs, food costs, and the costs of most everything else are climbing at a rapid clip, despite promises from Biden that the current spike is transitory.

While prices are rising, Biden’s unemployment bonuses and other payments to non-workers have kept people from taking jobs. Biden himself all but admitted as much when at a recent town hall, but told employers just to raise their wages. As a result, after falling rapidly under Trump, the unemployment rate has held steady since the beginning of the year.

The combination of high unemployment and soaring prices back in the 1960s gave rise to the Misery Index, which is derived simply by adding the inflation rate to the unemployment rate. As we reported recently, the Misery Index has climbed every month since Biden took office.

Despite the fact that the recession ended more than a year ago, and the economy had already made up most of the ground it lost during the lockdown when he took office, Biden talks endlessly about how he’s “rescued” an economy that was “on the brink.” He then rattles off lots of seemingly cheery statistics, crediting his $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” and other government largesse for them all.

We’ve already detailed how this boast is based on a series of lies. But more to the point, if handing money out willy-nilly was supposed to rescue the economy and make families whole, why are people feeling more financial stress now than they were a few months ago? The IBD/TIPP Financial Stress Index has been on the rise since April.

Not only are people worried about their current financial condition, but they are also more pessimistic about their prospects for the coming year. An ABC News/Ipsos poll found pessimism about the way things are going shot up from April to July of this year.

The increase in pessimism and stress could be the result of the fact that wages haven’t been keeping up with inflation. The chart below shows the inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings for private-sector workers so far this year. Notice that this trend is not up.

Biden can hardly blame Trump for the sharp rise in violent crime, either, although he and his fellow Democrats keep insisting that it’s all because of insufficiently strict gun control laws. The real cause, of course, has been the demonization of the police by Democrats (up to and including Biden), and the often successful attempts to cut police department funding while hamstringing officers. The result has been a huge increase in murder and assaults in the nation’s major cities.

Biden also blames Trump for the crisis at the southern border. But as we’ve written about in this space already, Biden created a crisis where none existed by promising to throw open the border and grant citizenship to millions of people here illegally. Then he put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of “fixing it,” and started blathering on about “root causes.” The results speak for themselves: an unprecedented flood of illegal immigrants, including unaccompanied children, many of whom are being released into the country.

And to top it off, the one thing people apparently trusted Biden to do was tackle the COVID-19 virus. He said he had a plan. He and his fellow Democrats rushed through a massive new spending bill to carry it out. But now vaccination rates have stalled and new cases are growing again thanks to the Delta variant.

Biden and Co. have been busy trying to pin the blame for this on Republicans, but as we reported recently, it’s minority groups and other Democratic constituencies who are least likely to be vaccinated. And, because Biden has spent so much time raising the hysteria level about COVID, he can’t just admit that this virus will be with us forever and tell people to “live with it,” as Trump once (correctly) advised. Instead, he’s pointing fingers and fumbling about with new mask mandates, forced vaccinations, and other draconian measures.

It is true that Biden has been in office for only six months. It’s also true things could turn around. But we don’t see that happening unless Biden changes course.

We have no doubt that Biden was very much hoping one day to tell the public how he killed COVID and saved the economy (just as he once bragged that “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” while he and President Barack Obama where in the White House).

The way things are going right now, Biden might one day have to admit that “the economy is dead, but COVID is alive.”

Footnote:  How to Speak Bidenese

John Ellis writes at his blog Four Illusions.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Illusion #1: Biden is not too old.

People who have been around American politics for a long time know Joe Biden well. The eldest among them have known Joe Biden for nearly five decades. What they will tell you is that he didn’t seem to age during his two terms as vice president. If you look at video of Biden 2016 and Biden 2008, you’re taken by how little he appears to have aged. Biden at 74 seems every bit as alert and physically vigorous as Biden at 66.

That’s no longer the case. Somewhere along the way of the last few years, Biden transitioned from “young old” to “old.” Veteran reporters describe the transition in code. “He’s lost a step or two.” Or: “he’s lost something off his fastball.”

You’re not supposed to talk about it. If you do, and you’re a Democrat, you’re scolded for aiding and abetting the enemy. If you do, and you’re a Republican or (God forbid) a MAGA voter, you’re a horrible hate-mongerer, trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election (and you probably watch Fox News to boot).

The problem is that it’s there for all to see. Pretending not to see it is untenable. It’s a bit like being the first car in a line of cars at a stop light and pretending that the light hasn’t turned green. Eventually, the cars behind you honk.

Illusion #2: Harris “has what it takes.”

The widely shared assessment of Kamala Harris’s performance (so far) as vice president also comes in code: she’s “not ready for primetime,” she needs to “step up her game,” and “she’s off to a rocky start.” Few if any of the political cognoscenti think she is (a) “presidential timber” and/or (b) capable of winning the 2024 presidential election, should it come to that.

These two truths — Biden is old, Harris isn’t ready — haunt Democrats and their media allies. When they imagine the 2024 presidential election without Biden or Harris, they notice another truth: there’s no bench. Gavin Newsom? Not. Andrew Cuomo? Not. Tim Kaine? Not. There’s a long list of superb military officers that would be formidable (and admirable) candidates, but the chances of a Democratic Convention nominating, say, Admiral William McRaven, are similar to my chances of buying the winning $1 billion Powerball ticket.

Illusion #3: Trump is done.

Where in the world did this come from? Wishful thinking explains part of it. Maybe all of it. But it’s clearly not true. The amazing thing is that he’s not done, given his disgraceful post-election conduct and evident disdain for long-established, essential norms of American democracy; “consent of the losers” chief among them. It’s August (almost) and he still maintains that he won an election that he lost. That’s the dictionary definition of “delusional.”

And yet it hasn’t hurt him. He remains the front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Republican elected officials at the federal, state and local level genuflect at the mention of his name. Would-be rivals for the 2024 nomination pledge their allegiance, and not just to Trump’s “populism” but to Trump personally. And then there’s Fox News.

The 2024 Republican presidential nomination campaign will “happen” on Fox News. It will also “happen” on right-wing talk radio and on right-wing websites and in right-wing chat rooms, but Fox will frame the choice; controlling who gets exposure (and in what time slots) and who sets the agenda. Those decisions are driven by one consideration and one consideration only: Does it rate?

Trump rates. The others don’t. End of story.

And lest anyone think that Fox will ignore the ratings, turn on Trump and do what it can to bring to the fore the next generation of GOP leaders, please call me and I will sell you my winning Powerball ticket. For $1 million.

Illusion #4: Trump can’t win.

Can’t win what? The GOP nomination? Really? Want to bet? Who’s going to beat him? Josh Hawley? Marco Rubio? Ron DeSantis? Nikki Haley? Take your pick.

My guess is that none of them will run if Trump announces his candidacy in, say March of 2023. Would you? You’d be signing a political death warrant if you did; forever alienating vast swaths of the Trump coalition by challenging their champion. You’d be asking your major donors to invite Trump’s wrath. You’d be asking Republican elected officials at every level to risk ruin by endorsing your candidacy. It’s a non-starter from the start.

Well, you say, Trump can’t possibly win the general election, can he? On paper, probably not. Fifty-two percent of the country would eat nails to vote against him.

But as we learn again and again, the national popular vote isn’t evenly distributed across the Electoral College. State-by-state, the Electoral College is almost perfectly distributed to make GOP victories possible, even when the party loses the national popular vote by a substantial margin. (Biden beat Trump by 7 million votes in the 2020 general election.)

It’s also the case that Trump enjoys an advantage over, say, Biden (or Harris or any Democrat, for that matter) on “cultural issues.” In the key Electoral College states (like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, to name three) general election voters align more comfortably with Trump’s views on cultural issues; on immigration especially, but also on crime, “defund the police,” the undoing of welfare reform, and the rise of Woke.

That’s enough to make him competitive, but probably not enough to put him over the top. He’s so toxic, he hits a ceiling. And the Democrats (and their media allies) will do everything in their power to make Toxic Trump the issue, above all others. They’ll borrow a line from the Reagan re-election campaign: “Why would we ever want to return to where we were, less than four short years ago?”

But what happens if Trump is not the issue? What happens if inflation is the issue? That would bring to mind the Carter re-election campaign, the one that ended in a GOP landslide at the state and local level and a 10-point win for Ronald Reagan (who received 50% of the national vote). Inflation destroyed Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It literally kicked him out of office.

What if Larry Summers is right and inflation is ready for launch and will likely take off next year? If Biden Administration policies are seen as the proximate cause of inflation, will “swing voters” view the administration as the best option for bringing inflation back under control? Probably not. Is inflation the kind of issue that can render Trump’s toxicity less salient? Yes it is.

The light is green. Let the honking begin.

On the technical operations of election processing, the audit in Maricopa County, AZ, has provided this overview published at Gateway Pundit Cyber Ninjas Found So Many Issues with the Voting Machines and Processes in Maricopa County It’s a Wonder the Previous Auditors Didn’t Find These Issues Too.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Ben Cotton’s team is auditing the IT-related practices and policies in the 2020 Election in Maricopa County. He shared some important items during his presentation last week that any good IT auditor would find.  We pointed out previously that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors hired two election firms because they knew these firms would give them a clean bill of health.

But Ben Cotton and his team were selected by the Cyber Ninjas to address the IT work related to Maricopa County’s results in the 2020 Election.  Investigator Cotton from CyFIR performed work that the previous auditors should have covered.

It’s a difficult task for these auditors because Maricopa County has been completely uncooperative, even with basic questions, referring auditors to lawyers.  This all provides more support that the subjects under audit, the auditees, are guilty and doing everything they can to postpone the evaluation.

Dominion has two full-time staff onsite servicing the Maricopa County election system. The current Dominion software was installed in August 2019. Since that date, there have been no antivirus updates, no operating system updates, or any security patches. Administrator accounts were also created on that date, each having the exact same password. These are actions of a ‘worst in class’ IT Department and it is a deliberate subterfuge of an election system.  Common practice is to update patches on a much more regular basis.

Below is a list of items addressed by Cotton during his presentation to the Arizona Senate last Thursday.

1. Auditors have collected over 2,000 Terabytes of data, the vast majority is video footage.
2. What Maricopa County has told the public is often drastically different than their response to the legal subpoena.
3. Maricopa didn’t use a forensically secure process to clone drives. Dates and times were altered by their cloning process.
4. On March 11th, 2021 someone with Admin access to the (EMS) election management system ran a script that produced 37,646 queries looking for blank passwords. The system has only 8 user accounts. (see below)
5. Windows Security Event Logs before February 5th, 2021 are missing.
6. Every election Administrator account, no matter the user, all have the same password.
7. When the Dominion software was installed in August 2019, Administrative passwords were created, and haven’t been changed since.
8. The vulnerabilities that exist on the Maricopa election systems would take an average script kiddie less than 10 minutes to gain access to these systems.
9. Maricopa’s election system uses ibutton key fobs as the 2nd step in logins. Maricopa and Dominion have refused to provide these fobs to auditors. (see below).
10. It’s become readily apparent there are severe cybersecurity problems with the way the election management system and network was maintained.
11. We are seeing anonymous logins at the system level that do not follow that pattern of normal Windows behavior.
12. After both sides agreed on a solution, Maricopa County then refused to release that router data.
13. Maricopa can’t check the configuration of its own election system without relying on Dominion employees.
14. The two EAC audits hired by Maricopa earlier in the year appear not to have addressed cybersecurity aspects, not even shared passwords.
15. Not a single bit of data was changed on any device in the auditor’s possession. Use of a “write block” device prevented this. Images were made bit by bit, then an MD5 hash value was applied. There is no need to purchase new machines.
16. There have been no antivirus updates, operating system updates, or security patches applied to the election system since August 2019, the date Dominion software was installed.

Maricopa repeatedly told the public the election system did not touch the internet but this was not true. If so the system could not have comingled with other Maricopa County department’s data. To prevent the release of router information, the Board of Supervisors and Sheriff then said election router data DID mingle with critical information from other county departments. By using EAC auditors, Maricopa told the public election machines were safe and secure. They now say those same auditors can’t be hired to test the same machines. This week they approved the purchase of new Dominion machines at $3 million.

The use of ibuttons is unusual for PC logins, and is very old technology. These ibuttons are typically used to verify a location or for access control. For instance, a security guard touches his ibutton to various doors to verify he walked his patrol. In Maricopa County, after you login as an election Admin, you must also use a preprogrammed ibutton to obtain access to the Dominion election system. Maricopa County stated only Dominion staff have the Admin ibuttons and both organizations have refused to help the auditors obtain them.

Overall, the IT-related observations of control practices to date are horrible. In some cases, the County is using old technology. In other cases, the processes are broken or even non-existent. With such as mess, how did the IT election auditors hired by the county not notice them?

At Gateway Pundit is an article explaining the techniques for validating ballots used in 2020 elections Maricopa County Auditor Bob Hughes Shares How They Are Using High Tech Forensic Digital Cameras and OCR to Validate Ballots.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Any massive vote fraud in Maricopa County Arizona is going to be identified. The Democrats must be terrified.

One of the auditors working for the Arizona Senate, Bob Hughes, discussed the audit and the reasons why the Democrats are absolutely frightened of the Arizona audit and it being performed in other states:

The other thing that I think is interesting is they keep saying, ‘They don’t know what they are doing’. ‘They’re idiots’. ‘These people are ridiculous’. ‘They have no idea what they are doing’. ‘They’ve never done this before’.

This is the first time in the history of the United States, number one, that it’s ever been done, but more important it’s the first time it’s ever been needed. And it was done.

I can tell you that I could go over all the process and you’d all understand, but when a ballot gets created, think about this. It’s like your bill being paid from SRP. They go out and get your voter identification number and they find out what precinct you live in, what city, what county, where your school districts are. All that information has to be accessed to create the proper ballot exactly for you. Because you have to vote for the right candidates in a city mayoral election, council elections, JP elections, the legislative district, the congressional district. [In fact, in 2020 there were 667 different versions of Maricopa County ballots.]

Think of those as maps that overlay the Maricopa County area and it creates all these little sections, and all these people get a very different ballot. So if somebody did what we were told they might have done, which is gone out and just duplicate a bunch of ballots, or put the same ballot in many times, or any of these kinds of things, I knew there was a way to find that out.

And so what we did is we, the cameras are not only cameras. They’re digital cameras. Digital cameras that are forensic. They’re actually police forensic cameras. They’re very, very high speed, high definition digital cameras. They make a scanned ballot.

So we scan that ballot. We then use optical character recognition (OCR). We’re looking at what’s in place on that ballot. Based on who that ballot is. How many should be? Can there be this many?…

…What I can tell you is you now will have the most authentic count of every legal authentic ballot you could possibly have.

See Hughes’ speech in the video here.

AP reporter Kate Brumback writes at SFGATE Judge allows Georgia ballot review case to move forward.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

ATLANTA (AP) — A judge on Thursday allowed a lawsuit alleging fraud in Georgia’s most populous county during the November election and seeking a review of absentee ballots to move forward.

Originally filed in December, the lawsuit says there is evidence of fraudulent ballots and improper ballot counting in Fulton County. The county, county elections board and county courts clerk had filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit. They argued, among other things that the the lawsuit was barred by sovereign immunity, a principle that says state and local governments and can only be sued if they agree to it.

After holding a hearing on those motions Monday, Henry County Superior Court Chief Judge Brian Amero, who was specially appointed to preside over the case, agreed. He ruled that the constitutional claims against those three entities are barred by sovereign immunity and dismissed them. But he also granted a request by the petitioners to add the individual members of the county election board as respondents in the lawsuit instead.

The suit was filed by nine Georgia voters and is spearheaded by Garland Favorito, a longtime critic of Georgia’s election systems. As part of the suit, they are seeking to inspect some 147,000 absentee ballots to determine whether there are illegitimate ballots among them.

Several election workers and volunteers have signed sworn statements saying they saw absentee ballots during the audit that weren’t creased from being mailed, appeared to be marked by a machine rather than by hand and were printed on different paper. The lawsuit also repeats a widely circulated claim of fraud based on security video that shows cases of ballots being pulled from under a skirted table and counted while observers and the news media weren’t present.

Fulton County officials have consistently defended the integrity of the election and have criticized the ballot review effort. The secretary of state’s office says it has investigated the claims and found no evidence of fraud. An independent monitor who observed Fulton County’s election operations as part of a consent agreement said he witnessed sloppy practices and systemic mismanagement but said there was nothing that should cast doubt on the county’s election results.The ballots are kept under seal in the custody of the clerk of Fulton County Superior and Magistrate courts. Amero in April ordered the court clerk to release the scanned absentee ballot images. At a hearing last month, Amero ordered that the paper ballots themselves be unsealed so that the petitioners who filed the lawsuit can inspect and scan them.

He had set a meeting for May 28 with the parties to sort out the logistics of how that review and scanning of paper ballots would proceed. But that meeting was canceled so he could hear the motions to dismiss first.

VoterGA Comment:

“We are pleased that the court has ruled in our favor again for the fifth time. The ruling substitutes Defendants by replacing currently named government organizations with individual board members we named originally in our lawsuit. It also moots Don Samuels’ attempt to dismiss our case. This continues the string of victories we have including how we obtained the original protective order, conditional approval to inspect ballots, access to ballot images, and the order to unseal the ballots.”

,

Todd Blodgett writes at the Des Moines Register Biden paving the way for Trump to win again.  (Full disclosure:  My mother, Dagmar Henningsen was born near Des Moinres, and I am 1/2 Danish because of her.)  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Only a smidgeon of popular votes would flip the few states needed for Trump to net 270 electoral votes.

In 2020, had 23,000 votes, spread across Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia, flipped, the Electoral College would’ve been tied, at 269-269. And with Republicans holding a majority of the states’ congressional delegations, the U.S. House of Representatives would’ve chosen Donald Trump as president.

But after five months, Joe Biden’s agenda and actions on several critical issues are diminishing Democratic prospects for 2024, and even for 2022. If the GOP retakes the House next year, it will be disastrous for the Biden-Harris administration.

But even if that doesn’t happen, the border crisis that Biden singlehandedly created has already caused many of his voters to suffer a severe case of buyers’ remorse. Nixing the Keystone pipeline was stupid and killed tens of thousands of jobs and indicated to oil-producing nations that the United States is impeding domestic petroleum production — which, under Trump’s policies, made us net energy-independent.

Increasingly, many Americans now see that Trump was the kind of president that they always wanted — but they didn’t realize they had.

After all, most Americans appreciate straight talk from their elected officials and distrust career politicians, especially lawyers. Many voters prefer no-nonsense, business-style governance. Most Americans also favor “America First” policies and expect their president to prioritize their interests above those of foreign nationals — particularly lawbreakers. As well, most Americans despise clueless leftists who advocate defunding the police. Polls reveal that most likely voters want presidents to appoint judges who are pro-victim, not pro-perpetrator, and who favor taxpayers over indolent, able-bodied, welfare scammers.

Americans expect their leader to understand that China not only isn’t our friend, but represents a clear and present danger to us.

Trump, not Biden, was that president.

Most taxpayers also strongly oppose Biden’s unprecedented, irresponsible spending spree. Even some Democrats detest Biden’s planned tax hikes and his costly boondoggles, which includes fancy hotels for immigrants, bailouts that discourage employees from returning to work, and paying the disreputable World Health Organization $200 million to reinstate America’s membership. Biden’s absurd claim that Trump caused this border disaster only exacerbates the scorn which scores of millions of Americans have for this liar.

Biden even released Mexico from its agreement — negotiated by Trump — to post federales (troops) on Mexico’s side of the border, to block border-crashing immigrants. As the Washington Post reported on May 25: “Under new Biden administration rules curtailing immigration enforcement, ICE carried out 3,000 deportations last month, the lowest level on record. Biden has placed ICE deportation officers on a leash so tight that some say their work is being functionally abolished.”

As Biden and Kamala Harris foment this destructive insanity, many pro-USA citizens justifiably feel like horrified, handcuffed, blindfolded passengers in the back seat of a vehicle being driven by a drunkard at 100 mph. When Ronald Reagan visited Des Moines in the fall of 1980, he told me that his opponent, President Jimmy Carter, made it “easy” for him, “because of how badly he’s screwed things up.” Will Biden do the same?

Trump will be the same age (78) in 2024 that Biden is now. However, Trump moves, acts, and looks 15 years younger than Biden — who, in 2024, will be 82. By 2024, old Joe could easily look like Jimmy Carter. If so, his predecessor may well become his successor. Only a smidgeon of popular votes would flip the few states needed for Trump to net 270 electoral votes.

Biden is basically setting the stage for Trump’s comeback.