This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden in a bind over campus protests of his Middle East policies, rising unemployment and inflation, and depressing reelection polls.
Inflation and unemployment flashed red when a jobs report came in weaker than expected on Friday, and the unemployment rate popped up to 3.9%. While it remains remarkably low, the increase undercut the administration’s election year claim that it was creating jobs.
What’s more, inflation continued to show its face with higher prices, especially for fuel and housing.
Biden’s recent surge in election polls began to fade. A Rasmussen Reports survey even showed him 10 points behind former President Donald Trump.
And after ignoring the campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war, Biden finally gave a short statement Thursday, but it didn’t appease younger voters encamped at many of the nation’s premier universities.
Pollster John Zogby, in grading the week a C-minus, said Biden angered campus pollsters anew with his call for law and order. Conservative analyst Jed Babbin said the week was a failure, citing more student loan “forgiveness” and plans to bring Palestinian refugees to the United States.
John Zogby
Grade: C-
President Joe Biden is in a real bind over Gaza and the college protests.
While the issue on the ground had been his blind support for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against civilians, he had been backing off just a little by insisting on more access to aid for the Palestinians and a ceasefire. Neither of those calls appeared to be satisfying young and progressive voters who he will need in the fall.
Seeing that he and fellow Democrats are taking a beating on law and order, Biden took the hardline approach by supporting police action on campuses and condemning the invasion of property and lawlessness of protestors. By doing so, he further alienated himself from these GenZ protestors and those who chose to support their freedom of speech.
Polling shows he is not going to go anywhere with law-and-order voters nor with younger voters who want to end the war in Gaza and discuss divestment from those who manufacture and supply arms to Israel.
The only thing that propped him up this week was having the public meet the motley cast at former President Donald Trump‘s hush money trial.
Jed Babbin
Grade: F
President Joe Biden’s regulatory onslaught continued with everything from HUD rules increasing home construction costs to new Title IX regulations permitting transgender males to participate in women’s sports (and everything else, including bathrooms and showers). But all that — which we’ll get to in a minute — paled in comparison to Biden’s plan to import illegal aliens from the Gaza Strip.
We have no treaty, or any moral, ethical or obligation to admit Palestinian illegal aliens from the Gaza Strip. No Arab country will admit a single one because they rightly fear that with them comes the dangers of Hamas terrorism. So, naturally, Biden wants to bring them in. The plans aren’t final yet, but they probably will be next week. Meanwhile, he’s totally silent on the American hostages still held by Hamas.
Biden finally spoke out against the college pro-Hamas and anti-semitic protests that have become common in most parts of the country. But he did so by making moral equivalence between the rampant anti-semitism and Islamophobia. It’s not Islamophobia to condemn in the severest terms those who kill randomly, use rape as a weapon of war and take hostages. (All of those things are war crimes under the Geneva Conventions.)
The cost of Biden’s illegal — and, by that, I mean his lack of statutory authority to do it — student loan “forgiveness” program may reach $1.4 trillion. And while we’re at it, Biden’s transgender largesse on Title IX is also illegal in that Congress would have to change the law in order to accomplish what Biden does with regulations. Congress hasn’t done it, so Biden’s regulations are illegal.
HUD’s announced that new homes are going to have to meet the new International Energy Conservation Code standards, which the National Association of Home Builders says will add as much as $31,000 to the cost of a new home. There’s no law allowing that, either.
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John Zogby is the founder of the Zogby Survey and senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. His podcast with son and managing partner and pollster Jeremy Zogby can be heard here. Their firm polls for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Follow him on X @ZogbyStrategies.
Jed Babbin is a Washington Examiner contributor and former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of former President George H.W. Bush. Follow him on X @jedbabbin.