An Embarrassment For Every Month: The Worst Blunders, Failures, And Flops Of Biden’s Final Year
Another year of the Bidens snowbirding between Delaware and 1600 Pennsylvania, another list of presidential ineptitudes to look back on. Last January, we brought you “A Crisis For Every Month: The Worst Debacles, Disgraces, And (Literal) Train Wrecks Of Biden’s Third Year,” and this year, we’ve survived to the final installment.
To catalog crises overseen by Joe Biden this year risks giving him too much credit, considering the incapacitated president clearly isn’t overseeing much of anything. Biden’s year has been marked more by disgraces and embarrassments than major actions, scandalous or otherwise. His greatest success of the year is a tossup between avoiding a 25th Amendment ouster and staying alive. But his many displays of incompetence (and possible incontinence?) this year have been just as damaging for the republic as the failures his handlers have committed with considerably more energy over the past four years.
With that, here are the worst times Joe crapped the bed, stumbled, fell on his face, and took a wrong turn — besides all the times he did those things literally.
January: Fighting to Not Enforce the Border
After the Biden administration refused to stop the surge of illegal immigration over the Texas-Mexico border, the state of Texas stationed National Guard troops in Eagle Pass and put up razor wire to deter illegal border crossings. Instead of thanking the Texas National Guard for the help or being embarrassed into doing its job, the Biden administration begged the U.S. Supreme Court to make Texas stop doing the derelict feds’ work for them and sent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton a cease and desist letter.
DHS claimed Texas had “impeded” its ability to do border enforcement. But, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland observed, DHS sought “to facilitate illegal entry and use the property to process the migrants,” rather than to do their job of keeping migrants from crossing illegally. The Biden administration was so desperate to stop Texas from securing the border, its agents cut the razor wire Texas had erected along the border and fought for the right to do so in court when Texas objected.
February: ‘An Elderly Man with a Poor Memory’
After his FBI raided the home of former president Donald Trump in 2022 in search of classified documents, Biden had the misfortune of having his own mishandled classified documents discovered in various insecure places at his home and elsewhere. It looked so bad for Biden to get away with the same supposed crime he was prosecuting his predecessor for, that Biden’s DOJ tapped a special counsel to probe whether or not they should also prosecute Biden.
In February, Special Counsel Robert Hur released a report with admissions about Biden’s mental faculties that were just as damning as the DOJ’s decision not to prosecute its boss. Despite evidence indicating Biden “willfully retained” classified information and “willfully disclosed” it to a ghostwriter, Hur opted not to prosecute him because Biden came across as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur continued. The report confirmed what Americans could see with their own eyes: that Joe Biden’s brain wasn’t all there.
March: A Botched Nod to Laken Riley … and an Apology to Her Murderer
Exactly two weeks before Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address, a Georgia nursing student named Laken Riley was murdered while jogging by an illegal alien who was released into the United States by Biden’s immigration agencies. Her death became representative of the countless killings, rapes, and other crimes committed in American towns by unvetted migrants.
Leading up to the State of the Union, Republicans urged Biden to recognize Riley and her family. She went unmentioned in Biden’s address until Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted his bragging about the border to ask: “What about Laken Riley?”
“Lincoln — Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” Biden admitted, butchering Riley’s first name. “That’s right. But how many of thousands of people are being killed by legals?”
Instead of expressing regret that his open border policies enabled Riley’s killer to enter the United States and her college town of Athens, Georgia, Biden followed up the off-script moment by telling MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart that he regretted calling him an “illegal.”
“I shouldn’t have used illegal, I should have — it’s undocumented,” Biden said. “Look, they built the country.”
April: Declaring Easter Sunday ‘Transgender Day’
As Christians prepared to celebrate the resurrection of Christ and His victory over sin and death on Easter Sunday, Biden declared a new, imaginary holiday in its place: “Transgender Day of Visibility.”
“[W]e honor the extraordinary courage and contributions of transgender Americans,” Biden said in a statement, before indicating his support for stocking schools with sexually explicit books and dosing gender dysphoric children with sterilizing hormones or amputating their healthy body parts.
The White House tried to do damage control by insisting that March 31 was Trans Visibility Day “every year,” and that it just so happened to fall on Easter this time. But trying to disguise the Biden administration’s contempt for Christians — while the same administration tried to throw peaceful pro-lifers in prison and targeted traditional Catholic congregations as potential “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” — didn’t fool anyone.
(After his “Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility,” Biden threw together a statement about Easter, too. It was written with all the theological rigor and sincere conviction of a Hallmark card, and clocked in at 94 words, compared to the 639-word statement celebrating transgenderism.)
May: Trump Convicted, Rule of Law Hardest Hit
One of Biden and the Democrats’ biggest campaign strategies of 2024 was attempting to make a criminal out of his opponent, Donald Trump. From Biden’s Justice Department to local district attorneys in Manhattan and Georgia who just so happened to have connections to the Biden administration, the goal was to get Trump thrown in prison or at least labeled a “convicted felon” in the media.
In May, in what experts agreed was the stupidest of several stupid lawfare cases against Trump, a deep-blue Manhattan jury convicted Trump of a crime no one could really articulate. The case revolved around a payment Trump made to his lawyer, who had paid a pornographic film actress as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Somehow, Democrat D.A. Alvin Bragg convinced jurors that amounted to stealing the 2016 election.
Biden, whose former No. 3 at the Justice Department magically showed up on Bragg’s team to “jump start” the prosecution of Biden’s opponent, was also overseeing two prosecutions of Trump by his own Justice Department. With Trump now assuming office, Biden has nothing to show for the effort but a few newspaper clippings labeling Trump a felon — and yet, the damage the lawfare campaign did to the American justice system will be one of the darkest stains on the Biden presidency.
June: That Debate
June brought the first and only presidential debate Biden did this election cycle. It was so bad, he would end up dropping out of the race a month later. He somehow sounded angry and sleepy at the same time, staring bug-eyed at something behind the camera. The entire Democrat Party was in panic mode before Biden hobbled offstage, and would quickly succeed in pressuring (threatening?) Biden to drop out of the presidential race.
July: A Dropout and a Shootout
If 2024 was Biden’s worst year, July was his worst month, and July 21 was his worst day. After a weekslong fight to stay in the race following his disastrous debate, Biden’s political career committed suicide by PR statement. Someone on Biden’s social media team uploaded a screenshot of a letter to the president’s X account, announcing his intent to end his reelection campaign. Was he forced out with threats of invoking the 25th Amendment? Did he even know about the statement at the time it was released? Did he nap through the whole thing?
July was also the month in which a series of Biden administration failures led to Biden’s presidential opponent getting shot in the head. As The Federalist’s Sean Davis observed at the time, Biden officials limited Trump’s security resources, left an obvious sniper perch outside the security perimeter of his Butler, Pa. rally, made sure no law enforcement personnel were stationed on said sniper perch, and — when a would-be assassin waltzed onto it and aimed a gun at Trump’s head — let him pop off several shots at the president and the crowd before neutralizing him.
August: Busted Taking Credit for 800,000 Imaginary Jobs
The Biden administration loves to brag about its “job creation,” even if it’s jobs that were simply recouped after Democrats’ own pandemic-era lockdowns or jobs held by foreign-born employees who drive down wages for American workers. It’s one of the talking points they have repeatedly relied on in response to Americans’ perception of the obvious: that the economy under Biden is far worse than it was under his predecessor.
That’s one of the reasons it was so embarrassing in August when Biden’s Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed the administration had taken credit for “creating” 818,000 jobs between March 2023 and March 2024 that never actually existed. Like everything else about “Bidenomics,” the positive propaganda turned out to be fake.
September: N.C. Hurricane Victims Left for Dead
In September, a deadly Hurricane Helene devastated the rural and mostly conservative communities of Western North Carolina. After days of silence, Biden finally faced reporters, only to tell them that the federal government had no more resources to send to residents whose homes and towns were decimated. Biden spent the weekend at the beach while the storm battered North Carolina communities.
The Biden administration’s response only got worse from there. Locals told The Federalist in early October that Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was simply “not there.” Biden’s Homeland Security secretary admitted FEMA, which had directed more than $1 billion to illegal immigrant services in the past two years, was running out of money. Biden’s authorization of 1,000 National Guard troops paled in comparison to the military assistance that was authorized for the similarly devastating Hurricane Katrina almost 20 years prior.
October: Dismissing Half the Country as ‘Garbage’
In response to a comedian’s joke about Puerto Rico at a Trump rally, Biden closed out the month of October by declaring that “the only garbage I see floating out there is his [Trump’s] supporters.”
Even Democrats realized instantly that calling half the country human garbage was not a great closing campaign pitch, so White House staffers scrambled to cover up the mistake by falsifying the transcript of Biden’s remarks. The coverup didn’t work very well and may have run afoul of presidential records laws.
November: Getting Dumped by the American People
We all know what happened in November. The guy Biden spent four years calling a threat to democracy won a resounding electoral victory. Biden may not have been on the presidential ticket, but the election never stopped being a referendum on his failed and unpopular presidency. Voters rejected Biden’s policies, his rhetoric, and his pea-brained prodigy in a victory so decisive, not even the Democrats’ ballot harvesting machine could save them.
December: A ‘Get Out of Jail Free, Forever’ Card for Hunter
In a major middle finger to the country on his way out, Biden granted his son Hunter blanket immunity. The pardon wasn’t just for the tax and firearm crimes of which he had been convicted, but also for any “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” over a 10-year period that just happened to start right around the time Hunter got a job at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. For added insult, Biden spent the entire 2024 campaign season vowing to voters that he wouldn’t let his son off the hook, before pretending to have a miraculous change of heart as soon as Democrats had nothing more to lose from his corruption.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
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