Joe Biden’s handlers and media friends continue to delude nobody but themselves that his legacy will land him in the history books alongside FDR and LBJ as a beloved, era-defining Progressive hero. His supposedly moderate priorities—infrastructure, family policy, and voting “rights”—have readily been exposed as deceitful partisanship and wasteful graft, and laden with power grabs so objectionable a senator of his own party had to distance himself to save face.

Further complicating his aspirational legacy, Biden is beholden to an eye-popping amount of dark money from leftist sources that propelled him to the White House in the first place. A careerist chameleon who knows the ultimate currency of the Washington favor economy is obedience to donors, he is obligated to indulge fringe priorities so repellent to the public that anti-police interest groups begged the White House to dial them back. Even with his public image plummeting from the self-made border crisis—now on pace to allow over 2 million illegal immigrants to enter and stay in the country every year—Biden acquiesced to bullying from activist groups (and NGOs whose lucrative business models depend on the public funding associated with high volumes of immigration) and raised the annual refugee cap.

As Biden’s early months lurched from one failure to stand up for our country to the next, it became clear that he is indeed era-defining, but not in the way his consiglieres would have hoped. Weak and negligent, derelict in the most basic duties a leader has to his people, licking ice cream to delight reporters as his homeland falls apart, Joe Biden is happily at your service as the concierge of decline.

The leader of the Free World routinely confounds the public with gibberish and outlandish assertions that the national press pretends not to notice. Last week, he attributed lower vaccination rates among black Americans to traumatic memories of “the Tuskegee Airmen,” apparently conflating the subjects of an infamous experiment conducted at the Tuskegee Institute with the squadron of World War II Army pilots. One day prior, he delivered a meandering disavowal of the Second Amendment, dismissing it as a gratuitous formality by insinuating the government could simply deploy “nuclear weapons” against rebellious armed citizens. The public, beseeched by the press to view Biden’s regime of managed decline as a return to normalcy, could be forgiven for wondering whether successful stewardship of a nation typically involves overt rationalizations for nuking one’s own citizens.

Essential elements of nationhood, including our borders, rule of law, energy pipelines, and food supply chains are disintegrating. Biden routinely appears apathetic, croaking “no comment” when a cyberattack took 45 percent of the East Coast’s energy supply offline—a response so lethargic it may have emboldened the cybercriminals who downed countless American facilities operated by the world’s largest beef supplier a few weeks later. With a resource as crucial as the food supply at risk, and minimal discussion on how to guarantee protection from such threats in the future, the White House again responded in almost ludicrously diffident fashion, weakly insisting they were “delivering a message” to Russia that if the hackers originated with them, that was very naughty indeed. The diplomatic decorum of managed decline forbids advocating too vociferously for our country’s interests. As its primary practitioner, Biden travelled halfway across the world to meet Vladimir Putin at the G7, handing over a list detailing our critical infrastructure sectors and politely requesting that he be kind enough not to hack those.

Back home, his staff obfuscates the fact that inflation is rising faster than nominal wages—meaning real wages are declining—and dismisses the higher prices burdening small businesses and families as a public relations inconvenience, even releasing a statement instructing the public to stop blaming them for high gas prices. Cities across the country are plagued with stomach-churning random assaults and open-air drug bazaars to such a degree the Democrats’ traditional media apologists are nervously signaling they cannot furnish effective propaganda to stave off a political backlash. Microchip shortages are roiling auto manufacturing and necessitating layoffs. In the face of record drug overdose deaths, his administration is offering subsidized drug paraphernalia to facilitate addicts’ injection of deadly narcotics. As the border crisis continues, the federal government rewards illegal border crossers with taxpayer-funded plane tickets to destinations across the country. Meanwhile, for citizens, the Biden administration is fixated on maximizing extractive, redistributive, and vengeful policies to “address” abstractions such as climate change, systemic racism, and the intelligence community’s latest absurd fiction designed to increase their budget, “terrorism from white supremacy.”

Despite his media portrayal as a great uniter, Biden cynically embraces talking points to divide Americans by race, encouraging citizens to blame each other for difficulties getting ahead instead of the destructive effects of policies he spent half a century voting for and now aims to revive. A long-time proponent of trade policies that dismantled our industrial base—sending millions of working-class jobs abroad—and of unfairly flooding the labor market with foreign workers, he appears committed to the belief that the inevitable decline in economic opportunity afflicting Americans of all races was in fact due to insufficient commitment to those policies instead of the other way around. Deploying theories of “systemic inequities” is a convenient pre-emptive strike for a man whose administration is officially forecasting economic decline.

In a demonstration of the sincerity of his administration’s commitment to black Americans’ success, his appointees congratulate themselves for frivolous interventions such as banning menthol cigarettes, but have little interest in addressing the fact that our public school system graduates a mere 7 percent of black 12th graders proficient in math. In fact, Biden’s most definitive contribution to the pitiful state of public education has been to assert in his State of the Union address that, when it comes to public education, “12 years is no longer enough” and “that’s why my American Families Plan guarantees four additional years of public education for every person in America.” Our concierge of decline does not demand higher-quality education—rather, he instructs Americans to spend four more years of their lives with the government’s educators, devoid of any obligation to the public to improve.

Such complacency in the face of deterioration is not only dysfunctional, but dangerous. Our adversaries are well aware: China’s delegation humiliated Biden’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to their faces on our own soil, asserting, “the United States does not have the qualification to say it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”

To many Americans, the Biden Decline feels distinctly wrong. Do leaders who love their country typically stand idly by while so many urgent problems accumulate for their citizens? A president who supplants his obligations to the people with wildly impractical ideological fixations does not seem motivated to steward our country to success. He seems intent on ushering in an era of weakness that puts our country’s safety, prosperity, and future at risk. The American people are resilient, but the lengths to which our leaders have gone to subvert our country’s strength will require serious course-correction to return to fighting weight.