The Cost of Becoming "Woke": First "Woke," Then Broke and Lawless A Consideration of The First Year of the Biden Administration

By William L. Kane

Merriam-Webster defines woke as being "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues [especially issues of racial and social justice]."

The Urban Dictionary defines woke as "the act of being very pretentious, attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed, about how much you care about a social issue."

Contemporary wisdom would suggest that woke is best defined as extreme progressivism.

W. Durant--author, historian, philosopher, Pulitzer Prize winner in 1968, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977--concluded that "a great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

The Biden administration's progressive agenda has weakened America in every aspect.

Woke progressive policies have cost America with open borders, the highest inflation rate in forty years, empty store shelves, unmanageable energy costs, education curricula viewed through the prism of racism, international humiliation, high crime and lawlessness, cancel culture, sanctuary cities, and an exploding national debt.

Extremely progressive woke policies are by their nature, divisive, and ultimately do more harm than good to our nation.

While most woke initiatives seem noble, few are successful; while most woke ideologies seem altruistic, few are pragmatic. We should aspire to more diversity of thought and less diversity of color. Americans must choose between reason and emotion in future elections. We must choose between being woke or being awake.

Once civilization begins to decay, it can accelerate rapidly down a steep decline into passivity, indolence, ignorance, and violence. America is now teetering on the brink of that kind of decaying culture. That is why this debate over work vs. welfare, knowledge vs. ignorance, and independence vs. dependence is so vital.

Newt Gingrich - Beyond Biden 2021

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662484056

Book preview

Chapter 1

President Biden’s Inaugural Address

The hidden dangers of the age: the rise of gigantic trusts that were rapidly swallowing up their competitors in one field after another, the invisible web of corruption linking political bosses to the business community, the increasing concentration of wealth and the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the squalid conditions in the immigrant slums, the mood of insurrection among the laboring classes.⁴

Was this quote reflecting upon the social media, internet, broadcast journalism, and newspaper publishing industries being dominated by a few titans? Or the political corruption revealed in the Peter Schweizer books, Clinton Cash, Secret Empires, Profiles in Corruption and Red Handed? Or the progressive outcry for wealth redistribution? Could it be addressing the poor conditions in which undocumented immigrants exist? Perchance, the January 2021 mob incursion into the Capitol Building?

In reality, the quote refers to none of these. It was from a different time, 1902, 120 years ago, when Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency upon the assassination of President McKinley.

How can it be that after more than a century, we are still stuck in the same social quagmire? How can it be that administrations of both parties have continually failed to resolve these issues?

Politics have become so bizarre and chaotic, we seem to have entered an extended period of political paranoia, a period of ignorance and arrogance.

The strategy intended by President Biden would be revealed in his 2021 Inaugural Address.

The address was given to a backdrop of National Guard troops not in Portland or in Seattle, where riots continued to occur since the summer of 2020, but in the US Capitol. How far have we fallen?

Fox News host Chris Wallace praised the speech.

I thought it was a great speech, Wallace said. I thought this was the best inaugural address I ever heard. Wallace pointed out that obviously, Biden’s address was colored by the emotion of the US Capitol siege earlier that month by extreme-right radicals, but they appreciated Biden’s call for future unity despite those events.

There was a mob of thugs, of insurrectionists, of domestic terrorists on the inaugural stand, Wallace said. And Joe Biden was saying that democracy prevailed. We were able to get through that, and he was talking about how we need to get through that in the future if we are going to be a united country.⁵

I suspect that there are many that would disagree with Wallace’s comments. The Biden speech seemed a mediocre effort. It lacked specifics and failed to deliver a memorable hallmark phrase, like JFK and other previous presidents had done.

President Biden’s overarching theme was unity—America united:

Much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build and much to gain.

It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy; unity, unity.

My whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation…

With unity we can do great things, important things, without unity there can be no peace, only bitterness and fury.

I will be a president for all Americans…I will fight as hard for those who did not support me, as for those who did.⁶

However, simultaneously, he also preached division and identity politics.

A cry for survival…[from]…political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism. Why no mention of the left-wing extremists such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter? How do such one-sided remarks encourage unity?

A constant struggle…(against)…the harsh reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonization have long torn us apart…recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit… We face an attack on our democracy and untruth…a sting of systemic racism.

Admittedly, as a nation, we are flawed, but we have worked to correct our failings. How is it unifying to omit the success we have had?

Jim Crow was systemic racism. Nothing like that exists in the United States today. America has been on a constant ramp of improvement regarding racism since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. President Biden chose to endorse the notion of systemic racism, emphasizing the negative, opted to be divisive rather than the positive, and acknowledging progress made which would have been inclusive.

Here we stand just days after a riotous mob thought they could use violence to stop the work of democracy.

On the evening of Inauguration Day, Antifa rioted in Seattle, Portland, and Denver. In a blatant display of media bias, the Associated Press reported on protestors that damaged Democrat offices in Portland and other property in Seattle and Denver on Inauguration night, setting fires and smashing windows. While the Associated Press reported the incidents, they failed to identify the protestors as Antifa, reporting that they were simply anti-Biden protestors.⁷

The AP, using the term anti-Biden protesters, either by intention or simply poor journalism, left the impression that somehow, the rioters were supporters of former President Trump.

Neither President Biden nor anyone from his administration condemned these acts.

Were these examples of how the president, the administration, and the media would unify?

Could President Biden’s Inaugural Address have been in more ironic conflict with the poignant vision created in Amanda Gorman’s poem The Hill We Climb?

In a New York Times interview prior to the Inauguration, Ms. Gorman explained the meaning of the poem:

What I really aspire to do in the poem is to be able to use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal. It’s doing that in a way that is not erasing or neglecting the harsh truths I think America needs to reconcile with.⁸

Her writing told us that America isn’t broken, just unfinished. It asks us to look at not what stands between us but what is before us to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.

Ms. Gorman cautioned that we will rebuild, reconcile and recover…if only we are brave enough to be it.

What will be the direction of a Biden administration? Will its purpose be to cancel the Trump presidency or to work in a bipartisan effort to address and resolve our persistent economic and societal issues? President Biden called for unity. Now he must prove his address was more than just words. Now he must demonstrate whether his administration can be brave enough to be it.

We shall see. Time will tell.

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⁴ Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times (Simon and Schuster, 2018).

⁵ Fox News Host, Chris Wallace, called President Biden’s inaugural speech, the ‘best’ he’s ‘ever heard,’ Washington Examiner, January 20, 2021.

⁶ American Staff. All quotes taken from President Biden’s Inaugural Address were taken from the transcript provided (January 20, 2021).

⁷ Protestors gather, damage Democratic headquarters in Oregon, Associated Press, January 21, 2021.

⁸ Read Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb in Cosmopolitan, January 20, 2021.

Chapter 2

President Biden’s Executive Orders

During candidate Biden’s campaign in an ABC News town hall in October 2020, Biden told George Stephanopoulos that Democrats had suggested to him that he could use presidential powers to force through policies if he could not garner the votes to steer legislation through congress.

There are things you can’t do by executive order unless you’re a dictator, Biden said. We’re a democracy. We need consensus. It was clear at the time that he saw there were limits to the use of executive orders unless you’re a dictator.⁹ Yet shortly after the inauguration, President Biden went to the Oval Office to execute thirty-seven executive orders and actions.

Beginning on Inauguration Day, the White House had rapidly rolled out executive actions and legislative proposals on a wide range of topics: economic relief, health care, racial equity, immigration, and climate change. Some actions implemented significant policy change, while others were more advisory and would require help from Congress to make happen.¹⁰

The flurry of edicts targeted any of three goals: undoing signature Trump administration policy accomplishments, initiating a woke progressive wish list agenda, or virtue signaling. Apparently dismissing the seventy-four million Americans who had supported Trump, the president quickly abandoned his quest for unity.

President Biden issued three executive orders relating to the coronavirus: a nationwide mask and physical distancing mandate on all federal grounds, the creation of a Coronavirus Response Coordinator to oversee his administration’s efforts to distribute vaccines and medical supplies, and revived a global health unit within the National Security Council that President Trump had disbanded.

The president issued four directives related to immigration, reversing some of Trump’s policies: eliminating the restriction on travel from the seven Muslim-majority nations embroiled in terrorist activity, overhauled the Trump administration’s expansion of immigration enforcement, ceased construction of the border wall, and nullified Trump’s directive to exclude noncitizens from the census count.

Biden also issued a memorandum calling on the Department of Homeland Security to preserve and fortify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children. He also issued an executive order requiring the DHS to suspend deportations for certain noncitizens ordered deported for the next one hundred days and reinstituted the Obama-era catch and release policy.

Each day was devoted to a different topic, with President Biden signing orders in the Oval Office, supported by briefing sessions from press secretary Jen Psaki and other senior officials. One early move, a hundred-day moratorium on deportations, was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in Texas.

Separately, Biden rolled out his immigration plans in an ambitious bill introduced to Congress which proposed an eight-year path to citizenship for the estimated eleven million people living in the US without legal status. The eleven million estimate was first introduced in 2008 by the Center for Immigration Studies and has remained unchanged in fourteen years. The actual number of illegals living in the United States is unknown, estimated by some to be closer to twenty-five or thirty million rather than the often cited eleven million.

Biden issued two executive actions pertaining to the pandemic economy. One extended the nationwide moratorium on evictions and foreclosures through March 2021. The other prolonged a pause on federal student loan interest and principal payments through September 2021.¹¹

President Biden began to undo the Trump administration’s environmental actions by rejoining the Paris Climate Accord and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline.

On racial equity, Biden rescinded the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission that was created in September 2020 to support patriotic education, intended to counter the educational influence of the New York Times initiated 1619 Project, which many believed to be modern revisionist history.

President Biden also addressed equity in an executive action preventing workplace discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Another directive called on the Office of Management and Budget "to develop recommendations to modernize regulatory review and undo Trump’s regulatory approval process."¹²

Over the next seven days, President Biden continued with his issuance of executive orders. One extended the 15 percent increase in the SNAP, food assistance program. A second guaranteed unemployment insurance for workers who refuse to work because of a perceived COVID risk. A third reversed the Trump administration rules that made it easier to hire and fire civil servants in policy making positions. And a fourth order reversed the existing transgender military ban.¹³

Progressives appeared to believe that President Trump was the anti-Christ and that they were duty bound to remove his stain from contemporary society.

Many in the media questioned and criticized President Biden’s avalanche of executive actions. The new president, referring to notes on three-by-five cards, offered little, if any, explanation as to their ultimate purpose. He began with issues that would not unite us and may very well have lit the fuse to more division.

The New York Times criticized:

President Biden sat at the Resolute Desk in the White House and signed a flurry of executive orders. He rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, repealed the so-called Muslim travel ban and mandated the wearing of masks on federal property. The actions had a theme: They either reversed former President Donald Trump’s actions or rebuked his general policy approach.

The president has issued a slew of executive orders, including committing to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, ending the travel ban from countries with heightened terror concerns, canceling the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, halting construction of the border wall with Mexico and mandating mask-wearing on federal property.

These moves are being met with cheers by Democrats and others eager to see the legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency dismantled posthaste. Republicans, meanwhile, are grumbling about presidential overreach and accusing Mr. Biden of betraying his pledge to seek unity.

But this is no way to make law. A polarized, narrowly divided Congress may offer Mr. Biden little choice but to employ executive actions or see his entire agenda held hostage.

These directives, however, are a flawed substitute for legislation. Executive Orders are intended to provide guidance to the government and need to work within the discretion granted the executive by existing law or the Constitution. They do not create new law—though executive orders carry the force of law—they are not meant to serve as an end run around the will of Congress."¹⁴

President Biden’s executive orders offered no hint that he was interested in bipartisan progress. The unprecedented number of EO’s signed fall into one of two categories: satisfy the extreme liberal wish list or cancel President Trump’s progress.¹⁵

Joe Biden had spoken of unity and tolerance, even as his actions and executive orders foster divisiveness. Many media outlets and Americans recognized this.¹⁶

White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield slammed the media, and particularly The New York Times, over its editorial calling for President Biden to ease up on executive actions.

As the New York Times editorial board criticizes President Biden for taking swift executive action to reverse the most egregious actions of the Trump Administration, I can’t help but recall that during the primary they encouraged voters to consider what a president could accomplish through executive action, so, my question is which actions that the president took to reverse Donald Trump’s executive orders would they have liked to see him not pursue?¹⁷

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki brushed off criticism that President Biden’s reliance on executive actions in his first week is at odds with his campaign promise of unity.

The more than thirty-seven executive orders were part of Biden’s fulfillment of commitments he made during the inauguration address. I would say first that part of unifying the country is addressing the problems that the American people are facing and working to reach out to Democrats and Republicans to do exactly that, take steps immediately to address the pain and suffering that the American people were feeling and that includes overturning some of the detrimental, harmful and at times immoral policies and actions of the 7prior administration.

Psaki suggested several times during press briefings "that the administrations’ economic relief package was broadly supported by the American public."¹⁸

It must be considered that Jen Psaki may have misunderstood the popularity for the 1.9 trillion-dollar COVID-19 relief package. The allure of a free $1,400 check from the government might have been the real motivator for the bill’s popularity. Sadly, most citizens were oblivious to the fact that the bill would also carry an additional $5,757 of national debt to be borne by every man, woman, and child in America ($1.9 trillion price tag, divided by 330 million US citizens).

Republicans believed that the $1.9 trillion proposal was far too expensive. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) accused Biden of side-stepping the democratic process to enact a far left agenda.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WS) said that Mr. Biden had always been very gracious and engaging as vice president. But he added, I just wish that his actions match the words of his inaugural address in terms of being unifying and healing.¹⁹

Joe Biden, in less than two weeks as president, had already issued as many executive actions as Trump and Obama did in the same period, combined. Biden hit the ground running, enacting thirty-seven executive orders, ten presidential memos, and four proclamations within his first twelve days in office. Every way you view it, Biden has out-actioned his recent predecessors. The number of executive orders he has signed are an order of magnitude greater than those before him. Obama was runner-up, with nine.²⁰

The implications and consequence of President Biden’s executive orders woke policies quickly became apparent with massive illegal immigration, spiraling inflation rates, ballooning fuel prices, historic increases in crime and lawlessness, expanding national debt, and weakened national security. His education policies threatened the quality of education our children receive and encouraged divisiveness.

Biden reversed several Trump administration policies. He eliminated the expansion of immigration enforcement, stopped construction of the border wall, as well as Biden’s own call to preserve and fortify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, his order to suspend deportations for a hundred days and reinstituting the Obama-era catch and release policy, all of which contributed to making the southern border more porous for illegal immigration.

These actions reinforced the president’s campaign promise to overturn, immediately, the current administration’s stricter immigration policies and effectively created an open invitation to Central Americans to come to the United States.²¹ The migrant population responded with continuous caravans beginning after the presidential election and continuing in unprecedented numbers through 2021 and beyond.²²-²³

The Biden administration refused to call the conditions at the border a crisis and banned the media from visiting, filming, and reporting on the chaos at the southern border.²⁴-²⁵

In a futile attempt to limit the number of illegal immigrants being held at the expanding number of retention camps, the Department of Homeland Security began releasing illegals into the interior United States, sometimes without paperwork or assignment of an Immigration Court notice.²⁶

Only when the public outcry became elevated was the media allowed to visit and report on the conditions within these camps. And combined with video reports of children being dropped over fourteen-foot-high walls and abandoned as well as frequent reports of unaccompanied children being found wandering in the southern desert, the popularity of President Biden’s immigration policies began to dwindle by a margin of 2 to 1. By April 2021, an Associated Press poll found 40 percent of Americans disapproved.²⁷

To further his administration’s policy to remove restrictions that would reduce uncontrolled immigrant migration, President Biden revoked another Trump administration policy that had required all prospective immigrants to show proof of US health insurance within thirty days of their arrival in the United States or demonstrate having enough money to pay for reasonably foreseeable medical costs.

Biden said the suspension imposed by his Republican predecessor did not advance the interests of the United States.²⁸

It may well be that Biden’s cancel Trump strategy backfired, with increasing numbers of Americans expressing their preference of the Trump administration’s border control policies.

Many Republicans felt Mr. Biden had undermined his own call for bipartisan unity by his extensive use of executive orders to pursue long-standing liberal priorities and reverse policies put in place by former President Donald Trump. President Biden announced his intent to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization.

By the first week in June, his decision to rejoin the World Health Organization without precondition was proven to be foolish after the WHO welcomed Syria and Belarus, two dictator states, to its executive board.

Many believed that a global organization that professes to care about world health should not give authority to such regimes as Russia, Syria, or Belarus. China lied about human-to-human transmission, which the WHO parroted.

It was a mistake to rejoin the WHO with no guarantees of reform or accountability. To send the World Health Organization more taxpayer money heaped injury to the national treasury and insult to common sense.²⁹

The Biden administration’s motivation was more directed at establishing a progressive agenda rather than generating bipartisan unity. The president’s initial actions only further divided the congress and polarized policy positions, yielding strong opposition from Republicans.

In July, the president issued an additional executive order that included three provisions. It directed the Federal Trade Commission to ban noncompete agreements, to reduce occupational license requirements, and to require human resource professionals to share compensation data with employees so that the workers could know how their compensation compares to the pay of other company workers with similar experience and skills. While the executive order was designed to improve opportunity for workers, it imposed additional constraints upon business and significantly increased government’s role in employee/employer relations.³⁰

Biden’s sweeping new competition order especially impacted big tech companies in ways that could profoundly alter how they do business.

The president’s promised quest for unity, when he announced in his Inaugural Address that My whole soul is in this: bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation, appeared to have been forgotten.

We can only wait to see what success or disappointment develops from the many other Biden executive orders and can only pray that the consequences are dissimilar to his immigration actions.

How do you measure a man or woman by their words or their deeds?

Elections do have consequences.

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⁹ Biden signs more executive orders despite claims he once said they were for dictators, Washington Examiner, January 28, 2021.

¹⁰ After Scripted Rollouts of Executive Orders, Biden’s Task Gets Harder, Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2021.

¹¹ What Did Biden’s Day-One Executive Orders Achieve? Intelligencer, January 20, 2021.

¹² What Did Biden’s Day-One Executive Orders Achieve? Intelligencer, January 20, 2021.

¹³ Here’s the full list of Biden’s executive actions so far, NBC News, January 25, 2021.

¹⁴ Biden’s Executive Orders, NBC News, January 21, 2021.

¹⁵ Biden’s First Week Was a Race to the Left, Op-ed, Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2021.

¹⁶ Biden Unleashes War on Political Opposition, Epoch Times, February 2, 2021.

¹⁷ White House’s Kate Bedingfield slams NY Times editorial on Biden’s executive orders, New York Post, January 28, 2021.

¹⁸ Psaki defends Biden’s use of executive orders amid criticism, Yahoo News, January 28, 2021.

¹⁹ After Scripted Rollouts of Executive Orders, Biden’s Task Gets Harder, Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2021.

²⁰ How Joe Biden’s executive orders compare with those of other presidents, Reuters, January 31, 2021.

²¹ Biden Team Gently Walking Back Election Year Campaign Promises, Washington Examiner, December 22, 2020.

²² Migrant Border Arrests Hit 15-Year High, Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2021.

²³ ‘No end in sight’: Inside the Biden administration’s failure to contain the border surge, Washington Post, March 21, 2021.

²⁴ Biden admin limits what Border Patrol can share with media about migrant surge at border, NBC News, March 17, 2021.

²⁵ Photos show crowded conditions for migrants at Texas Border Patrol facility, NBC News, March 22, 2021.

²⁶ Migrants freed without court notice—sometimes no paperwork, Associated Press, April 1, 2021.

²⁷ More Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the border than approve, New York Post, April 5, 2021.

²⁸ Biden rescinds Trump-era health insurance requirement for new immigrants, Associated Press, May 15, 2021.

²⁹ Biden rejoining the World Health Organization looks worse every day, Washington Examiner, June 7, 2021.

³⁰ Biden’s latest executive order empowers workers in three keyways, Yahoo News, July 9, 2021.

Chapter 3

President Biden’s COVID-19 Strategy

Whether by accident or some evil plan, China introduced a devastating pandemic to the planet, and COVID-19 impacted the world health, economy, conduct, and even politics.

After several missteps during the initial period when there was no clear understanding of the potential scope or severity of the virus, the Trump administration established a plan and policy for dealing with it, leading up to Operation Warp Speed and the historic delivery of effective vaccines in record time. The first vaccine shots were administered on December 14, 2020. While some counts vary, on Inauguration Day 2021, nearly 1.5 million daily inoculations were administered for a total of 15.6 million vaccinations. Operation Warp Speed had succeeded.³¹

President-Elect Biden promised aggressive action against the virus after inauguration, announcing that COVID-19 would be his first, second, and third priority, and he delivered.³² On his first day in office, via executive order, the president ordered a nationwide mask and physical distancing mandate on all federal grounds and created the position of a Coronavirus Response Coordinator to oversee his administration’s efforts to distribute vaccines and medical supplies.

When candidate Biden was campaigning for the presidency, he assured the American people that he had a plan, superior to the Trump administration, to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. However, with few exceptions, President Biden followed the Trump plan, adding a federal bureaucracy tasked with accomplishing the same work.³³

The administration’s team, after a few early gaffes, performed commendably, and by the end of April 2021, 140 million citizens, representing 42 percent of the population, had received at least one dose. Overall, eighty-seven million, or 26 percent, had been fully vaccinated.³⁴

However, success in attacking the pandemic served neither the purpose nor the narrative of the Biden administration nor the Democrat Party. From its introduction, the virus instilled fear around the globe. While a curse to most, it provided an early October surprise for the Democrats regarding presidential politics in the United States.

The Biden campaign, supported by a biased media, used the COVID-19 fear as a cudgel against President Trump during the campaign. In August 2020, when Vice President Pence suggested that We’re on track to have the world’s first safe, effective coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year, the media called that suggestion a false claim and inaccurate.

CNN reported:

Though there are several vaccine candidates in different phases of testing, there is no guarantee that the Food and Drug Administration will have approved a vaccine by the end of the year. And even once one is approved, it will likely still be many months before it’s widely available across the US.³⁵

Curiously, Pfizer, after receiving government guarantees from the Trump administration to buy hundreds of millions of doses as well as the easing of government regulation via Operation Warp Speed, waited until immediately after Election Day 2020 to announce it had developed a vaccine with a 90 percent effective rate.³⁶

At a time when COVID-19 deaths, hospitalizations, and new cases identified were dropping dramatically and vaccinations were surging, the Biden administration continued to project the pessimism necessary to fuel the fear of the American people.³⁷³⁸³⁹ Why did the president feel it necessary to wear a mask during a zoom call or when visiting a deserted Arlington National Cemetery other than for optics?

The Democrats and the Biden administration continued to use COVID-19 fear as a weapon against the American people until they were able to pass the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill in March of 2021. They demanded that schools continue to be closed. What nation sacrifices their children to further political gain?

The Biden administration, in their continuing quest to delegitimize the Trump success and mislead the public, falsely accused the Trump administration of malfeasance regarding COVID-19 planning. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain announced on Meet the Press that the Trump administration left complex problems that required a host of fixes. A wider distribution plan did not really exist when we came into the White House.⁴⁰

CNN White House correspondent MJ Lee quoted unnamed Biden administration officials alleging that There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch. The new administration would have to start from square one. Lee also quoted President Biden: Trump’s vaccine rollout had been a ‘dismal failure.’

However, Dr. Fauci debunked those allegations during a White House press briefing when Fauci was asked by NBC News if the new administration was starting from scratch. Fauci responded, acknowledging the Trump administration had developed the vaccine in record time and the Biden administration is certainly not starting from scratch because there is activity going on in the distribution.⁴¹

CNN’s Lee, defending her reporting, characterized Fauci as a holdover from the Trump administration.

In fact, the US had completed more than 20.5 million coronavirus vaccine doses and had hit the pace of one million vaccinations per day in the final days of the Trump administration, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Distribution Tracker.

It would be necessary to continue to stoke the COVID-19 fear to garner public support for the proposed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 rescue plan that the president would present to Congress.

The president took every opportunity to espouse the need for continued masking and social distancing. Administration officials and the sky is falling Dr. Fauci continued to press the need to keep schools, restaurants, and other businesses closed, even while some states were reducing the requirements.⁴²-⁴³-⁴⁴

We can never truly know what effect the pessimism of the Biden administration, despite the massive increase of actual inoculations, was having on the confidence of the American people in the vaccination itself.

President Biden said, We’ve got a lot to do, and the first thing we’ve got to do is get this COVID package passed.

The bill was receiving no Republican backing. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) wanted a deeper accounting of what funds remain from the $900 billion coronavirus aid package from December, questioning whether additional funds would be necessary. Literally, the money has not gone out the door. And responding to Schumer’s comment, I’m not sure I understand why there’s a grave emergency right now. The government had already steered $4 trillion in aid, an unprecedented emergency expenditure, to keep millions of Americans housed, fed, and employed amid the crisis.⁴⁵

A group of senior Republicans met with President Biden to outline a $618 billion compromise counterproposal to the $1.9 trillion Biden plan, but it was summarily rejected.⁴⁶

Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) had already declared that the Democrats would enact the legislation without them [Republicans] if we must. Everywhere you look, alarm bells are ringing.

President Biden’s first ten days in office had unfolded with executive orders, policy announcements, daily press briefings, and scripted signings from the Oval Office, providing an early window into how he and his top aides would manage White House operations.

Democrats advised the president to abandon his interest in a bipartisan approach that would require sixty votes in the senate and instead pass the bill on a party-line vote, using a process known as reconciliation. The senate had fifty Democrats and