Summer has so far not been kind to President Joe Biden, who returned from the July Fourth holiday this week hoping to turn the page from a spate of setbacks and unflattering headlines.
Biden had ended the previous week by railing against multiple Supreme Court decisions that angered Democrats and disrupted his agenda.
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He began this week by watching his team face a barrage of questions about illegal drugs found on White House grounds and whether he would acknowledge the biological granddaughter whose existence the Biden family has worked to ignore.
And that all followed a parade of problematic news coverage for Biden over the previous few weeks over what critics described as evidence of his declining health, his son’s criminal charges, and serious allegations of misconduct at his Department of Justice.
Biden was slated to hit the road this week to promote “Bidenomics,” the catchy title his team began using last week to describe the economic plan on which the president will run for reelection.
But Republican groups quickly turned the phrase into a punchline that could prove effective on the campaign trail given how negatively the public views Biden’s handling of the economy.
The first Supreme Court case to ruffle feathers at the White House last week involved an effective end to affirmative action at colleges and universities, a policy that dovetailed with the Biden administration’s overall diversity goals.
“I strongly, strongly disagree with the court’s decision,” Biden said during a speech at the White House on Thursday that his team announced shortly after the ruling.
The next affected Biden’s agenda even more directly. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan.
“I know there are millions of Americans in this country who feel disappointed and discouraged, or even a little bit angry, about the court’s decision today on student debt. And I must admit, I do too,” the president said Friday during another speech his team announced after the Supreme Court issued its opinions for the day.
Biden also slammed the court’s ruling in 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, a case that sought to answer the question of whether a wedding website creator should be required to design a custom product for a same-sex marriage. The president said the conservative majority’s decision to side with the website creator was “disappointing” and warned that the ruling “could invite more discrimination against LGBTQI+ Americans.”
Progressives, at times frustrated by what they view as a lack of urgency from Biden on issues like climate change and transgender rights, were quick to demand Biden use executive power to right what they saw as the Supreme Court’s wrongs. Liberal lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), urged Biden to attempt to wipe away student loans under a different authority, even though the original plan was not broadly popular.
In fact, Biden had spoken little about it since its launch last year, barely mentioning it in his State of the Union address in February and frequently omitting the program from his lists of accomplishments. But thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday, he’s now in the position of having to defend the effort as he begins his campaign.
Then there was the uncomfortable spotlight the New York Times shined on the Biden family’s personal affairs over the weekend with a feature story about the president’s unacknowledged granddaughter in Arkansas.
The article detailed how Hunter Biden’s former assistant became pregnant with a child the presidential son denied fathering until a court-ordered DNA test established his paternity. Hunter Biden’s lengthy and bitter legal battle over child support and the mother’s unsuccessful quest to give her daughter the surname of her famous family came to an end last week, refocusing attention on a matter the president had studiously ignored.
The White House refused to answer questions on Wednesday about whether Joe Biden would choose to acknowledge the existence of the young girl. He has frequently cited his love for his six, not seven, grandchildren.
Hunter Biden-driven headaches consumed much of the president’s June.
His son pleaded guilty earlier this month to two misdemeanor tax charges through a plea deal that also spared him more serious consequences for a gun-related charge.
The plea deal itself, however, caused fewer problems for the White House than the context surrounding it.
House Ways and Means Committee Republicans voted to release transcripts of testimony from two IRS whistleblowers who claimed Hunter Biden received years of favorable treatment from the Justice Department; the whistleblowers also revealed evidence that seemed to suggest Joe Biden could have been more involved in his son’s business dealings than the president previously said.
The White House’s efforts to mitigate the situation did little to stem scrutiny.
A White House spokesperson said Joe Biden was “not in business with his son,” a departure from the president’s prior insistence that he had never even discussed business with Hunter Biden. The change in language did not go unnoticed by Joe Biden’s critics.
And then there were the handful of incidents that whipped up a recurring conversation about Joe Biden’s fitness for office.
On June 16, the president wrapped up a gun control speech by saying, “God save the queen.” Viewers were baffled by the statement, which the White House attempted to explain away by claiming Joe Biden was somehow commenting to an unidentified audience member.
On June 27 and 28, the president repeatedly confused the war in Ukraine with the war in Iraq.
Also, on June 28, Joe Biden emerged from the White House with visible marks on his face from a medical device, which the White House later conceded was due to the president's use of a machine to treat sleep apnea. The images of him with the marks are likely to bolster critics who say the president is aging too quickly to make an effective leader.
Joe Biden got bad news recently about his most likely successor, however. Last week, poll numbers showed Vice President Kamala Harris had hit the lowest approval rating of any vice president in history.
The president's rocky couple of weeks — which began with the White House having to issue an apology for transgender activists who, at a Pride Month event to which they were invited, stripped off their tops on the South Lawn — peaked over the weekend with another bizarre situation at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
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Secret Service agents evacuated the White House on Sunday after discovering a white powder they later determined to be cocaine.
White House officials on Wednesday deflected questions about who may have brought the substance into the West Wing and what was being done to identify the culprit.