One Year Into His Presidency, Biden Hits a Wall. Can He Recover?
With midterm elections looming, he turns up the heat on Trump after a series of setbacks on Covid, voting rights, and his economic agenda.
For Joe Biden, this wasn’t how 2022 was supposed to start.
On the timeline imagined by the White House when he took office a year ago, widely available vaccines would have effectively ended the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. by now. The economy would be growing strongly, and a narrowly divided Congress would have already passed the bulk of Biden’s agenda. With those mega-missions accomplished, the president could have spent 2022 focusing on voting rights, cutting ribbons on infrastructure projects, and telling Americans what he’d done to make their lives better—with vaccines, stimulus checks, and Great Society-scale investments in child care, education, and the fight against climate change.