| Today, President Biden has been in office exactly 365 days. Objectively, things aren't going well for him. Here's what we mean when we say that: - He's struggling to quell the coronavirus, amid some health experts' criticisms that his administration should have prepared better to protect Americans from a highly infectious variant such as omicron and with polls showing Americans think the government's guidance has been confusing. Biden confirmed today the government could have ramped up testing sooner.
- He's struggling to address inflation, which is as bad as it's been in 40 years and is Americans' top concern. Yet there's not a lot he (or any president) can do about it.
- Today, Democrats will try — and fail — to break through a Republican filibuster to pass legislation on voting rights, and they will have to acknowledge they have no path forward to fulfill this key Biden campaign promise.
- They also don't have a path forward for Biden's big government spending plan, Build Back Better.
And a solid majority of Americans disapprove of the job he's doing so far (which actually isn't that unusual in these partisan times).  Biden holds a news conference on his first anniversary in office. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) | What he's saying about it That he's doing the best he can, essentially. "I understand the overwhelming frustration, fear and concern with regard to inflation and covid," Biden said Wednesday in a rare news conference designed to give his side of the story. "And yet if I told you, 'I'm going to create over 600 million jobs, I'm going to get unemployment down to 3.9 percent'…You'd look at me like, 'You're nuts.'" His struggles have been frustrating, and they haven't been entirely his fault. He has little to no control over the global supply chain, and he can't make skeptical Americans get vaccinated. No one has figured out how to successfully combat the misinformation on the pandemic coming specifically from conservative media circles and Republican figures. Presidents with much bigger majorities in Congress have failed to pass major legislation, and yet Biden has managed to pass a coronavirus relief bill and a bipartisan infrastructure bill. And from vaccine rules in workplaces to protecting abortion rights, he's been stymied by a conservative Supreme Court again and again and again.  Anti-vaccine-mandate protesters outside the White House recently. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post) | But his approach to these challenges are in his control. For example, he didn't have to set expectations so high on legislation when it was such a reach — as with ending partisan gerrymandering or instituting paid family leave. (He argued Wednesday he didn't overpromise and predicted action on voting rights will happen.) It all comes back to Afghanistan That's the conventional political wisdom right now, that this summer's U.S. withdrawal of Afghanistan was so messy that it punctured Biden's veneer of being a capable, competent president — at least compared with the guy he beat. The many challenges he faced after that left potentially deeper dents. "Biden presented himself as an antidote to his predecessor, offering the promise of what his own campaign ads called 'strong, steady, stable leadership' after four years of bedlam under President Donald Trump," report The Post's Ashley Parker, Tyler Pager and Sean Sullivan. "But the tumult surrounding the administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan offered an early glimpse of the cascade of crises that have badly eroded Biden's image of restoring calm." You can see that his approval rating — already steadily declining, as most presidents' do — took an even bigger drop in August after the Afghanistan withdrawal. And it has only gone down from there. Will Trump get indicted? We don't know, but his company could be in trouble. Since before he left office, prosecutors in New York have been aggressively investigating the Trump Organization. They already indicted the company this summer for allegedly keeping two sets of books to dodge taxes. We just got confirmation they are investigating potential fraud, specifically whether the company undervalued its properties to dodge taxes or overvalued it to get loans and other deals. New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) hasn't alleged wrongdoing directly on the president's part, but she did say in a statement this week that she will try to force the former president and his kids to talk under oath about it: "Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., and Ivanka Trump have all been closely involved in the transactions in question, so we won't tolerate their attempts to evade testifying in this investigation." (Trump might be more directly threatened in Georgia, where prosecutors are looking into whether he broke state laws by trying to reverse his election loss there.) | 
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