Biden’s massive body count

OPINION:

At noon on Jan. 20, on the West Front of the Capitol, a sad chapter of American history will come to an end. Americans will turn the page on the Biden administration, but the aftermath of his failed presidency leaves behind a trail of human suffering that will haunt millions at home and abroad. President Biden will leave office having racked up a body count usually associated with dictators and banana republic strongmen.

Mr. Biden empowered the jihadis by surrendering Afghanistan to terrorists who are responsible for public executions, hundreds of extrajudicial killings and thousands of casualties.

When it comes to the rights of women and girls, the Taliban’s leadership, which continues to benefit from billions in U.S. largesse, is the most oppressive in the world. The World Bank estimated that Afghanistan lost more than one-quarter of its real gross domestic product in 2021 and 2022 alone. According to hte International Crisis Group, millions of Afghans have slipped into poverty since the Taliban’s return, and many of them are facing starvation.

Then there were 13 U.S. service members killed during the disastrous withdrawal, despite President Biden’s denials that any troops died on his watch.

The largest war in Europe since World War II is another sad legacy of Mr. Biden. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin may have ordered the invasion, but Mr. Biden’s lack of strategic deterrence set the stage for it. Mr. Biden’s vacillation and disjointed approach to the threat of Russian troops along the border rolled out the welcome mat for Mr. Putin. As vice president, Mr. Biden did nothing to support the Ukrainians after the annexation of Crimea. He has allowed Mr. Putin to all but destroy the second-largest country in Europe.

Since the beginning of this war, the number of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed or wounded tops 500,000. The combat has resulted in over 30,000 civilian casualties and more than 10 million displaced.

Upon taking office, Mr. Biden lifted sanctions on Iran, signaled he would revisit the Iran nuclear deal, removed the Houthis from the terrorist list and sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinians. In May 2021, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki dismissed former President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, saying, “We don’t think they did anything constructive.”

That weekend, Hamas launched 4,000 rockets into Israel. Two years later, Hamas would stage the Oct. 7 massacre, sparking a war that has claimed the lives of more than 46,000 people on both sides.

At home, Mr. Biden’s immigration policies have resulted in a human calamity so massive that it surpasses American military casualties during World War I. First, the expansion of drug trafficking because of the open border has seen the cartels operate with near impunity across America.

Mr. Biden knows full well the vast majority of fentanyl crosses the southern border. Not counting 2024, the total number of deaths just from fentanyl is estimated at 219,142 during Mr. Biden’s term. If 2024 holds to the mean, that would be 73,000 Americans dead from these drugs last year.

In addition to the drug overdose figures, some 60 homicides were attributed to illegal immigrants in 2021, a 1,900% increase from the last year of the Trump administration. Mr. Biden must have been encouraged, secretly flying and busing illegals on the taxpayer dime into the country.

In the last three years of the administration, headlines became increasingly common, showing mug shots of illegals arrested on murder and sexual violence charges. Among the most recent is a Guatemalan charged with setting a sleeping woman on fire in the New York  subway. He had been deported during Mr. Trump’s first term but returned under Mr. Biden. Over the four-year period, hundreds of homicides have been committed by illegals.

The Biden body count includes not only Americans but also illegal migrants. In the first two years of Mr. Biden’s presidency, more than 1,000 died attempting to cross the border; over 500 died in 2023. More than 300,000 children were lost or unaccounted for, but replacing Democratic voters and exploding the welfare rolls to justify expanding the administrative state was worth the fiscal chaos, crime, human suffering and death.

None of these estimates consider the high cost of Mr. Biden’s nonsensical vaccine mandates and his administration peddling misinformation to justify Democratic-supported lockdowns during the pandemic. More than 750,000 Americans died from COVID-19 or had the virus at the time of death during Mr. Biden’s term. There is no telling how many of them could have been saved by public health policies based on sound science rather than political science.

Mr. Biden’s COVID-19 policies shuttered hundreds of thousands of businesses and created an epidemic of learning loss and academic delays for a generation of children.

Democrats under Mr. Biden used the pandemic to execute an unconstitutional censorship regime, destroy reputations and spend trillions that contributed significantly to 40-year-high inflation.

Mr. Biden’s policies shaped by his leftist handlers have likely cost an estimated nearly 1 million lives at home and abroad. This is by no means a dispositive accounting, but even a short review of the carnage makes one understand how Mr. Biden could cheerfully award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros.

Make no mistake: The fact that the impact is so hard to calculate is precisely the reason extreme liberals believe they will continue to get away with murder by proxy.

We can never allow such disregard for human life, the law, basic decency and the Constitution to wreak havoc from the White House again. We can never wonder who is really running the country. It’s a lesson for all of us, but particularly Democrats whose blind hatred of Mr. Trump allowed the installation of a mentally diminished automaton who would do the bidding of our enemies from behind the Resolute Desk.

As we turn the page from this calamity, we can never forget.

• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax TV and is a Washington Times columnist.