What Started It All

Let's rewind to early May of 2021.

Joe Biden had just wrapped up his first 100 days, a traditional window for newly elected presidents to gauge progress as their administration transitions into a well-tuned machine. Biden went to work quickly, signing more than 60 executive orders, the majority of which overturned disastrous Trump policies like the removal of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, the racist Muslim ban, and the homophobic ban on most transgender individuals joining the military. He put together the most diverse administration in history creating multiple firsts such as the first Black woman vice-president in Kamala Harris, the first Black Secretary of Defense in Lloyd Austin, the first openly gay Cabinet Secretary in Pete Buttigieg, and the first Native American Cabinet Secretary in Deb Haaland among others. He signed the American Rescue Plan, which provided a $1.9 trillion boost to the struggling economy. And, let's not forget how he skillfully dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic, creating systems and collaborations that would double his original goal and get over 200 million shots into arms by the end of April, helping jobless claims to hit a pandemic low, and working diligently to get schools reopened to five days a week. With all this and more being accomplished, it should surprise no one that Joe Biden had a 57% approval rating, which would become the highest approval rating of his entire first term. 

With all this being done without the drama of a Trump presidency, you'd think our media would be ecstatic. After all, returning to normal would mean that working adults would have more income and more income meant more spending on non-essential items like, say, a digital subscription to The New York Times or Washington Post. Having workers healthy and their families stable would mean that corporate media companies could retain and even grow their workforce. This recovery was also critical for generating ad revenue. With advertisers now having a path to start purchasing ad buys again, this meant that news organizations like CNN could again count on consistent ad purchases from their most reliable corporate sponsors. While America began our methodical path back to normality, you would have thought that the media would have welcomed the work that Joe Biden was doing to help make that happen. 

You would have thought wrong.

Because over the next 4 months, while Joe Biden and his administration would continue to build upon the success of their first 100 days, they also would be confronted with what would become their first major foreign policy challenge: the Afghanistan withdrawal. With a commitment by Donald Trump to completely withdraw all 13,500 American troops by May 1st, the Biden Administration was hamstrung in keeping to this agreement while also recognizing the reality on the ground. Despite buying an extra 4 months to complete a full withdrawal, Biden and his team soon faced the grim reality that the Taliban were using this planned withdrawal to advance on the capitol and were facing little to no resistance from the American-trained Afghan military forces. By early July, military experts were predicting that Kabul would fall in as little as six months but this estimate proved to be a gross miscalculation as the Taliban took back territory at an alarming rate. It became apparent that the United States had a matter of weeks, rather than months before the Taliban completely overran Kabul, thereby making the fall of the entire country complete.

This rapid advancement expedited what would become the largest non-combatant evacuation airlift in U.S. history, surpassing the Berlin Airlift in both scope and scale. Operation Allies Refuge as it would be called consisted of nearly 800 civilian and military aircraft from over 30 nations to evacuate over 124,000 people to safety despite oftentimes having only a single runaway available at the Kabul airport. This was done, despite the rapidly advancing Taliban forces as well as the constant threat of terrorist attacks. Diplomatic staff were evacuated from the U.S. embassy in Kabul on August 15th. Tragically, a suicide bombing on August 26 killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 people in total at the Kabul airport, an event that reports later concluded was simply unpreventable. Gallant U.S. servicemen and women continued evacuating as many people as possible up until the final flight on August 30th at 11:59 P.M. when wheels went up on our generation's fall of Saigon moment. The longest war in American history was finally over.

But while foreign policy doves hailed this moment, our news media did not. That is because for 20 years, they had come to rely on the Afghanistan War as one of their cash cows. If it bleeds, it leads and the Afghanistan War had bled for a good portion of the past two decades. So when Joe Biden took ownership of evacuation, it was knives out from the media. Instead of honoring the remarkable scope and scale of the airlift, the Biden Administration was blamed for not having done more sooner. They were blamed for the Taliban's rapid advance. They were blamed for the terrorist attack. Despite doing the best he could with the hand he was dealt, Joe Biden was seen as the cause of the chaos. It was a portrayal that the media was more than happy to make. 

The New York Times' archives of that period show several opinion pieces written to discredit Biden's decision-making. Opinion pieces from Maureen Dowd, Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, and the entire editorial board all sought to cast doubt on how Joe Biden managed the evacuation. The Washington Post was equally critical with articles on the fall of Kabul, the concern of U.S. allies, the decision-making of the withdrawal itself, and a timeline of events titled "Two Weeks of Chaos." On the news broadcast front, CNN reported on America's "departure from the world stage," and described the "chaotic and bloody events" of the evacuation's final moments. Their August 31st piece titled "America's Afghan war is over but the battle for Biden's legacy is just beginning" can be seen as prophetic as it truly was a watershed moment in the media's coverage of the Biden administration.

Due to the media's anti-Joe Biden blitz, he wound up with a September approval rating of just 43%, a steep 14% drop from early May. It is a number that he would surpass just one single time in the following 33 months. Despite the remarkable achievements of his first 100 days and his ongoing work in helping the United States recover from a global pandemic, Joe Biden was now a pariah in the eyes of the media. He had shut down their forever war and in doing so had robbed them of a key part of their international news coverage. Without active boots on the ground, major news outlets like The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN would now have to cover boring foreign policy topics like diplomacy rather than the razzle-dazzle of war. Without both Trump and Afghanistan, the media would have to do real work rather than relying on presidential bluster or a firefight in the remote Afghan mountains between U.S. troops and Taliban soldiers. The media lost their gimme topics and they knew it was Joe Biden alone who was to blame.

This is how we ended up here today. Like a scorned prom date, our media has yet to forgive Joe Biden for robbing them of their forever war. They needed Afghanistan for their international news portfolio. It's why foreign correspondents like Richard Engel were so bitter that Joe Biden was robbing them of their livelihood. The Afghan War was supposed to be a gimme, a conflict that would continue no matter which party was in the White House. When Joe Biden dared to end it, our news media took this personally. They vowed to get him back and did so with disparaging news articles and opinion pieces, starting in the summer of 2021. Ever since then, the media has had open disdain for the Biden Administration. They want him to fail. They want him to be neck-and-neck with Donald Trump in the polls even though there is no logical reason why this election should even be close. They are willing to do all they can to ensure that Joe Biden not be seen as a success in the eyes of the American public and they will go to great lengths to ensure that this happens.

All because he ended a war they never wanted to end. 

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