Kimberly Strassel’s The Biden Malaise compares Biden’s deliberate ideological governance—excessive spending fueling 9% inflation, politicized DOJ attacks (e.g., special counsels), and media complicity—to Carter’s inherited failures, arguing Democrats weaponize instability to sustain voter dependency. Congress’s dysfunction stems from omnibus bills and bureaucratic overreach, while McCarthy’s procedural reforms offer a rare bright spot; immigration inaction may force action via appropriations battles. Strassel warns Biden’s policies risk demographic backlash unless Republicans unite behind a Reagan-esque leader, predicting primary consolidation by Thanksgiving as donors abandon weak candidates amid Trump’s legal hurdles. The malaise isn’t accidental—it’s engineered, and the cure lies in conservative unity over economic freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
Today I am honored and delighted to have Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel to discuss her new book, The Biden Malaise, Democratic Weakness from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden and how America Bounces Back.
A lot of you I know do not remember Jimmy Carter.
I was there.
It was a tremendously depressing time.
I remember living in a really low-level neighborhood outside of Boston.
The economy was in the tank, and yet at the same time, inflation was spiraling upward.
People were miserable.
And at that time, Jimmy Carter made a famous speech in which he talked about the American Malaise.
He said, there's a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul of our national will.
We can see this crisis in the growing doubt of the meaning of our own lives and the loss of unity and purpose as a nation.
The erosion of confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of the nation.
So like all Democrats, it never occurred to him to look in the mirror and say, oh, wait, it's me.
I'm doing this.
My lousy policies are doing this.
But they were.
Kimberly Strassel has written a new book called The Biden Malaise.
She is a New York Times best-selling author, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
I read her weekly column, Potomac Watch, every Friday.
And I have to tell you, it is one of the best columns about politics and the inside workings of politics and what is going on.
There is.
You should all be reading Kim Strassel and this book.
Kim, it is great to see you.
Andrew, it is so great to be here and see you.
It's been a long time.
The last time I saw you was in an airport lounge and you were running out and I kind of lifted my hand, but you were gone before I could say anything.
So the Biden Malays, a really fascinating book.
You draw the parallel with Jimmy Carter.
And like I said, a lot of my audience may not remember Carter, but it was a grim time and very, very much like this one.
The parallels are amazing.
The fact that we have to learn this every generation is kind of crazy.
Draw the parallels for me.
Tell me how Biden is repeating, Carter.
Well, and I will, and I'll start by giving you the parallels, but I'm going to give you a big caveat too, because it's why I wrote the book.
So the parallels are just incredibly obvious.
I mean, obviously inflation, you know, people are living under inflation.
Energy price inflation as well, too.
We haven't quite got to the part of gas lines yet.
I remember sitting in a gas line as a child under Jimmy Carter.
High crime that we see going on.
The upheaval in our education establishment, a lot of people don't remember that Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education.
He sold his soul to the teachers' unions.
Obviously, we have another president now who sold his soul to the teachers' unions during COVID.
Weak foreign policy, which has really set America on the back foot, makes it look like it's not a leader in the world.
And the parallels go on and on.
But here's a really important thing.
When people first started making those comparisons, I thought it was really unique.
But when I started doing the research, I realized just how profoundly unfair the comparison is to Jimmy Carter.
Because this president, the circumstances by which we have ended up in these situations are entirely Biden-created.
Whereas Jimmy Carter, he made a lot of mistakes, but he also inherited a lot of his worst problems.
Now, I have to ask you this because you know so much about the inner workings of government.
When you say Joe Biden, are you talking about the person Joe Biden or the organization we know as Joe Biden?
Talking about the borg of people around Joe Biden that make Joe Biden's decisions for him and issue them on behalf of the Biden administration.
Okay.
All right.
I just want to be clear about that because I've been watching this guy in Maui and I thought, oh my God, he's one of the fatalities.
The one thing about Carter that people forget to give him his due was that he changed his mind from time to time.
He came in, as you were saying, his foreign policy was weak and he came in talking, I remember about why are we all so panicked about the Soviets?
And then the Soviets went into Afghanistan and he suddenly thought like, oh, that's why we're all so panicked about the Soviet.
He changed his mind because he wasn't really an ideologue.
He was just wrong.
The thing about the Biden administration that gets me is they mean this.
They mean this to happen.
Or am I being paranoid?
It seems like the effects that they're creating, they intend to create.
No, no, you're totally right.
Jimmy Carter was a technocrat.
And there's problems with that as well, too.
He really believed that if you just pulled enough levers and tinkered with enough stuff, you could make everything hum correctly.
And in fact, the guy might have benefited from having a little bit more of an ideology because he was kind of rudderless throughout some of his presidency.
But he didn't change his mind, okay?
He changed his mind, as you said, on military budgets by the end.
At one point, he fired nearly all of his cabinet because he understood that, you know, people had lost faith in them.
And I think one of the reasons Jimmy Carter could do this as well, too, was because he was a very religious man who acknowledged his own faults.
We've got an administration now that, as you say, is completely ideological, completely partisan.
And that is what is driving and creating all of these messes.
Like one example, Jimmy Carter, when he came into office, we were in the middle of the great inflation.
There was inflation across the world.
He was trying a number of things to try to fix it.
We didn't really have Reaganomics at that point.
And so people weren't as clear about supply-side economics and how it worked.
He did his best in work.
Joe Biden took a perfectly awesome economy and through pure ideology and just wanton spending created the inflation we have today.
That's the type of difference I'm talking about between the two presidencies.
So you can say they both had inflation, but the circumstances by which we got there are so different and Biden bears so much more responsibility.
Do they, you know, on the show last Friday, I was talking about the curly effect, the fact that Democrats turn cities into places that are awful, but at the same time, all the people who wouldn't vote for them leave.
They run away.
The rich people leave essentially.
And so they just keep getting elected.
So it actually serves them to have people broken and afraid and a high crime ridden.
Is this and I don't want to sound paranoid, but these are the things that people ask me.
So I want to ask you, because as I say, you see inside government so much.
Is this like a plan?
I mean, is there no point at which these guys turn to themselves and say, oh, crime, you know, crime is high?
I mean, you mentioned in the book that the federal government can't do that much about crime, but still they can care.
I mean, they can care that they can say that defunding the police is a bad idea.
Do they want inflation high?
Do they want gas prices to go up?
Is that all part of the plan?
Well, I think they do.
Look, all you have to do, Andrew, is look at what happened when Joe Biden first stepped into office and we were coming out of COVID.
Okay.
I mean, by the way, he inherited an amazing situation.
The vaccines were already out the door.
You know, people were lifting like the economy was about to come roaring back.
They nonetheless used that as an excuse, saying, oh my gosh, we're in the worst crisis in the history of the United States.
And therefore, we must spend $2 trillion on a COVID relief plan, which, by the way, didn't really go to anything having to do with COVID.
And then we need to create, I mean, get this, like five new cradle-to-grave entitlements that will keep people on the government dole from the day they're born until the day they die.
You know, universal kindergarten and family and medical leave and free college and free child care and everything.
They were using the fact that people were disoriented and economically dislocated temporarily as an excuse to expand government, which would then make people reliant on it.
And of course, continue to elect Democrats forever who promised to keep giving it to them.
Of course, it's a plan.
It's a total plan.
And it's such, so different from the Democratic Party of Jimmy Carter's years or the Democratic Party that first sort of began this FDR, we expanded government, but it was on the belief that people were temporarily out of work.
They needed temporary help.
That's not it now.
Now they want European style socialism.
So the other thing that really seems different to me from the Carter years is that there used to be an establishment.
There used to be an establishment that actually clung to the Constitution that there were liberals who wanted more government aid and there were conservatives who wanted less government aid.
Everybody, obviously they were still left-wing.
They went after Reagan tooth and nail.
They did make excuses for Carter.
I remember all of that.
The Media's Role in American Malaise00:04:03
It seems, however, that we have almost literally no media, no news media in America.
I mean, I started doing the show about eight years ago.
I used to be able to read the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and feel I had the facts and I had two different opinions and I could now start looking for what I wanted to say about it.
It now takes me about five times as long simply to find out what the facts are because what's going on?
Yeah, what's going on?
So how much of that plays into what's happening and how much of that plays into the American malaise?
So I actually believe it's the number one factor.
Yeah, unbelievably correct.
Because why in times past did politicians not step over the lines?
Why did they not push the boundaries, break the norms, take a wrecking ball to all of our storm like norms and procedures?
It's because they worried about the possibility of getting trashed on it.
Public retro, public sort of denunciation of whatever steps they took, which often came from the media, because the media had a kind of common sense view, like, no, you're not acting within the realm of what is considered correct or acceptable to society.
I hate to say this, but we have a media that has gone from being left-leaning to being an arm of one party in the United States.
And their refusal to criticize any action that Democrats take has led to the largest and quickest erosion of standards and norms that this country has ever seen in an extremely short period, whether it's the normalization of impeachment, the normalization of contempt orders against members of the Trump administration when they were there, local prosecutors filing racketeering indictments of former presidents, FBI raids on presidents' homes, special counsels.
We have a special counsel currently investigating the current president and the former president.
We had a special counsel in John Durham who basically was cleaning up for the prior special counsel, Bob Mueller.
The Department of Justice is basically one big political operation, and the media won't say anything.
It is amazing.
I mean, this thing in Hawaii, the fire in Hawaii, I couldn't believe what I was seeing, the malfeasance and the incompetence and the tragedy and the fact that the media, it almost didn't exist.
It was the worst fire in 100 years.
I mean, you know these people.
You work with these people.
Have they no shame or do they not see what they're doing?
Or what's the idea?
So I think fundamentally what happened, and we all can trace the day that this happened, right, Andrew?
It was a day Donald Trump walked into office, okay?
And I think all you need to know to explain what's going on here is just look at the tagline that the Washington Post adopted.
Democracy dies in darkness.
So what happened is the entire media told themselves that it was their obligation to society to oppose Donald Trump and all he did because somehow he was evil.
And that that obligation superseded any obligation they had to just report neutrally on what was going on.
And once they convinced themselves that that was okay, and I'm sure they know that it's not, but they just needed that little excuse to probably do something a lot of them have been wanting to do for a long time anyway.
But they suddenly had their excuse, and that's what they tell themselves.
I am standing up for a truth, light, and the American way by, you know, trying to rid this nation of a budding fascist and dictator.
Now, one of the things you do so well in your Friday column, we're talking to Kimberly Strossel about the book, The Biden Malays, Democratic Weakness from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden and how America bounces back.
And we will get to the part about bouncing back because I'm already so depressed that we have to talk about it.
Congress's Pork Problem00:04:28
But one of the things that I love about your column is your coverage of Congress.
I mean, you seem to know the ins and outs of that place.
I can't imagine how you get the information that you get, but you really seem to know the ins and outs of Congress.
Congress seems to me, yeah, that's asking, right?
Yeah.
Congress seems to me to have completely fallen down on the job.
They don't seem to do anything anymore.
And when they pass a law, the law is so long that not even the Supreme Court can read it.
So I don't see how you're a free country if you don't know what's in the laws that are being passed.
And from that, the bureaus in the deep state basically get to enforce, say the laws, anything they want it to say.
How did we get there?
Some of the people here at the Daily Wire believe that it was because they got rid of pork.
There's not enough pork to get anything going.
That doesn't seem to really play for me.
What happened to Congress?
So by the way, I absolutely reject that argument.
I'm just saying.
I mean, and I love all of you at the Daily Wire.
So, but I reject that argument.
Here's what happened.
Like, I think it's a combination of things.
One, it was laziness.
Okay.
I mean, just pure up laziness.
Well, there's a couple of things.
First of all, Congress started to involve itself in more and more issues, including issues it shouldn't be involving itself in.
But issues of, you know, when you decide that you're going to essentially run healthcare from Washington, like the Obama administration decided to do, you can't do that with a 20-page law.
It's going to take a 5,000-page law, right?
And then, you know, people get lazy and they want to throw things in there and nobody's reading it.
Democrats, I think, on the other hand, do this on purpose.
They write these giant bass things that nobody takes time to look at.
And they're happy with it because the more vague it is, the more license the administrative state has to do what they want them to do.
And they know that 95% of that administrative state is on their corner.
So if they just leave it to them, they know all the things that they hope will happen will happen.
Okay.
I think the final big problem that we've had is that we have a budget law that no one has correctly followed in about 25 years.
You're supposed to come out with 12 different appropriations bills in the House, in the Senate, have a conference.
And the spenders in Congress prefer that that not happen because that's a process where people can hold amendments and get rid of their pork.
They would prefer an omnibus process at the end of the year where everyone disappears into a smoke-filled room and come out with a 7,000-page document that has not all of their spending, not just all their spending priorities, but a whole bunch of legislation that they couldn't pass otherwise.
They just throw it all in one thing and everybody wants to go home for Christmas.
And so they all say yes without reading it.
It's laziness.
Kevin McCarthy is actually fixing this.
And it was some of the demands that the Freedom Caucus and other conservatives had in order to make him speaker.
And we are actually seeing Congress begin to function the way it's supposed to again.
He has been an amazing surprise.
If you had asked me if he was going to do the job that he's doing, I would have said no.
No, absolutely not.
But is that only because he's being forced by the conservatives or did he find some spine in himself?
You know, I think the smartest thing he did is he realized when he came in that he had five kind of very separate caucuses within his party.
And he created the five families.
I don't know if you've heard that.
No.
That's what he calls them.
So there's a head of each one and he convenes the five families.
Of course, I don't know if any of those leaders who are coming remember what happened to the ends of all of the five families at the end of that.
But anyway, it's working and they've all been coming in and they've been able to, that's how he got that debt ceiling deal across the gate is he just kept everybody close, made sure everyone's opinions were taken on board, cut the deals, did the thing.
It's long.
It's hard.
It's messy.
He's only got a five vote majority.
And there's going to be some more blowups here before, you know, before long.
But I think that if you're going to be a leader and you're going to have that Monero of a majority and you're not going to do what Nancy Pelosi did, which is just threaten everybody with losing their limbs unless they do what they're told, then this is as good as it can be is how you're going to run it.
Moment For Republicans?00:10:02
And I've been impressed.
I think the reason he's done well is, you remember, Kevin McCarthy's job for a long time was getting people elected.
He knows all of his members and he knows them very well and he's got good relationships with them.
And I think it's helped him so far.
In the book in the Biden Malaise, you have a chapter called Border Disorder.
And one of the things that does seem to me a mystery, I understand, I can conjecture why the Democrats want the border open, but I don't understand why Republicans have never done, nobody's ever done anything about this.
Is this serving both parties to have open borders?
I don't know why the Republicans won't do anything about it either.
I mean, pay close attention to this round of appropriations bills and see what comes out in the ones that deal with border funding.
I think there may, in fact, move at some point toward impeaching Maorkis over failure of duty.
I think the Republicans really do want to do something.
One of the things people might be surprised to hear is for all of Donald Trump's really tough language on the border, and he obviously did a bajillion times better job than what's going on right now.
He had a kind of mixed record on especially returning people who had got in.
You know, weirdly, one of the presidents that was most aggressive about this was Barack Obama, who took a lot of heat from his own party for doing it.
But he understood how bad a porous border was politically.
You know, given that, he understood that that just led to bad headlines.
So, you know, I think the Republicans are going to have to get a lot tougher on this.
But part of it, Andrew, they have to figure out what they intend to do.
You know, are they only going to care about the border or are they going to deal with the broader question of immigration?
And if you're never going to do that, we're going to keep facing these surges.
Yeah.
All right.
Before we get to the bouncing back, my last question.
The DOJ seems to me to be now a criminal organization, which I find really frightening.
I mean, I don't think that's, you know, I make jokes about it all the time, but when you're appointing David Weiss to oversee David Weiss, you've actually gotten to the Chicago level of corruption.
Can the Republicans do anything about that?
I heard an idea floated that they should defund the DOJ.
I cannot imagine them having the guts to do that.
I mean, even if they had the guts, I don't know if it's wise.
Look, the Department of Justice, I mean, I also saw Vivek Ramaswamy going around and say, I'm going to get rid of the FBI.
Okay, you know, the FBI has done some very, very bad things.
By the way, almost all of them out of DC headquarters, okay?
By the guys on the seventh floor at the top, the political hacks who are working in, but, you know, every day for every one of those guys, there's 10,000 FBI agents who are busting up child prostitution rings and going after fentanyl, drug cartels and mobsters and keeping us safe from terrorists who would like to blow up places.
You know, we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
All right.
But one thing that I do think Republicans do have to do a better job of is putting this in context and explaining and forcefully explaining again and again who, which side it is that always weaponizes the Department of Justice.
Okay.
Obama's wingman, Eric Holder, really kicked this off.
All right.
And, you know, Joe Biden has run with it.
That whole place is political.
But I'll tell you what, Attorney General Bill Barr, he tried to stop a bunch of this.
And he put a bunch of rules in place saying we're not going to tolerate political nonsense here.
I mean, look, one thing I think is really great.
Republicans are mad about it, but Donald Trump is mad.
He's like, why didn't I know that Hunter Biden was being investigated when I was still in office?
Well, because Bill Barr made sure that that investigation was handled properly, which was to me that it wasn't out in the public.
That's how you make sure cases aren't politicized.
Right.
And I think it's going to take a Republican simply getting a man or a woman of extraordinary legal credibility running that place.
But I mean, he's going to make that.
I mean, everybody on the right now hates Bill Barr because they feel he's been disloyal to Trump, but I always liked him because everybody hates him.
I mean, when that's the way, that's the way you should be if you're the attorney general.
Everyone should hate you, not just one side.
Yeah.
Right.
I mean, it would have been terrible if Bill Barr had bent to Donald Trump's wishes in terms of what Donald Trump wanted him to do.
That would have been politicizing the Department of Justice.
You know, and the fact that he wouldn't, you're right.
It was like why everyone was mad at him.
But, you know, he wasn't about to be pushed around that way.
And you need someone else there.
Merritt Garland.
Oh my gosh.
By the way, did we like, you know, miss a bullet with that on the Supreme Court?
I mean, he's been terrible.
He's been terrible because he's so political and he's so politicized.
Yeah.
No, I've frequently said that when Mitch McConnell stands before the Pearlie Gates, they're going to go down the list.
Then they're going to get to that and say, all right, you know, you're in.
That's it.
Cancel out everything else.
Bouncing back.
So again, the book is by Kimberly Strassel, really one of the best and most knowledgeable columnists in the business, The Biden Malays, Democratic Weakness from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden and how America bounces back.
And it's now, I'm sure anybody who's listening to this can hear how knowledgeable you are.
Tell me, please, how?
How do we bounce back?
How do we bounce back?
So, I mean, the reason I really wrote this when I did right now, Andrew, is because I think we are at this incredibly important and potentially unique moment in this country.
Okay.
Things are very bad.
The democratic ambitions for this country are terrifying.
They've already gone a ways down of accomplishing that.
But, you know, remember what happened when America got its up close and personal experience with Jimmy Carter's governance, one of the first truly liberal presidents that we'd had.
They hated it.
They rejected it.
And at the end of his tenure, a very charismatic fellow named Ronald Reagan came in and won not just one, but two landslide elections and changed the demographic and voting habits of this country for a generation in this nation toward conservative politics.
I believe we could be at a similar moment now.
America's on the on the if you just look at the polls, they hate the majority of the Biden politics.
Okay.
The only thing that has kept Democrats, you know, close in the House, the kept control of the Senate, you know, is that they have successfully been able to use the threat of ultra mega Republicans and crazy abortion politics and Donald Trump to scare people into continue voting for them.
And I think, you know, this is no commentary on Donald Trump and his tenure as we were before, but there's a moment for a young, charismatic, new generation Republican leader to come in without all that baggage, to make the case for a Reagan-like agenda and to do the same thing he did.
I mean, no one will ever be Reagan, right?
But someone to come in and say, you know, these policies are going to destroy this country.
You don't have to agree with us, Republicans, on all the cultural issues and everything.
Reagan was that way.
But come in, dip your toe in the water.
I think you're going to like a lot of the stuff we do believe in on the economy, on freedom, on individuality, and use that to, there's a minority voters.
There's a whole demographics of the country that are shifting.
If you look at the elections, they're up for grabs.
And this could be a moment for Republicans to get them.
Now, you know, I liked, I voted for Donald Trump.
I liked what he did for three years, actually.
And I think he's been, he was a godsend to the Republican Party because he woke them up from a deep, deep sleep.
I don't feel he's the guy.
I feel like his time has gone by and that he's now so involved in his own, you know, his own situation, not just the indictments, but his own loss of the election that I don't think he can bring himself together.
How do you get past him?
He's like this elephant stuck in the doorway, you know?
Yeah.
No, I mean, look, the Republican Party and the people who are taking part in this primary and the debate that we saw this week, they're just going to have to be wiser this year.
In some ways, the fundamentals are already a little different, Andrew.
I think some people don't realize this.
When we had the first debate in 2016, there were 18 people who took part.
And so we're already down to about half that number, at least in terms of folks that made the main stage, a little less.
I do think Republicans learned the lesson I know for a fact, and I hear this of Washington all the time.
Everybody understands the risk of going along and everybody dividing the vote.
Look, if you dig into Trump's numbers, it's really fascinating.
There was a New York Times Sienna poll out of Iowa, Iowa voters.
47% said they were currently going to go with Donald Trump, but you broke into that.
Half of those said that they were still actively looking at other candidates.
So you do all the numbers and he's at about 23, 24%.
That's three quarters of the party that's like, ah, like maybe we want something else this time, you know?
But I think you're going to see enormous pressure as you get closer to Iowa toward the end of the year.
Thanksgiving more.
That's like my number, I think.
Where if people haven't gotten out who should have gotten out, you know, the folks with the single digits, donors are just going to be putting a lot of pressure for people to say, stop auditioning for the cabinet, a position.
You know, get out and let somebody else consolidate and make this a match, make this a race.
Listen In For Inside Info00:00:56
Interesting.
That's interesting.
All right.
So I'm going to watch for that around Thanksgiving.
Kimberly Strasso, the author of The Biden Malays, Democratic Weakness from Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden and How America Bounces Back.
It's great talking to you.
And also, please read Kimberly's column in the Friday Wall Street Journal.
It is just terrific.
Kim, it's great to see you.
It's been way too long.
I hope we'll get together again soon.
Yeah, soon.
And everybody listen to Andrew's podcast.
I listen to it all the time.
Thank you.
It's great to see you.
All right.
Great talking to Kim.
She's just so knowledgeable, so much inside information.
And you will get more inside information if on Friday you come to the Andrew Clavin Show, where I will be and you can be too, and get out of the clavenless darkness and into the Claveny light.