Les Francis, former White House deputy chief of staff to then-President Jimmy Carter, stated that Joe Biden’s presidency is “reminiscent of reliving” the turbulent reign of his one-time boss.
“The guy can’t catch a break,” Francis said in a Wednesday statement to Politico. “It’s so reminiscent of reliving those times, where we had Mount St. Helens, we had Three Mile Island… we had the truckers rioting… Then we had the hostage crisis. We had the Soviets invade Afghanistan in December of 1979.”
Among the crises the Carter administration oversaw were the 1979 Three-Mile Island nuclear disaster and the Iran hostage crisis in the following year, Francis recalled to the news outlet.
“Now you’ve got a hurricane and a million people without power in Louisiana. You’ve got wildfires in the West. You’ve got the delta variant on COVID. Nobody could criticize him for those things, but they have a way of infecting the overall political environment,” the Carter aide said. “What it does is, it sours people’s attitudes, and if you’re the guy in charge, people sort of take it out on you, their frustrations, their anger, whatever it is.”
President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized Biden as “worse” than Carter because he was “created[ing] crisis after crisis.”
“Biden is the most pathetic president. And look, he makes Jimmy Carter look great,” Trump said during a political rally last month.
“The issue is Joe Biden’s staggering incompetence and gross negligence,” the former president added. “He doesn’t know where the hell he is. You think he’s running the government? He’s not running the government.”
In less than a year into his presidency, Biden faces a growing number of crises at home and abroad. Biden’s recently botched withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan led to an ISIS terror attack in Kabul, which resulted in the killing of 13 U.S. servicemembers. The Democrat president has also overseen a sharp increase in illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border and growing inflation.