President Joe Biden made excuses for his administration’s failures on Friday by blaming former President Donald Trump.
“Take a look at what I inherited when I came into office, when I came into office the state of affairs, where we were,” Biden said, repeating a familiar complaint by new presidents struggling in their first year of office.
The president spoke about the ongoing migrant and border crisis, his disastrous exit from Afghanistan, and growing Democrat infighting over his multitrillion-dollar agenda at the White House after a speech on coronavirus boosters.
In this Aug. 22, 2021, file photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, Afghan passengers board a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III during the Afghanistan evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. (MSgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP, File)
“Remember I said it’s going to take a year to deliver everything I’m looking at here,” Biden said to reporters who questioned the chaotic direction of his presidency.
Biden acknowledged that his administration was still getting people out of Afghanistan, after withdrawing troops, but made the excuse that it was always going to be difficult to end the war.
“There’s no picturebook way to say, okay, the war has ended, let’s get everybody out and we’ll go home,” Biden said. “No war has ever ended that way other than there’s been surrender and it’s a totally different circumstance.”
The president also said he “took responsibility” for pictures of border agents on horses confronting Haitian migrants on the Southern border, but blamed “those people” for damaging America’s reputation around the world.
United States Border Patrol agents on horseback tries to stop Haitian migrants from entering an encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande near the Acuna Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas on September 19, 2021. – The United States said Saturday it would ramp up deportation flights for thousands of migrants who flooded into the Texas border city of Del Rio, as authorities scramble to alleviate a burgeoning crisis for President Joe Biden’s administration. (Photo by PAUL RATJE / AFP) (Photo by PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images)
He also claimed he did not look at his falling approval polls, despite discussing them with reporters on September 11th.
“That’s why I don’t look at the polls. Not a joke,” he said. “Because it’s going to go up and it’s going to go down, it’s going to go up, and hopefully at the end of the day I’ll be able to deliver on what I said I would do.”
Biden promised that by the end of 2021, things in the country would be better.
“There’s a lot, I’m sure, along the line that there’s things I could have done better,” he said. “But I make no apologies for my proposals, how I’m proceeding, and why I think by the end of the year we’re going to be in a very different place.”