Miranda Devine: Joe Biden, the California royals, Britney and Cleo - 2021 in review

It will be a glum Christmas for Joe Biden and the royal family’s California branch, but full of cheer for Britney Spears and one special little girl, writes Miranda Devine.

Who would have thought that we would be heading into the third year of the pandemic still fretting over masks and nasal swabs and lockdowns.

But here we are. All the world has gone mad, except for me and thee. And sometimes I have my doubts about thee.

For most political leaders around the world, Covid has been a career downer, but none more so than Joe Biden.

At first the pandemic was a great gift. He made a fetish of his big black mask and basement isolation during last year’s campaign and being able to hide from the voters probably clinched the election.

US President Joe Biden has made a fetish out of his black face mask. Picture: AFP

He tied every Covid death around then-President Trump’s neck and, in their final debate last year, declared, “220,000 Americans dead. If you hear nothing else that I say tonight, hear this… anyone responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.”

Hubris is never smart for a politician, and it’s come back to bite him. President Biden has presided over more Covid deaths in his 11 months than Trump ever did.

He squandered his great good fortune of inheriting the vaccines made possible by the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed and has not applied the same urgency to make sure treatments such as monoclonal antibodies are widely available.

Instead, he and his doppelganger Dr Anthony Fauci have become more punitive about their favourite scapegoats, the unvaccinated. Democrats in New York now want to jail anyone who poses a risk to public health, aka the unvaccinated. There’s plenty of room at Rikers Island, after all, since the actual violent criminals now roam the streets of New York punching old ladies in the face.

Forget that the new Omicron variant has shown that the vaccinated both spread and catch the virus, Biden is under the illusion the unvaccinated are all Trump voters, all 74 million of whom he is determined to crush like bugs.

Thus he is warning of “a winter of severe illness and death” – for the unvaccinated.

So much for Christmas cheer. Even the Rockettes have folded their tents.

But the populace finds its fun where it can in trying times and abusing Biden has become a national sport. If it’s not students chanting “F Joe Biden” at college games, it’s the polite equivalent, “Let’s Go Brandon”, which is pulled across the skies by sign-writing planes and pops up in stickers on petrol pumps.

When the 79-year-old president took a tumble or two as he tried to bound athletically up the stairs of Air Force One, it was early enough in his term that most people had the decency not to laugh too loudly, but anyone with an eye for history knew those images would come to define his presidency.

When Biden had a colonoscopy a few months later and his doctor pronounced his brain is fine, the jokes came thick and fast. “Obviously the doctor who performed that colonoscopy on Biden knew where to look to find out whether his brain was working.” wrote New York Post reader Steve.

“Nice work,” wrote George. “My brother the doctor observed that the finding of the polyp means ‘that he’s not a perfect a**hole after all.’”

Biden’s polls started nosediving after the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan when he promised not to leave a single American behind but left hundreds. Then he kept glancing at his watch during a solemn ceremony to ­return the bodies of 13 young service members killed at Kabul airport in a bombing during the frenzied evacuation.

Soaring petrol prices, inflation, supply-chain shortages, rising crime and out-of-control illegal migration are just a few of the self-inflicted debacles the president stubbornly refuses to acknowledge let alone try to remedy. Instead, the White House gaslights the public into thinking there’s something wrong with noticing the problems.

But there’s no hiding Biden from an approval rating that has sunk to a historic low of 41 per cent, in the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. Fifty-five per cent of adults disapprove of the job Biden is doing as president.

Even worse for Biden, only 29 per cent of independents approve of him, while 66 per cent disapprove.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s AUKUS diplomacy was a triumph. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

And, crushing the Democrat dreams of a demographic destiny fuelled by Hispanic immigration, Biden has lost the Latino vote in a big way, now at 33 per cent approval versus 65 per cent disapproval.

Young people, once reliable Democrat voters, have turned off Biden too: just 41 per cent of Gen Z and Millennials approve of the job the president is doing, compared to 54 per cent who disapprove.

With the US Midterm elections next November, it’s a sorry way to end the year. No wonder Biden seems angry and shouty every time he stands in front of a teleprompter these days.

By contrast, on the other side of the world, Scott Morrison appears genial by contrast, his great pandemic mistake of the vaccination “strollout” now papered over by a record Aussie uptake of the shots, and the economy not quite as battered as it could have been going into 2022.

The Prime Minister’s visit to Washington DC to seal the AUKUS deal with Biden and his British counterpart Boris Johnson was a triumph of sneaky diplomacy, snookering China with nuclear submarines, sending the Frogs into high dudgeon, and baffling Biden from start to finish.

Prince Harry and and Meghan Markle haven’t made many friends on either side of the Atlantic. Picture: Getty Images

Singer Britney Spears was released from the control of her father. Picture: Getty Images

Speaking of the British, the royal family’s Montecito arm, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, finished the year in a bit of a funk.

Meghan had been hinting at a budding political career that might take her straight to the White House as the first “woman of colour” and duchess to be president.

To that end she has taken to phoning American politicians to lobby for pet projects like paid parental leave. But that royal intervention was met with bemusement in Washington.

What would Meghan know, after all, about the plight of working women when she lives in the lap of luxury with nannies, a stay at home husband, and does nothing you might call a real job. Elsewhere in America the Sussex effrontery went down like a lead balloon. “GOOD GRIEF! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” was the refrain.

A far more sympathetic female celebrity ended the year on a high.

Four-year-old Cleo Smith recovering in a hospital in Perth after she was abducted from her family's tent in Western Australia in October. Picture: WA Police

Britney Spears, at 40, won “emancipation” from the court-ordered conservatorship that had granted her father and others a stranglehold over her personal life and finances for more 13 years. You can only hope freedom brings her more happiness.

For feel-good stories this year, it was hard to go past the heartwarming rescue of little Cleo Smith in Western Australia, 18 days after she vanished from a family camping trip.

After all the bad Covid press Gulag Australia has copped in the US, images of four-year-old Chloe’s smiling face as she was carried tenderly to safety by burly cops went viral across the country. It was just the tonic we needed to remember what really matters.

On that note, dear readers, Merry Christmas, and let’s do it all again next year.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph