Miranda Devine: The honeymoon is over for Joe Biden

Misstep after misstep is plaguing the Biden administration to the point where his once loyal supporter base is deserting the US President in droves, writes Miranda Devine.

After a series of self-inflicted disasters, including a stagflating economy, a southern border overwhelmed by illegal migrants from around the world and the botched withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, US President Joe Biden has plummeted in the opinion polls.

After just eight months, the honeymoon is over.

And how. Twenty per cent of Biden voters now regret their vote, according to the latest Zogby poll, with young people and minorities the most disenchanted.

Of Hispanics who voted for Biden, 33 per cent rue their choice as do 25 per cent of African Americans.

The hits keep coming. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds Biden’s overall approval rating is down six points from June to 44 per cent, with 57 per cent of independents disapproving of his performance.

A Rasmussen poll earlier in the week found 60 per cent of voters thought Biden should be impeached over the Afghan debacle.

Biden’s weakness in the polls means he desperately needs a win at November’s climate conference in Glasgow to salvage what is left of his credibility with his base.

That’s why we saw top Democrats cynically capitalise on last week’s storms in the Northeast which saw people drown in basements in New York. It’s why Biden flew to Louisiana in the wake of a hurricane.

Partly, the Democrats are trying to change the subject from Afghanistan by hyping a heavy rainstorm as the cataclysmic consequence of climate change.

But they also are using the weather to spruik their $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” package of green boondoggles, which they pretend is the solution to climate change.

However, if the renegade West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin makes good on his threat to torpedo the legislation on fiscal prudence grounds, Biden will have nothing to boast about at Glasgow.

That would be embarrassing optics for a president who has declared climate change is “the number one issue facing humanity” and who made a big deal of re-joining the Paris agreement on his first day in office.

US appeasement of China at the upcoming Glasgow Climate Conference will cause problems for Australia.

If Biden wants a win at Glasgow, he will have to extract concessions from China, the world’s biggest carbon dioxide emitter – at 27 per cent of global emissions compared to the United States’ 11 per cent (as well as being an actual filthy polluter of rivers and the air, not that anyone seems to care about such things anymore).

To that end, John Kerry, the former Secretary of State who is now Biden’s “special envoy” for climate change, spent two days jawboning with Chinese diplomats last week trying to get a commitment that they will lower emissions from 2030 and at least stop financing overseas coal-fired power plants.

But, in another predictable foreign policy humiliation for America, the Chinese sent Kerry away with a flea in his ear.

“The US side wants the climate change cooperation to be an ‘oasis’ of China-U.S. relations,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Kerry.

But “China-U.S. cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-U.S. relations”.

In other words, Biden must appease China, whether with trade concessions, or not investigating the origins of the Wuhan virus, or not protesting China’s persecution of Christians and Uyghurs, or whatever else President Xi Jinping wants.

In earlier meetings with US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman (who also helped make a hash of the Afghan withdrawal) the Chinese spelled out their demands in a peremptory “List of U.S. Wrongdoings that Must Stop” and a “List of Key Individual Cases that China Has Concerns With”.

These include lifting sanctions on Communist Party figures and to stop interfering with suspected Chinese espionage operations in the US. What a cheek.

The lists also demand the US drop its defence of Taiwan, and back away from its Pacific alliances, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Whatever deal China works out with the Biden administration looks like bad news for Australia.

US President Joe Biden walks through the cross hall to speak in the State Dining Room of the White House. Picture: AFP

Biden already has given the cold shoulder to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, refusing to share any of his vast stockpiles of spare mRNA vaccines or bothering to phone him over his unilateral Afghan withdrawal, despite the fact Australia answered the call to fight alongside the US in Afghanistan from October 2001, at the cost of 42 Australian lives.

Since Australia contributes only a little over one percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the pressure at Glasgow should rightly be on the two biggest emitters, China and the US.

But that doesn’t stop the United Nations chief climate adviser jetting into Canberra this week to lecture Australia about its “per capita” emissions, as if that makes any difference.

The fakery of Glasgow can be summed up by the fact that the European Union is proposing to exempt private jets from its planned tax on aviation fuel.

In any case, why would you trust any Chinese commitment on climate, anyway?

President Xi Jinping just keeps building dozens of coal-fired power plants to fulfill his nation’s yawning energy needs. It suits the Chinese that western nations want to impoverish themselves chasing the climate unicorn.

They know Biden doesn’t care whether they genuinely plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

All he wants is the “perception” of Chinese climate action, just as he told Afghanistan’s president to lie about Taliban advances.

China knows the game. Let’s just hope Biden doesn’t give too much away.

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