What Became of Joe Biden’s 2020 Election Promises?

By Raúl Capote Fernández on December 15, 2023

photo: efe

The current US president, Joe Biden, will complete his term of office in January 2025, by which date the four years provided for in Article 2 of the Constitution of the United States will be completed.

He has been as warmongering as his predecessors, the most aggressive hawks linked to the war industry have found in his administration space for their imperial delusions, thus placing the world on the brink of a global conflict, generating crises of incalculable consequences.

“I will return our combat soldiers in Afghanistan home during my first term”, he announced, thus concluding the longest war in US history, with a chaotic end, however, he is the architect of lethal conflicts in other parts of the world, such as the conflict in Ukraine, he escalated serious situations of tension with China and Iran and is an accomplice of the Zionist massacre in Gaza, Palestine.

During his inauguration on January 21, 2021, Biden said: “I am going to put all my soul into this, into bringing America back together”, referring to the deep divisions in society, aggravated during the mandate of his predecessor, the Republican Donald Trump.

Today, however, those divisions are even greater and the country is fragmented and polarized.

Immigration, guns and minorities, three emblematic issues, are considered part of Biden’s biggest failures, as mass shootings have increased, he has not passed a law to protect African Americans’ access to vote, nor has he curbed racists police abuses against them.

His campaign promise to grant legal status to the nearly 11 million undocumented people residing in the country remains in limbo.

The hope of an immigration reform to open the path to citizenship for millions of migrants and especially for the “dreamers”, the young people who came to the United States as children, also remains on the back burner.

Allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of drugs and eliminating the death penalty were some of his commitments to reach the White House.

However, he has been unable to push through Congress an assault weapons ban and his ambitious plan to forgive some student debt was rejected outright by the Supreme Court.

“Make public colleges and universities free for all families whose income is less than $125,000 a year,” he said, but Washington has also failed to make this promise a reality.

Biden has maintained the position that building a border wall is ineffective. But the White House recently authorized the completion of some sections of the wall, for budget reasons, thus extending the dreams of Trump.

As president, he enacted a law authorizing the federal government to negotiate lower prices for some drugs for Medicare beneficiaries, but without repealing existing law, adding an exception, i.e., nothing from Bidencare as he said during a debate in October 2020.

Since taking office, he has taken no action to make this Bidencare proposal a reality, which could mean for Americans, the ability to enroll in a government-run health plan.

Meanwhile Cubans are still waiting for Biden’s campaign promise of improving relations with the island when the reality is that the ongoing affects of the blockade and the renewal of Cuba on the unilateral list of States sponsoring terrorism has only made things worse.

Donald Trump, in spite of his affirmative speeches, did not fulfill the commitments announced during the campaign either. He proclaimed himself many times as the most effective president in history, but in truth, he did very little except go backwards.

Raúl Capote Fernández is a Cuban professor, researcher and journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Resumen Latinoamericano.