After President Joe Biden delivered the commencement speech at the Air Force Academy’s graduation on Thursday, he tripped over a sandbag and fell flat on his face. But that’s just about the only tumble Biden has taken recently, either literal or metaphorical: The president is coming off a remarkably successful month, in both political and substantive policy terms.
Consider the following examples.
The May jobs report, released on Friday morning, found that the US economy produced 339,000 jobs, a blistering pace of growth that suggests fears of a recession are at present overblown. “Job growth at this rate, this far into a recovery, with unemployment this low, is pretty close to unprecedented,” tweeted University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers.
On Thursday night, the Senate passed the bipartisan debt ceiling deal, ending a standoff that threatened to cause a global disaster, on relatively favorable terms for the president. “Biden averted an economic crisis without making extraordinary policy changes, and took the debt ceiling issue off the table until after the 2024 election,” per my colleague Andrew Prokop’s apt summary.
Earlier in the month, data showed that inflation had slowed to a nearly two-year low. The expiration of Title 42, a Covid-era immigration restriction whose end was supposed to cause a massive surge in migrants claiming asylum, had no such effect; in fact, border apprehensions declined precipitously after it ended.
Also in May, special counsel John Durham’s report into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe found nothing damaging for Biden. A House Republican report into the finances of Biden and his son Hunter cleared the president of wrongdoing. And a jury found Biden’s most likely 2024 opponent, former President Donald Trump, liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll.
None of this means Biden is cruising to reelection. His approval ratings are still quite poor, and he’s trailing Trump in the…
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