On January 6, President Joe Biden gave a weirdly bitter speech.

“He values power over principle,” the president sneered about the man he wouldn’t name. “He can’t accept he lost even though that’s what 93 United States senators, his own attorney general, his own vice president, governors and state officials in every battleground state have all said: He lost.”

Why so grouchy, Mr. President?

Perhaps it’s because his victory in November 2020 with a record-breaking 81 million votes has soured into a dismal 41% approval rating, with 53% of respondents in a nationwide survey saying they disapprove of the president’s performance.

The recently released Umass Amherst Poll also found that 55% of Americans say Biden has fallen short of their expectations, and nearly two-thirds of Americans say the country is “on the wrong track.”

In the same poll last April, Biden had an approval rating of 51% and a disapproval rating of 44%, with only 36% saying he had failed to meet their expectations.

What happened between April 2021 and January 2022 to convince tens of millions of Americans that Biden is doing a terrible job as president despite every Democratic media consultant spinning like a Kenmore washer to persuade voters he’s doing a great job?

There are space limits in this newspaper, but here are some highlights.

At the end of August, President Biden pulled U.S. forces out of Afghanistan in a devastatingly incompetent manner, resulting in the death of 13 U.S. service members in an avoidable bombing attack, the immediate takeover of the country by the Taliban, the finders-keepers gift to the Taliban of billions of dollars worth of advanced U.S. military hardware that was needlessly left behind, and the unforgivable abandonment of Americans and others who were told to fend for themselves in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.

The COVID pandemic, which candidate Biden pledged to destroy, is still here. Biden has now adopted the policy stance of the previous administration, admitting that the states must lead the response. This after Biden defied court rulings and pressured private employers to impose vaccine mandates through federal workplace safety regulations, an overreach that the U.S. Supreme Court has now kiboshed.

Biden ignored warnings that excessive federal spending would let the evil genie of inflation out of its bottle, and in December, inflation raged at 7%, the highest since June of 1982. Inflation is effectively a regressive tax, burdening everyone with the stress of ever-higher prices for the goods and services essential to daily life. Only the government benefits from inflation, as higher prices generate higher sales tax revenue and the wage-price spiral propels insufficient incomes into higher tax brackets.

Inflation is only part of the cause for higher gasoline prices. Before the chair in the Oval Office was warm, Biden shut down construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have delivered more than 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska, and he suspended new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands and waters. It wasn’t long before the president was begging OPEC to pump more oil, a humiliating plea that OPEC ignored. By October, Americans were paying the highest gasoline prices in seven years.

Biden’s response to all of this was to push—so far unsuccessfully—for a sickeningly expensive “Build Back Better Act” that would create new entitlement programs and more “green energy” mandates of the kind that have given California the highest electricity rates in the country, as well as the highest rate of electricity imports, due to the persistent problem of the sun going down. Senator Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, cited California’s failed policies when he refused to vote for the Build Back Better Act, effectively killing it.

The president’s plunging approval ratings may not yet reflect the next crisis with Russia, as Russian troops are poised on the border of Ukraine and a “senior Russian diplomat” was quoted in the New York Times as saying talks with the West are approaching a “dead end.” The U.S. lost key negotiating leverage when Biden reversed the previous administration’s decision to block the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, and obtained nothing in return for letting the Russia-empowering project go forward. The pipeline bypasses Poland and Ukraine, cutting them out of the business and the revenue, and giving Russia control over liquified natural gas supplies to Europe.

Speaking of borders—don’t even ask. Space does not permit.

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It’s likely that the president’s sinking approval rating is a sign that many Americans are offended by his comments comparing tens of millions of law-abiding Americans to terrorists, Civil War secessionist leaders, mid-century segregationist politicians and Klansmen, just because they show up at school board meetings to complain about what their kids are being taught, or because they support voter ID laws to protect election integrity, or because they supported his predecessor.

Biden compared the events of January 6, 2021, to the U.S. Civil War in his speech at the Capitol and again in a speech in Georgia, as he pushed for election laws that are languishing on Capitol Hill for lack of votes in the Senate. The president accused 19 states of enacting laws “attacking voting rights” and called the work of these elected state legislators “Jim Crow 2.0.” He warned senators that if they didn’t support the federal election legislation he supports, they were on the side of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.

And that wraps up year one of the Biden presidency. Sadly, U.S. civil wars go on for four full years.

Write Susan at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley