Biden's Year 2 Test

As the pandemic wears on and prices rise, many Americans are disillusioned with the president. Can he win them back?

- By Nancy Cook and Josh Wingrove, Illustrations by Kati Szilágyi

For Joe Biden, this wasn’t how 2022 was supposed to start.

On the timeline imagined by the White House when he took office a year ago, widely available vaccines would have effectively ended the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. by now. The economy would be growing strongly, and a narrowly divided Congress would have already passed the bulk of Biden’s agenda. With those mega-missions accomplished, the president could have spent 2022 focusing on voting rights, cutting ribbons on infrastructure projects, and telling Americans what he’d done to make their lives better—with vaccines, stimulus checks, and Great Society-scale investments in child care, education, and the fight against climate change.

It’s just not, to put it mildly, how things have played out. Hard on the heels of the delta variant, omicron is now roiling the country. School closures and a shortage of tests are fueling Americans’ frustration and despair. Meanwhile, Biden’s Build Back Better bill has stalled over the objections of West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, leaving the president’s agenda in a rut.

Also to contend with: soaring inflation numbers, the highest in 40 years; a simmering standoff with Russia as it masses troops on its border with Ukraine; and progressives’ fury at Biden over what they consider to be a late-to-the-game push for voting rights.