These contradicting policies won’t work economically or help Biden politically, but they do point to the commonsense way forward. Namely, an end to Biden’s impossible EV mandates, an end to Biden’s costly EV subsidies, and an end to Biden’s many bans on domestic rare earth mineral production.

The underlying political and economic pain Biden is trying to mitigate all stems from his radical plan to force drivers out of the internal combustion engine cars they love into inferior, unreliable, and expensive electric vehicles they do not want.

Biden’s scheme has two components. First, using the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency, Biden has issued strict new mandates forcing all domestic automobile manufacturers to ensure that two-thirds of all cars sold by 2032 are electric. If any car company misses that metric, it will be hit with crippling, trillion-dollar fines from the EPA. 

Second, Biden is also using the power of the purse to bribe as many drivers as possible into the electric cars he is forcing Detroit to make. Key among these subsidies is a $7,500 tax credit for each electric vehicle purchased.

Many Democrats who signed on to these electric vehicle subsidies, however, did not want them to benefit foreign companies. So, the law authorizing these tax credits, the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act, also required that a certain percentage of the components of each car must be produced domestically to qualify for the credit. 

This is where Biden’s gift to Chinese EV component manufacturers comes in. This month, the Energy Department issued its final regulation governing the tax credit, and it essentially decided not to enforce the Chinese component ban at all until 2027, at which point there would be nothing stopping the Biden administration (if still in power) from not enforcing the ban again. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) called this regulation “outrageous and illegal” and accused Biden of “effectively endorsing Made in China.”

Manchin is right. By not enforcing the Inflation Reduction Act’s ban on tax credits for cars made with foreign components, Biden is effectively subsidizing Chinese companies. But here is the thing: Without those subsidies, domestic car companies will never be able to reach the strict EV mandates set by Biden’s EPA. If the Inflation Reduction Act were enforced as written, none of the existing EVs on the market would qualify. Our domestic EV makers are simply too dependent on Chinese components to meet Biden’s EV mandates. No amount of tariffs on Chinese-built cars is going to fix that problem.

Electric vehicles, whether manufactured in China or the United States, just aren’t good enough for most people to make the switch. They take too long to charge, it is hard to find charging stations, the battery life shrinks in the cold, and it shrinks even further when the vehicles are asked to pull heavy loads.

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People simply don’t want these cars. And they are not buying them at anywhere near the numbers necessary to meet Biden’s mandates. Ford, General Motors, Rivian, and Tesla have all been forced to fire workers as EV production has outstripped demand. It’s time to admit Biden’s EV revolution is a failure.

Instead of raising tariffs on low-quality Chinese EVs Americans don’t want anyway, Biden should repeal his EV mandate, freeing consumers to buy the cars they want, and repeal his EV subsidies, allowing for tax relief for families. And if he wants to make EV manufacturing easier here in the U.S., he must stop his Department of Interior from banning the mining of the rare earth minerals necessary to build them.

In the first four months of this year, consumer price index inflation rose from 3.1% to 3.4% on a 12-month annualized basis. In absolute terms, the CPI has risen by 1.4% in the past four months, or 4.2% on an annualized basis. That’s more than twice the Fed’s maximum target of 2%. While core CPI, a Fed-preferred measure that strips away the volatile categories of food and energy, has slightly decreased on a 12-month annualized basis from 3.9% in January to 3.6% in April, core CPI has increased by 1.5% in absolute terms, or 4.5% on an annualized basis.

Worse, producer price index inflation, a leading indicator because wholesale prices are eventually passed on to the consumers, has more than doubled since January from 0.9% to 2.2% a year. While April’s data for personal consumption expenditure price inflation is still forthcoming, PCE inflation soared in March to its highest level since November of 2023. On a three-month annualized basis, a more precise picture than the annual measure, the Fed’s preferred inflation measure of core PCE rocketed from 3.7% in February to 4.4% in March, more than twice the Fed’s 2% maximum inflation target.

Despite Biden’s assertions to the contrary, voters understand this, and it feeds into expectations. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s April survey found that annual median inflation expectations among consumers rose from 3% to 3.3%, with gasoline inflation expectations rising to 4.8% and food price inflation expectations rising to 5.3%.

Median earnings growth expectations declined to 2.7%, and on this front, the survey respondents are also largely correct. Since Biden took office, real average weekly earnings have fallen by nearly 5%. When the Fed brought down inflation from its near double-digit peak in 2022, it seemed on pace to undo some of these losses, but since the end of last year, the average real weekly paycheck has shrunk by another 0.5%. Over the past three years, inflation — the silent and unilaterally issued tax by a greedy government aiming to rack up consecutive $2 trillion deficits — has eaten up the equivalent of a paycheck-and-a-half each year of the average worker’s 26 annual paychecks.

While average voters may not understand the minutiae of macroeconomics, they know that Biden’s wasteful fiscal policy is diametrically opposed to the monetary tightening wrought by the Fed. In a recent Financial Times-Michigan Ross poll, the majority of registered voters said their own finances were worse off since Biden took office, with half of respondents blaming his policies in particular.

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The grand irony of Biden’s insistence on continuing with his inflationary fiscal policies is that they are increasingly undermining the one piece of good news he can deliver before Election Day. Whereas the Fed projected it would slash the federal funds rate from its 23-year high at least three times at the start of this year, worsening inflation, further fueled by Biden’s open borders and regressive student debt cancelation for upper classes, has led bond markets to price in a one-in-three chance that the Fed does not cut interest rates at all before the election.

Voters may be able to stomach the painful medicine of monetary tightening to stanch inflation, but with both price hikes and interest rates staying higher than most generations have experienced, Biden has nobody but himself to blame if voters decide to send him to belated retirement.

Two months is far too long to count votes, and this is not the first time California has taken an inordinate amount of time to finalize a result. Delays breed doubt and conspiracy without the compensation of increased accuracy.

Voter confidence in election results requires that we get rid of election month and return to Election Day. Many states are wisely doing this.

Last week, Georgia enacted a law, its latest voting reform, requiring all early and absentee ballots to be counted within an hour of polls closing on Election Day. Like most of Georgia’s other reforms, this is wise. The public knows voter fraud can be real and can be decisive. As is well established even by the liberal New York Times, mail-in voting is more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting because the chain of custody is less secure.

The public knows this. Even with safeguards in place, citizens’ doubts about integrity rise if ballots, especially ones that arrive by mail, are not counted for hours or days after polls close. More than 1.3 million Georgians voted early in 2020, and it took more than three days after polls closed for all ballots to be counted, and another week for results to be certified.

One reason it was easy for former President Donald Trump to convince tens of millions of supporters that the 2020 election was stolen is that he led in early vote counts in several states, including Georgia, only to be caught by Biden in late-counted absentee ballots. In all those instances, subsequent analyses made clear there weren’t enough anomalies for Trump to have won, but that has not eliminated doubts among Trump supporters.

As both the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and polls on the matter three years later demonstrate, massive voter distrust in election integrity is a serious threat to the proper workings of our constitutional system.

If votes are counted in a timely manner, the public doesn’t get the idea that fraudulent ballots are being manufactured in back rooms. There is no time or opportunity for that to happen. Ballot integrity, real and perceived, benefits accordingly.

Despite caterwauling from the usual leftist suspects, timely absentee vote counting is neither an administrative burden nor an impediment to voters’ rights. Florida requires absentee votes to be tabulated as they come in, beginning 22 days before Election Day. As a result, Florida, for several consecutive elections, has been able to announce undisputed — repeat, undisputed — results within hours of polls closing. If Florida can do that with nearly 11 million voters in 2020, Georgia, with fewer than 5 million voters, could also have done so.

Why can’t every state do the same? In election cycle after election cycle, some states, mostly in the West, dawdle for days or weeks before finishing their vote counts. California takes more than a month, by design, to tabulate votes. In a primary election not decided until earlier this month, it took California two months to determine the winner.

The problem isn’t merely with public confidence: Slow vote counting can have more concrete effects. Partisan control of the House and the Senate can remain undetermined for weeks, making it difficult for Congress to organize itself for its next session. What if slow counts leave control of Congress up in the air when a presidential election is also being disputed? What if Congress is in organizational turmoil when the mandatory Jan. 6 presidential electoral vote count is scheduled? The consequences could be severe.

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States also should adopt other practices that help timely reporting of election results, such as discouraging same-day registration, maintaining eligible voter lists, and training poll workers better.

When the Left fights against commonsense election integrity measures, it is no surprise that millions of people suspect foul play.

According to an examination by the Free Press of three of the most prominent nonprofit organizations paid by the Biden administration for migrant services, their revenues have more than tripled since 2018, and each of their CEOs makes more than $500,000 a year.

One, Global Refuge, saw its revenue rise from $50 million in 2018 to more than $200 million in 2022. Documents show that Global Refuge housed more than 2,500 migrant children in 2019 at a cost of $30 million. It housed just 1,443 in 2022 at a cost of $82.5 million. In that same period, Global Refuge CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah saw her salary rise from $244,000 a year to $520,000. Before coming to Global Refuge, she served as former first lady Michelle Obama’s policy director.

Another nonprofit group, Endeavors, was awarded more than 1 billion dollars in 2022, of which it spent $533,000 on a music therapist, $4.6 million on “consulting services,” $1.4 million on conferences, and $700,000 on lobbyists. Despite past scandals involving self-dealing among top executives, in 2022, Southwest Key Programs was awarded almost $800 million, of which it gave more than $1 million to its CEO.

Each nonprofit organization benefits from the Department of Health and Human Services’s Unaccompanied Children Program. When children are caught illegally crossing the border without parents, Border Patrol must, by law, turn them over to HHS, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement is charged with housing, feeding, and educating them until their parents or a sponsor can be found. HHS does not provide these services. They contract with nonprofit outfits that do, hence the big payouts to Endeavors, Global Refuge, and Southwest Key Programs.

Under the leadership of HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, the Unaccompanied Children Program has been plagued by fraud and abuse. One director quit after Becerra threatened to fire her if she didn’t discharge children to sponsors faster.

“If Henry Ford had seen this in his plants,” Becerra told ORR staff in 2022, “he would never have become famous and rich.” But the CEOs of the nonprofit organizations Becerra pays sure are getting rich.

Profiteering at the nonprofit groups involved in the Unaccompanied Children Program is a tiny fraction of the problem. The Biden administration has opened the spending floodgates through many other federal programs including State Department funding for the United Nations’s Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan; Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for the Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which is not to be confused with FEMA funding for Shelter and Services Program; or HHS funding for refugee entrant and assistance programs. Billions of dollars flow from taxpayers to far-left nonprofit groups allegedly to provide services without oversight for millions of migrants.

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“We could afford to take, in a heartbeat, another 4 million people,” Biden said while campaigning for president in 2019. “The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre, absolutely bizarre.”

It’s easy to afford the housing, food, education, and medical costs of millions of new migrants when you are spending other people’s money, as Biden always is. It is even easier to spend that money when you know it is going to your political allies. It is past time for Congress to cut off the border crisis gravy train.

Asked by Erin Burnett if he can convince voters to trust him more on the economy than Donald Trump, Biden began by denying the premise of the question. “The polling data has been wrong all along,” he claimed. “How many — you guys do a poll at CNN. How many folks you have to call to get one response?”

Who knew Biden was such a poll denier? Has every pollster who has asked voters about Biden’s handling of the economy, from CNN, the Economist, Harvard University, the New York Times, Yahoo, Fox, Marist, and CNBC, got it all wrong? Apparently so, and only Biden knows the truth, which is that people love Bidenomics despite what every poll says.

Biden then claimed, “When I started this administration, people were saying there’s going to be a collapse of the economy.” This is also flatly untrue.

When Biden took office, the economy was already recovering at a fantastic rate. Between the nadir of the government lockdowns and Trump’s last month in office, the economy added more than 12 million jobs at a rate of just under 1.4 million a month. That is the opposite of collapse.

Since Biden took office, job growth has slowed to just 400,000 per month, which is not surprising given Biden did everything in his power to delay the end of COVID lockdowns which began under Trump.

After falsely claiming he inherited a collapsing economy, Biden then claimed he inherited high inflation from his predecessor. “It was 9% when I came to office,” Biden claimed, “9%.”

Here in the real world, the truth is that prices rose just 1.4% in the 12 months ending in January 2021, which was the 11th consecutive month that annualized inflation was under 2%. That is what Biden inherited. But instead of continuing Trump’s policy of ending lockdowns quickly, Biden passed $2 trillion of deficit spending that immediately sent inflation skyrocketing. 

By June 2021, inflation hit 5.4% and by the time most of the Biden sugar rush hit consumers, inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, nine months after our current president took office. Inflation has come down from those historical highs, but not fast enough or far enough to undo the damage they initially caused. As Burnett herself noted, real income is still lower today than it was when Biden took office.

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The economic pain caused by Biden’s inflation does not end with real income. The cost of buying a home is now double what it was before he took office, grocery prices are up 30%, and consumer credit card debt has never been higher.

We may never know if Biden is lying or if he does not recognize that his aides are feeding him false stories. For voters though, it doesn’t matter. They know what harm Biden has inflicted on them whether he does or not.

One would think not, judging by the rarity of mentions of this crisis by the president, his spokespeople, or the news media. The absence of focused public concern is inexcusable. Even more inexcusable, unless there are covert operations in the offing, is the lack of action, whether diplomatic or by military special forces, to try to return U.S. citizens to safety and freedom.

Biden seems primarily concerned with putting counterproductive pressure on Israel to stop its military actions without putting equal or greater pressure on Hamas. His inattention to the American hostages is astonishing. He met their families in December and featured them as guests on March 7 at his State of the Union speech. On April 24, he also quietly met with one of the few hostages who has been released, 4-year-old Abigail Mor Edan. But Biden left it to national security adviser Jake Sullivan to say anything about the meeting.

The president seems not to want to be seen involving himself in the issue. A cynic might think he is keen to avoid being tainted by their captivity in an election year. That cynic might also think that he especially wants to avoid the subject because it makes the terrorists look bad and his far-Left supporters, who believe only Israel can be evil, don’t like the counter-narrative of facts. 

Biden issued an anodyne joint statement with 16 other nations on April 25, but other than such occasional references and minimal expressions of concern, the past seven months have been notable for his relative silence. Neither Biden nor his appointees nor the media seem even to mention the hostages’ names.

Biden doesn’t make them a public part of his diplomacy. He demanded a ceasefire from Israel. He is withholding from Israel arms shipments specifically authorized by law. Yet nowhere does he declare that Hamas’s release of the five Americans is a nonnegotiable predicate for any ceasefire.

He should go further: Rather than pressuring Israel to stop military operations, he should warn Hamas that until it releases hostages, he will not lift a finger to dissuade Israel from any action it wishes to take against the terrorist regime. He should threaten U.S. action targeting Hamas’s leaders wherever they may be while the hostages remain in captivity.

If you type “hostage crisis” into a search engine, you are offered information about news events not now but from 44 years ago. That is partly because U.S. hostages were taken seriously back then — far more so than now. The Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81 was a daily national anxiety. For 444 days, network anchors led every newscast with stories about the hostages’ fates. The contrast with today, when Iran’s proxies are holding Americans, is stunning.

No administration should allow its national security aims to be determined exclusively by the condition of hostages. Nor should it weakly beg for their release. But there should be a proper balance of presidential and media pressure to secure freedom for captive Americans even while keeping the national interest clearly in mind.

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The news media’s left-wing straitjacket no longer allows reporters to see themselves, even in appropriate circumstances, as Americans first. If you’re just a “citizen of the world,” you refuse to see American hostages as being of any particular concern, and certainly less important than castigating Israel when bombs fired by terrorists fall on Gazan hospital parking lots.

Hostages Edan Alexander, Omer Neutra, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Keith Siegel deserve better from our nation’s president and its news media. The silence is shameful.

In many ways, the incident was a microcosm of the governor’s education policy agenda in the Sunshine State: Tune out the noise and push forward. And this week, the fruits of this approach were once again vindicated as U.S. News & World Report ranked Florida as the best state in the nation for education.

Now the Sunshine State has consistently ranked at or near the top of education rankings among conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, which credits the state for having a number of robust parental rights protections, as well as a universal school choice program. But the U.S. News rankings are proving that even by legacy metrics, the state is providing a model of good education policymaking.

The rankings use several data-driven metrics to rank states by education outcomes. Five metrics pertain to higher education, while another five measure pre-K-12. Driving Florida’s high ranking are three higher education metrics in which the state placed top two in the nation: four- and two-year graduation rates and tuition and fees. The state also placed fifth in the pre-K-12 category of college readiness.

For as much controversy and vitriol as DeSantis has faced from the Left, the rankings have once again vindicated his approach to education policy. It is in this success that the governor has found his revenge for the malicious and dishonest smear campaign that has been waged against him.

That Florida has the lowest tuition prices in the country (despite being one of the most desirable places to live) is nothing short of a remarkable achievement. College costs have ballooned for years, yet the average tuition and fees for an in-state student is $4,613, less than half of the $9,678 national average.

Over the past two years, DeSantis and Republicans in the Florida legislature have waged a war on the education cartel at both the K-12 and college levels and have come out victorious. This achievement is all the more impressive, given the fact that the state has persevered in its quest for education freedom in the face of corporate boycotts and pressure campaigns, as well as legal and administrative efforts by the Biden administration and legacy education organizations such as teachers unions.

As Florida has shown, the key to achieving educational success is by affording institutions, students, and families the freedom to choose from as many options as possible in the ever-growing educational ecosystem while removing blatant political agendas from the classroom and administrative offices.

As soon as children are of school age, parents in Florida are afforded the ability to send them to school wherever they wish, whether it be a public school, a private school, or home school, because the state has embraced school choice. This educational freedom continues through high school because, thanks to the DeSantis education agenda, students are no longer restricted to taking the SAT or the ACT in order to apply to the state’s public universities. Alternatives such as the Classic Learning Test are now treated as equals to the legacy exams and have broadened the range of high-quality options that students can rely on to measure their academic ability fairly.

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That commitment to a better path has extended to higher education, where Florida has reduced administrative bloat and ideological conformity by banning diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies and appointed university trustees who are committed to excellence in education rather than political indoctrination. And to insulate Florida schools from overly imposing accrediting agencies, each state university is now required to change accreditors every 10 years.

In three years, the Florida education ecosystem has been entirely remade into one that stresses freedom over bureaucratic control. Detractors can accuse DeSantis and Republicans of destroying education in the state all they want, but the results are clear: When it comes to education, the Sunshine State shines above the rest.

The two largest social insurance programs, Social Security and Medicare, are on slightly firmer financial ground today than last year, according to the trustee reports released by President Joe Biden‘s political appointees this week.

This is mostly attributable to higher economic growth. Under accounting fictions, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are now expected to run out by 2035 and 2036, respectively, compared to last year’s projections of insolvency in 2032 and 2031.

Expecting economic growth to continue through 2035 at its current high rate is disputable but not unreasonable. What is completely unreasonable, however, is the trustees’ assumption about the rate at which women will have babies.

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its annual report, finding that the overall fertility rate fell to 1.62 births per woman in 2023, the lowest ever recorded by the federal government. Yet, Biden’s Social Security and Medicare trustees used a rate of 1.9 for their financial projections. There is a huge difference.

That 1.9 is still below the 2.1 needed for the population to replace itself and not fall, but it is far more optimistic than the reality of 1.62. The trustees explained that they used 1.9 because “historically, birth rates in the United States have fluctuated wildly.” But a quick look at any fertility chart shows a steady decline in birth rates starting at the end of the baby boom to a previous low of 1.76 births per woman in 1976. 

Fertility rates briefly recovered during the 1980s, rising to 2.1 in 1990, at which they plateaued until the 2008 economic crisis. It has, unfortunately, been all downhill since then.

Declining fertility tracks the decline in marriage. Single women have far fewer babies than married women (1.15 to 2.12, respectively), and women who get married younger have more children than those who get married later. (Half of women who get married in their early 20s end up having at least three children, compared to just 33% of women who get married after 30). This means that as fewer women get married, and those who do marry do so later, the fertility rate will go down.

The trustees acknowledged the link between marriage and fertility in their report, writing, “Since the baby-boom era, women have had higher educational attainment, higher labor force participation, an older average age at first marriage, and a higher propensity to remain unmarried. All of these factors are consistent with continued lower total fertility rates.”

But if fewer and later marriages mean fewer babies, why do the trustees expect the trends to reverse? The report doesn’t say. It just magically expects birth rates to rise even as marriage continues to fall.

It is a nonsensical assumption that will cost taxpayers trillions of dollars. As the Congressional Budget Office noted in its long-term budgetary outlook, population growth is a key determinant of future fiscal health because it determines the size of the workforce and its productivity. The more young people there are in the country, the larger the workforce. The older a population is, the more money is spent caring for the old, and less money is invested in capital to make existing workers more productive. The difference between a shrinking population and a growing population is the difference between financial ruin and economic survival.

Some believe we can solve demographic decline with immigration, but as the CBO pointed out, low-skill immigration has costs. “Additional foreign nationals will initially work in sectors of the economy that have relatively low productivity, such as services, pushing down total factor productivity,” the CBO wrote.

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“Additional foreign nationals,” it continued, “are expected to work in sectors of the economy that pay relatively low wages, thus putting downward pressure on average wages. Second, the projected increase in workers reduces the amount of capital per worker, which also puts downward pressure on wages.”

Lower wages mean even fewer marriages, which means still lower birth rates, which undoes what little economic benefit immigrants brought into the country. Our nation’s accountants cannot assume away our demographic decline. And our nation’s leaders need to realize that family problems are fiscal problems.

According to the indictment filed by Bragg, Trump is on trial for the crime of falsifying business records in 2016 and 2017. Bragg claims that money paid by Trump to his lawyer, Michael Cohen, was used to keep Daniels from speaking publicly before the 2016 presidential election.

It is not illegal to pay for someone’s silence. Nor is it illegal to pay a third party to make the payment. What Bragg alleges is that Trump recorded his payments to Daniels falsely in his business records. This is, if true, a bookkeeping crime.

Normally, that is a misdemeanor and charges must be brought within two years. That deadline was missed almost five years ago. Bragg sidestepped this problem by alleging that the falsification was done “with intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.” By adding this intent to commit or conceal another crime, the bookkeeping misdemeanor is raised to a felony, which carries a five-year statute of limitations.

What is this “other crime” that Trump is alleged to have intended to commit or conceal? Bragg’s indictment does not say. Trump is literally on trial, facing more than 100 years in jail, for a crime that his tormentor-prosecutor cannot or will not name.

One theory floated by Bragg’s defenders in the Democratic Party is that Trump is guilty of participating in a conspiracy to promote his election by suppressing negative information about his personal life. But if paying off bimbos to stay silent about affairs for electoral gain was a crime, the entire Clinton family and its campaign staff would have done jail time.

Furthermore, as Trump’s lawyers established during cross-examination, it wasn’t even his decision to classify his payments as legal expenses. It was his accountants who saw a check to Cohen, knew Cohen was Trump’s lawyer, and then selected “legal expenses” as one of just a few available options on a drop-down menu. The accountants were trying to keep the books as best they could with the information they had. Where is the crime in that?

As strained as Bragg’s legal reasoning is, his purely partisan prosecution of Trump isn’t even the most damaging aspect of the trial. The presiding judge, Biden donor Juan Merchan, has made the circus worse by unilaterally silencing Trump. While Cohen is permitted to conduct a media tour bashing his former employer, Merchan has issued a gag order banning Trump from fighting back. Merchan has enforced this gag order with fines, which Trump paid, and with the threat of jail time.

Since when is it acceptable in a democracy for a partisan judge to use the threat of jail to silence a candidate from responding to his political opponents?

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At best, voters are tuning the Trump trial farce out entirely. More likely, Bragg is making a martyr of Trump with his flimsy and patently partisan prosecution. Merchan’s utter lack of objectivity is also helping public perceptions of Trump.

It is often said that Biden and the Democrats wanted Trump as his opponent, and once they got him, as they have, they would damage him by fair means and foul. They were not careful what they wished for. Their wisest course now would be for Bragg to file for his case to be dismissed post haste.

But the “ironclad” pledge should concern Baltic states as they face Vladimir Putin’s invasion threats. It should also concern the Philippines as it faces Chinese efforts to carve out an exclusive economic zone. And it should concern Japan as it faces Chinese and Russian affronts to its territorial sovereignty. Because Biden’s support for Israel is molten rather than ironclad.

This Monday, national security spokesman John Kirby refused to say whether the U.S. suspended an agreed arms shipment to Israel and also refused to offer American support for Israel’s effort to eliminate Hamas’s last bastion in Rafah.

Fearful of left-wing protesters, the Biden administration has intensified pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire leaving Hamas in place. Understandably, Israel refuses any ceasefire that amounts to such a defeat. Hamas has at least four brigades of approximately 8,000 terrorists in Rafah, and allowing them to stay would pose extreme danger to Israelis and would signal unmistakable weakness to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is a disgrace for Washington even to suggest that killers responsible for the evil of Oct. 7 should be allowed to stay and plot a repeat.

America’s global credibility is collapsing into the abyss between Biden’s rhetoric and reality. His equivocation and fecklessness in slithering away for electoral reasons from support of a staunch and indispensable ally promotes terrorism, gives succor to our enemies, and cannot but alarm our allies.

By opposing Israeli action in Rafah and withholding military aid, Biden is putting Hamas’s interest in the survival of its military capabilities before Israel’s interest in securing its people. Friends and enemies will take note.

This doesn’t mean American diplomatic and military support for Israel should be endless. A sustained Israeli occupation of either Rafah or Gaza is impractical and will feed grievances that do long-term damage to both Israeli and U.S. security interests. Aid deliveries into Gaza, though often stolen by Hamas, are necessary and until recently have been inadequate. That aid flow reinforces the truth of this conflict that Israel has, and must retain, actual and visible moral supremacy over Hamas.

It is also appropriate for the U.S. to make demands in exchange for its support of Israel, such as that neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor any subsequent Israeli leader ever again share high-tech knowledge, software, and hardware with China, bolstering the People’s Liberation Army. China has betrayed Netanyahu’s support, but acquired technology transfers that will potentially cost American lives in a future U.S.-China war.

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But these are reasons for tough demands, not for the betrayal of our core regional ally in its hour of need. Victory over Hamas is necessary for Israel’s security and the restoration of its effective deterrence in the Middle East. Present chaos aside, the Abraham Accords and moves toward a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement indicate the broadly shared interest of a more peaceful, prosperous future that moves beyond today’s hatreds and ideological fanaticism.

This better future will be impossible, however, if Hamas and other such groups are allowed to shape U.S. policy. Biden should stand with our ally, not with the terrorists who so brutally attacked it.