'He saved Ukraine': Republican pundit lays out the '10 best things' President Joe Biden did in 2022

27 December 2022

Right-wing pundit Marc A. Thiessen has never been shy about bashing President Joe Biden in his Washington Post opinion columns and during his appearances on Fox News. In the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms elections, the 55-year-old Thiessen — who was a speechwriter for both President George W. Bush and the late Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the 2000s — stridently predicted that the GOP would enjoy a massive red wave on November 8. But Thiessen had a much more reflective tone when Democrats performed a lot better than expected in the midterms, which he described as an “absolute disaster for the Republican Party.”

Thiessen actually gives Biden some credit in an opinion column/listicle published by the Post on December 27, laying out 10 of the “best things” Biden did in 2022.

“This week, I offer my annual lists of the 10 best and 10 worst things the president did this year,” Thiessen explains. “Since President Biden gives me so much to criticize, we’ll start with the best things.”

Thiessen’s list ranges from acting “to prevent a crippling national rail strike” to signing “the first bipartisan gun legislation in decades” to securing “extradition of the terrorist charged with bombing Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 190 Americans.” Most of the items listed pertain to foreign policy, and the Post columnist/Fox News pundit also applauds Biden for “sending B-52s to Australia to counter China,” keeping “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations,” ordering “the drone strike that took out bin Laden’s right-hand man and successor,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, and declaring “the United States will defend Taiwan.”

Another thing Thiessen gives Biden credit for is launching “a ‘full-court press’ against China’s domestic semiconductor industry.”

In a November 2020 column, Thiessen described Trump as having “one of the greatest conservative presidencies in modern American history” despite his “offensive rhetoric.” Thiessen often defended Trump on foreign policy when he was in the White House, including his policy with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As Thiessen saw it, Trump was showing NATO tough love; Never Trump conservatives like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol and the Post’s Max Boot, in contrast, saw Trump as anti-NATO and as a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Biden, in 2020, campaigned on rebuilding the United States’ relationship with its NATO allies —which, like Scarborough and Boot, he believed that Trump had severely damaged. NATO, to be sure, has been both revitalized and expanded during the Biden era — and Thiessen, in his December 27 column/listicle, gives Biden credit for winning “support for Finland and Sweden to join NATO.”

The #1 item on the former Bush/Rumsfeld speechwriter’s list is “He saved Ukraine.”

“Biden’s handling of Ukraine tops both my best and worst lists this year,” Thiessen writes. “Here is the best: After Russia invaded, Biden rallied our allies to support Ukraine’s self-defense — providing arms, money, intelligence and diplomatic support that stopped Putin from seizing Kyiv. At the start of the conflict, no one thought Ukraine could survive; today, Ukraine’s courageous armed forces are on the offensive, retaking territory Russia unlawfully seized. For all the flaws in his Ukraine strategy, Biden deserves credit for saving a free and independent Ukraine.

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