“Medieval alchemists sought to turn base metals into precious metals like gold,” writes historian Victor Davis Hanson. “The more the alchemists bumped into the reality that gold was an element, the more desperately they sought to find fantastic ways to fabricate the rare element out of nothing. Joe Biden operates on the same alchemist principles.”

Hanson argues that the more Biden tries to turn his own dross into gold, the more he fails, and then “the more zealously he embraces his next new fantasy.”

Printing money, talking up low interest rates, disincentivizing work, subsidizing inactivity, and being unprepared that a pent-up, locked down, constipated economy of the past two years would eventually break out — all that resulted in January’s 7.5 percent annualized inflation rate. Unlike Joe Biden, even a child knows that too much demand and liquidity and too few available goods and services cause prices to rise. The rate of inflation is increasing at an annualized rate not seen in 40 years. And the jump already follows a prior 2021 annual rate of 6.8 percent. The prices of gas, food, and houses — the stuff of life — are collectively rising far higher than just 7.5 percent.

Hanson recalls all the ways Team Biden has explained away inflation in recent months — the worries of the elite, “temporary,” “transitory,” merely the price of higher wages, Trump’s fault, unavoidable, etc. That’s when they weren’t insisting it was actually “an indicator of a ‘robust’ Biden economy.” But there’s more:

Biden is hunting for the same magic excuses to fabricate a golden spin on crime. After demagoguing the police, contextualizing the 2020 riots, and supporting openly or quietly the Soros district attorney revolution, crime has exploded. Carjackings, smash-and-grab robberies, and violent assaults come to American screens each morning on social media and the news despite the denials of the Biden filters.

Rather than address the crime wave, the FBI prefers to harass after parents at school board meetings, to fixate on mythical “white supremacist” conspiracies, or to retrieve lost property of the wayward Biden offspring.

He continues:

Turn to the Afghanistan disaster, the worst humiliation of the U.S. military since the 1975 flight from Saigon. We were first told the “generals did it.” That is, Joe Biden was never properly apprised of the dangers of his scram. Once Biden’s polls dipped below 40 percent, the top brass mysteriously began coming out of the woodwork and blaming Biden — as if to say “We are not taking the rap for a now failed president.”

Then we learned that the logistics of the scamper were actually brilliant — so much so that no other country could ever approximate such a well-prepped getaway. It was as if the United States now leads the world’s militaries in the art of flight.

Next we learned that all the pertinent U.S. and loyalist Afghan personnel were safely evacuated — except they were not. Apparently, that lie was predicated on the assumption the end was so humiliating that no American would wish to revisit August 2021, or to even again hear the word “Afghanistan.”

Finally, we were assured — no surprise — that Biden was just continuing the Trump planned escape.

In the end, the truth emerged. Biden had demanded a big 20th anniversary remembrance of 9/11 by giving a “big” speech that he alone had ended the Afghan war. And so, he had to get everybody home in time for his self-congratulatory triumph.

Biden’s dross-making continues with the energy sector, “turning an energy independent, oil and gas exporting nation into a dependent importer again.” He eventually resorted to begging the Saudis for more production.

Likewise, it manifested on the border:

Distilling this mess was even trickier, because most of Biden’s supporters believe that he successfully turned a secure border into a golden open one. So again, Biden was the proverbial alchemist who insisted that his own pig iron policies actually created a 24-karat border, albeit unperceivable to ordinary Americans.

Most Americans polled expressed their horror at the idea of nearly 2 million pouring across the border — illegally, without means of support, unvaccinated and untested in a time of pandemic, without English or skills, cutting ahead of patiently waiting legal applicants, unvetted with no idea how many had criminal records. All that required more of Biden’s alchemy to turn that dross into glitter.

“Finally,” Hanson concludes, “there was the COVID-19 challenge.” Biden promised victory over the virus, and has failed grossly, in large part because “much of the Fauci ‘follow the science’ orthodoxy was revealed as irrelevant if not simply anti-science.” Now Biden and the Democrats are simply declaring that we have to live with COVID and they’re busily lifting restrictions.

Perhaps “alchemist” is not quite the right word for Joe Biden. After all, he worked not with dross in his attempt to make gold. Rather he started with inherited golden policies on the economy, energy, the border, and foreign affairs and turned them into dross.

Is Biden then really the “anti-Alchemist,” a delusional medievalist who does his best to turn gold into base metals?