As Americans celebrate the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s return to office, it is more important than ever that they not forget the last four years of his predecessor, Joe Biden. While the words “Biden” and “forgetful” naturally go together, Americans must remember the Biden-Harris administration for the same reason the Bible counsels us to remember death: It fixes our minds on the ruinous consequences of poor choices.

President Donald Trump took office less than 15 weeks ago — and it seemed fitting his inauguration fell on a national holiday. Long before he unveiled tariffs, the president’s second inaugural address aptly called his January 20 inauguration “Liberation Day,” because for millions the changing of the guard felt like the closing of a dark chapter in our history and the answer to four years of fervent prayer. But as the second Trump administration promises that Americans stand poised on the threshold of a “new golden age,” we must never forget the most important lesson of the first Trump administration: Rapid success breeds contempt. For the next four years, Americans must remember the bad times ushered in by the historically harmful and hateful administration we have barely left behind.

The problem is, President Trump succeeded too well in his first term. Candidate Trump began his unlikely ascent to the presidency after a murder that bore a tragic resemblance to that of Laken Riley. Another young woman, Kate Steinle, was murdered in San Francisco in 2016 by Jose Ines García Zárate, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had been deported five times and was on probation in Texas at the time he killed Steinle in a sanctuary city. Suddenly, talk of a “big, beautiful wall” sounded palatable, and candidate Trump became President Trump. Soon, the economy exploded. Working class and middle class saw their income grow at a faster rate than the nation’s top income-earners, and the nation set new record-low unemployment for women and minorities.

The first Trump administration became so successful so rapidly that the nation adjusted to the prosperous new normal. Now, voters could be shaken by the legacy media’s saturation coverage of mean tweets, images of Obama-era youth detention facilities, and ludicrous rumors from “Russian collusion” to baseless allegations the president called deceased soldiers losers and suckers. Between that and historically anomalous, loose voting laws rammed through under the guise of fighting COVID-19, the Biden-Harris regime came to power, and American economic, military, and moral might — even our life expectancy — declined.

Over the next four years, Americans have to remember not just a leaderless administration that welcomed mass illegal immigration for its own political power, not just double-digit inflation breaking decades-long records, not just American humiliation on the international stage. Above all, Americans must remember the fact that as it held the reins of power in the Biden-Harris administration, the Left held them in contempt.

America reached the highest-ever average gasoline price, $5.01 a gallon, on June 14, 2022. Although the legacy media blamed hostilities in far-off Ukraine, President Trump noted that the Biden administration “cut the number of new oil and gas leases by 95%.” When a Bloomberg News host noted that the price of a gallon of gasoline had risen to $7 a gallon in California, he asked Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, “What is the Granholm plan to increase oil production in America?” Madam Secretary promptly bust a gut laughing at the notion that the energy secretary should do anything to lower gas prices. “That is hilarious!” she roared.

Similarly, Vice President Kamala Harris had a good laugh at the plight of Americans her administration forced to stay home from work through its COVID-19 lockdown orders, even for children in school. “More parents are seeing the value of educators,” she said, launching into her signature cackle, “when they had to bring their kids” home from school, she said, laughing so hard she had to adjust her mask.

Again, when a reporter pointed out the bare store shelves and high prices greeted the lockdowns and the Great Resignation — in part instigated through Biden’s unemployment policies that paid more to stay home than to work — then-White House spokeswoman and current MSNBC hostess Jen Psaki mocked “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed” due to snarled supply chains.

“We inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare. Their policies drove up energy prices, pushed up grocery costs, and drove the necessities of life out of reach for millions and millions of Americans,” Trump told Congress last month. Already, he’s lowered the price of eggs by half.

We must also remember the Democratic administration’s utter indifference to 13 U.S. soldiers who died in Afghanistan due to a poorly executed withdrawal. Joe Biden spent the solemn transfer of the bodies looking at his watch. He would go on to fib that no soldiers got killed on his watch. Congressional Democrats seemed equally unimpressed when President Trump told a joint session of Congress about the arrest of the ISIS-K terrorist responsible for the deadly Abbey Gate bombing, refusing to stand, applaud, or acknowledge the event.

Americans must remember the White House’s full-blown support for transing kids as “one of the most powerful things you can do” for you child, its embrace of cross-dressing luggage thieves, Richard “Rachel” Levine’s concerted effort to pressure WPATH to lower its guidelines for child transgender surgeries, its love of trans-identifying influencers clicking their fake nails and transgender activists flashing bare breasts on the White House grounds.

Americans must remember the last administration’s mass weaponization of government against its own people. The Democratic administration sent dozens of federal agents in paramilitary equipment to arrest Catholic fathers and try them on trumped-up charges alongside evangelical grandmothers, elderly Holocaust survivors, and progressive secularists who happened to believe killing potentially viable children is wrong. We must remember their attempt to keep the COVID-19 regime going as long as possible, especially by mandating private businesses for employees to take “shots in arms” or lose their jobs.

Once again, President Trump’s greatest weakness is his strength, and the key to his future failure may be his success. Already, he has brought border crossings to a record low, ended the disbursement of federal funds to institutions that carry out transgender procedures on children, and defunded many abortions around the world. There are reasons for optimism that his economic policies will pull America out of the doldrums necessitated by the Biden-Harris administration’s policy of intentional, managed decline.

That means Americans are vulnerable. Above all, we must remember that the legacy media’s coverage amounts to one enormous act of misdirection. The same reporters who mourn mass deportations for lawbreakers enthused at Biden’s mass firings. We must not let the legacy media’s lamentations over pampered federal bureaucrats forced out of their jobs because they could not produce a tiny list of their weekly tasks make us forget the thousands of enlisted men forced out of the armed services for refusing to take an experimental shot tested on aborted babies’ cells. We must remind ourselves and others before another regime attempts to censor anyone who expresses a contrary opinion from the White House’s to the point of trying to get you throttled, silenced, or banned from your own social media page.

Is This the Remembrance of Wrongs?

Christians may ask themselves if dwelling on the Biden-Harris administration’s scornful and spiteful actions constitutes a sin, the remembrance of wrongs (some translations of I Cor. 13:5). The answer is no — in fact, just the opposite. Scripture shows us that remembering the unbearable consequences of our complacency and God’s miraculous deliverance strengthens us against relapsing into sin against the Lord our God. Indeed, God commands us:

1. Remember the consequences of sin. After ancient Israel’s rebellion against God, the Lord commanded them to remember their 40-year detour to the Promised Land. “Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lordthy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.And He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live” (Deuteronomy 8:2-3, emphasis added). Truly, the Word is life (John 14:6).

2. Remember God’s deliverance from oppression, sin, and death. As God recapitulated the 10 Commandments, He charged the people of Israel to “remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm” (Deuteronomy 5:15). Bringing His mighty acts of salvation to mind on fixed holy days, as the children of Israel did each Passover and Christians do every Holy Week and Resurrection Sudnay, reminds us of God’s benevolence and our obligation to thank, praise, worship, and obey Him.

3. Remember not to fear, compromise with, or serve wicked political, academic, or social leaders. Remembering God’s deliverance from the hands of oppressive rulers reminds us of the One Sovereign in Whom we should place our trust. “If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them? Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the Lord thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt; The great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out arm, whereby the Lord thy God brought thee out: so shall the Lord thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid” (Deuteronomy 7:17-19).

At the beginning of a new administration, promising a New Golden Age, we must assure that through corruption, complacency, or compromise that we do not sink back into bondage.