President Biden announces his Covid-19 vaccine mandate in Washington, Sept. 9.

Photo: Oliver Contreras - Pool via CNP/Zuma Press

Say what you will, it should be obvious by now to any fair-minded observer that Joe Biden is an incredible president. Absolutely unbelievable.

Given what might be politely termed as recent adverse developments, this will come as a surprise to some readers, so let me clarify: I don’t mean “incredible” in the sense the word has come to be used in the modern argot of our rapidly devaluing language. Like “awesome,” which, growing up I only ever heard used in the context of the deity but which is now typically deployed to describe a slice of pizza or a haircut, “incredible” has been subject to significant linguistic distortion.

It’s amusing to hear some journalist of impressively wide self-esteem but evidently narrower vocabulary heap praise on a story by describing it as “incredible”—though the phrase “this is some incredible reporting from CNN,” which I have occasionally seen tweeted, has a satisfactorily, if unintentionally, faultless quality to it.

So, in a probably futile bid to return English words to their actual meaning, I should make clear that what makes Joe Biden an incredible president is that you can’t believe a word he says.

Remember that vaccine that Kamala Harris said a year ago she probably wouldn’t take because Donald Trump was responsible for it? Well, now she and her boss say we’ve all got to take it or else the federal government will have us fired from our jobs. This followed a declaration on the vaccine by Mr. Biden, shortly before taking office, that he wouldn’t “demand that it be mandatory.”

Two months ago, we were “closer than ever to declaring independence from the virus” but last week we were warned that defeating the virus would “take a lot of hard work and it’s going to take some time.”

Now, things change, it’s true. We’ve all had to revise and amend remarks in light of uncomfortable new facts. But this administration’s capacity for self-contradiction has reached epidemic levels.

Take that slightly menacing speech on vaccine mandates last week. Even within the span of a few minutes Mr. Biden managed a baffling inconsistency. One moment he assured us that if we were vaccinated we had an infinitesimal chance of getting sick enough to need hospitalization. But the next moment he said the unvaccinated were threatening the health of those of us who are vaccinated.

What makes this Covid credibility problem more remarkable is that Mr. Biden evidently thought it would be helpful for his credibility to change the subject from a subject on which it had already been shredded—Afghanistan.

You’ll recall the nightly contentions from the White House podium in that last chaotic week of the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul. The allies were perfectly happy with it. No Americans would be left behind. The Taliban were going to be helpful partners.

The president seems to have settled on a strategy of rotating monthly through a different set of falsehoods. Afghanistan in August. Covid in September. Next month: How I’ve succeeded in keeping immigration under control. By Thanksgiving, inflation will no doubt still be transitory.

Now it’s important to say here that the past few years haven’t exactly been a golden age for presidential credibility. Mr. Biden’s predecessor set the bar for authoritative misdirection extremely high.

But you’ll recall that President Trump’s whoppers were, in the somber reporting of the time, cast as an existential threat to the very fabric of American democracy. News articles would report something he’d said as either an outright lie or with the censorious clarification that his words were “false” or “without evidence.” (I earned infamy a few years back as editor of the news pages of this newspaper for insisting that reporting something confidently as a “lie” required a level of knowledge about a person’s mind that we probably didn’t have.)

I don’t see news organizations reporting that President Biden has “falsely” stated that there had been no complaints from U.S. allies, or that he has said “without evidence” that Covid was on the wane. Republicans lie. Democrats merely misspeak.

His credibility problem isn’t simply sapping Mr Biden’s poll numbers or even his ability to advance his political agenda. It’s further eroding trust in government, undermining America’s tattered reputation in the world and making it immeasurably harder for authority—now and in the future—to maintain the kind of trust that is essential to the functioning of a free society.

Among America’s most important allies there is no longer any trust that Mr. Biden can be relied on as a serious partner. They’re now making their own plans. At home, people are so bewildered and angry about the endless inconsistencies on masks, lockdowns and vaccines that many of them have simply stopped paying attention.

It’s not the first, to be sure, not by a long shot. But what an awesome—incredible—presidency.

Wonder Land: With the Democratic Party's relentless leftward lurch, how long will the president’s old pals, the moderate Democrats, continue with its 'progressive' formula for success? Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition