As I warned in September, Joe Biden has become trapped in a confidence-crisis cascade of his own making, and the decline may be accelerating. The latest poll from NBC News shows Biden’s approval rating at 42/54, a thirteen-point swing from their previous poll in August.

But Biden’s disapproval isn’t the only trend accelerating:

A majority of Americans now disapprove of President Joe Biden’s job performance, while half give him low marks for competence and uniting the country, according to results from the latest national NBC News poll.

What’s more, the survey finds that 7 in 10 adults, including almost half of Democrats, believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction, as well as nearly 60 percent who view Biden’s stewardship of the economy negatively just nine months into his presidency. …

Using Gallup’s historical data, Biden’s approval rating in this poll (42 percent) is lower than any other modern first-year president’s at a similar point in time, with the key exception of Donald Trump (whose approval averaged 37 percent in fall 2017).

Among a narrower set of registered voters, Biden’s job rating stands at 45 percent who approve, 52 percent who disapprove — a drop from 50 percent who approve, 48 percent who disapprove from two months ago.

Donald Trump’s numbers never did look good, but then again, Trump had to deal with an openly hostile press corps. Joe Biden has gotten the easiest of rides from the media. For instance, not once in this NBC News report does Mark Murray mention the catalyst for this confidence-crisis cascade: abandoning Americans in Afghanistan after explicitly promising not to leave without getting everyone out first. Instead, Murray attributes the slide to a number of factors, and the “chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan” isn’t even the first one mentioned. But even with that kid-gloves treatment, Biden’s heading for a polling abyss as his incompetence has become too obvious to ignore any longer.

Of course, those other factors — COVID-19, inflation, and job numbers that suddenly get cast as “disappointing” after the media largely played along with White House happy talk — matter too. But like Hurricane Katrina was for George W. Bush and the Iranian hostage crisis was for Jimmy Carter, the abandonment of Americans to the Taliban provided a spark that magnified all other presidential failings. Bush and Carter had the political wherewithal to recognize their risk and at least attempt to correct for the situation, but Biden lacks the self-awareness and the intellect to rise to the occasion.

And that’s the biggest problem, because voters have finally figured that out. Even Democrats are conceding that Biden sold them a bill of goods:

“The promise of the Biden presidency — knowledge, competence and stability in tough times — have all been called into question,” Horwitt continued.

“What people voted for was stability and calm,” added fellow Democratic pollster Peter Hart. “And what they got was instability and chaos.”

The wrong-direction slide (22/71) should worry Democrats more than anything else. This metric almost always runs to the negative as it’s easy to use this question as a channel for any frustration, but amplitude matters.  After ten months of the Biden presidency, you’d expect this metric to have improved, especially given the January 6 riot that immediately preceded Biden’s inauguration. In April, Biden got it to 36/56 and even in the midst of the Afghanistan disgrace it only got to 29/63, but now it’s almost as bad as the NBC poll result right after the riot (21/73).

The cascade manifests itself in both of the issue ratings polled by NBC. Biden gets a 51/47 on the pandemic, which looks great until you remember that he got 69/27 approval in April on that issue. Biden had a 52/43 approval rating on the economy in that poll too, but now only scores a 40/57 — worse than his overall approval rating. With inflation roaring and a supply-chain crisis threatening to push the US into recession, that may be the worst part of his cascade, and the one issue that Biden has the least control over to boot.

It’s not reflecting well on Democrats either. The generic ballot hasn’t actually changed much since the August poll put Democrats up 47/46, with it now standing at 47/45. Those leads are not only within the margin of error, they’re actually pointless for House control. Thanks to structural issues and pollsters’ reliance on urban areas for polling results, Democrats usually need more than a five-point lead to maintain or expand their House seats. This virtual tie would guarantee that Democrats will lose seats a year from now unless they can improve their standing.

And how are they to improve their standing with the dead weight of the Biden administration on their backs?