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There comes a point in most Administrations when an American President confronts his surprising powerlessness. Joe Biden, it seems, has reached that point. Just this week, Biden acknowledged that there was not much he could do, in the short term, to lower the skyrocketing prices of gasoline and food. "We can’t take immediate action that I’m aware of yet," Biden said. After horrific mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde and Tulsa, he emphasized a similar point: unless Congress passes new laws, he’s all too limited in what he can do on his own about the wave of gun massacres, no matter that the vast majority of Americans clamor for more gun-control measures. "I can’t dictate this stuff," Biden told reporters, the other day. "I can’t outlaw a weapon. I can’t change a background check. I can’t do that." And though he is facing a national outcry over the shortage of infant formula, he said on Wednesday that he did not know about it until it was already a crisis—a crisis that will apparently take months to resolve, even with federal intervention.

There is no doubt that Biden’s had a brutal second spring in office. The sense of metastasizing crisis threatens to overwhelm any other story about his leadership. Much of the problem, though, is out of his control. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the worst war in Europe in a generation, now looks to grind on for months or years, and trigger global food and energy crises. The Supreme Court, with its 6–3 conservative majority, is about to toss out the five-decade-old right to abortion. There’s the highest inflation in four decades, and fears of a recession to come. Then, of course, there’s the pandemic. As the author Chris Whipple joked to NBC the other day, "What’s next? Locusts?"

Biden’s running commentary in recent days about the limits of what he can do to combat these plagues could be seen as a bit of let-me-level-with-you candor. "Here’s the deal" has long been one of his favorite lines. But this frankness comes at a time when reviews of his approach to the Presidency have been increasingly withering. CNN used the phrase "reactive crouch" this week. NBC headlined its version "Inside a Biden White House Adrift." In liberal Massachusetts, the Boston Globe recently found support for the President under fifty per cent—and Boston.com highlighted its coverage of the poll results with a comment from a voter: "He’s done next to nothing." Biden admitting his inability to fix intractable problems might be honest, but it’s also a political problem in and of itself for a President whose leadership has increasingly come into question.

The accepted story of the modern American Presidency has been one of inexorably expanding executive power—an "imperial Presidency," as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., styled it— acquiring and exercising more and more authority at the expense of the other branches of government. Yet there is a countervailing narrative, too, especially in this era of political polarization, obstruction, and congressional gridlock, when passing laws requires a level of political consensus that does not exist in a system where actors are increasingly incentivized not to make deals but to brag about their refusal to compromise. On leaving the White House, in 2016, Barack Obama told the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin that, despite the "unique" power vested in the Presidency, he had come to realize it also came with a "whole host of institutional constraints" that held him back from both doing and saying what he wanted.

Donald Trump, of course, had a different approach. Rather than lament the limitations of the office, he regularly asserted vast powers that he did not possess. Who could forget his claim that Article II of the Constitution gave him "the right to do whatever I want as President"? He often falsely invoked his "total" authority when faced with obstacles, famously doing so during the initial stages of the pandemic, and then quickly backed away when confronted with the facts of what such an assertion in practice would mean. Some of his executive-power grabs were breathtaking—in 2018, the family-separation policy that resulted in thousands of children being forcibly taken from their parents at the border, until an outcry forced him to stop; in 2019, the defiance of Congress to raid the Pentagon’s budget in order to pay for his border wall, even though Congress had explicitly refused to appropriate the funds he had requested for it. Most often, Trump used bluster to obscure his own failure to deliver on grandiose promises that were never really within his power to accomplish.

Biden may have overcorrected. Which is why, I suspect, the President ended the week delivering an unusual prime-time address to the nation, from the White House’s Cross Hall, with flickering rows of candles behind him in honor of the victims of mass shootings. In his speech, Biden struck a very different note from his hey-what’s-a-President-to-do laments of earlier in the week. He talked of going to mourn with the families of the victims in Buffalo and Uvalde. He shared their message to him and to Washington: "Do something, just do something, for God’s sake."

Rather than merely bemoaning the influence of the all-powerful gun lobby again, he offered a long list of specific legislation to be passed. He called for an assault-weapons ban and, if that is too politically difficult for Congress, pushed to raise the age at which a person can legally purchase such a weapon, from eighteen to twenty-one. He demanded new "red flag" laws that would allow family members or school officials to ask a judge to temporarily block an unstable person from possessing or buying firearms. He also advocated for a ban on high-capacity magazines, the passage of safe-storage requirements, and the repeal of gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.

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Of course, it was still true at the end of his speech, just as it was at the beginning, that Joe Biden can’t dictate this stuff. He wasn’t wrong about that. Yet another crucial moment in his Presidency may once again come down to the decisions of one or two senators in closed-door talks in which Biden is not a participant. Congressional reporters quickly pointed out that many of the gun-control measures Biden proposed, such as renewing the assault-weapons ban and forbidding high-capacity magazines, aren’t even being discussed by a bipartisan group of ten senators who have renewed gun-control talks in the wake of Uvalde. But "Do Something" is a much better message for an American President than "I Can’t Make it Happen." Especially when there’s a midterm election coming up in a few months.

Can Biden turn his political fortunes around? June, as the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik recently pointed out, is more or less the last chance in a midterm-election year for a President and his party to somehow change course and avert a looming political debacle in the fall. "In the last four midterm elections, by June the public had made up its mind about the leadership in Washington and how they were going to vote in November," Sosnik observed.

Which means that Biden has a few weeks, at best, to somehow revive an approval rating that currently stands in Trumpian territory: an average of 40.8 per cent approval, 54 per cent disapproval, according to the political Web site FiveThirtyEight. It’s one reason, among many bad indicators for Democrats, that forecasters right now predict Republicans will take over the House this fall, and very likely the Senate as well. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report projects Democratic losses of twenty to thirty-five seats in the House, where Republicans need just a handful of wins to gain control.

And what will happen in June? The Supreme Court will likely decide to overturn Roe v. Wade. Democrats in the House will try and fail to pass Biden’s assault-weapons ban. There will be more fighting in Ukraine, and the very real possibility that, despite the influx of American weapons, Russia will continue to make territorial gains in the country’s east and inflict heavy casualties. Inflation shows little sign of receding; gas prices may reach record highs. This week, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, warned of an economic "hurricane" that could push oil from its current price of a hundred and nineteen dollars a barrel—which currently seems nightmarishly high—all the way up to a hundred and fifty dollars per barrel, or even a hundred and seventy-five. According to the American Automobile Association, gas prices at the pump, reportedly the metric that is obsessing Biden’s White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, are currently averaging $4.76 per gallon nationally—up from $3.04 a year ago. COVID-19 has not disappeared either, and new variants suggest the possibility of additional spikes this fall.

Not all of these events will necessarily boost Republicans. Some may even benefit Biden. Polls suggest that the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft abortion ruling caused a surge in support for abortion rights. A Gallup poll found support for abortion rights at its highest level since 1995; a Wall Street Journal survey found that fifty-seven per cent of Americans back a woman’s right to a legal abortion for any reason, the highest level since the question was first asked by the publication’s pollster, in 1977. If Roe is indeed thrown out, Democrats are hoping to generate a wave of anger-fuelled support this fall, especially among independent-leaning female voters, who were key to the Party’s success in retaking the House in the 2018 midterms and holding it in 2020.