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It is impossible to overstate just how desperately Joe Biden wanted to make himself president. That ambition was made crystal clear across his two bids for the Oval Office in 1988 and 2008, before he finally got over the hump in 2020 after leveraging his claim as the dubious successor of the Obama years. His approval rating swooned shortly after that belated triumph, but judging by the policy ledger alone, it can be argued that Biden weaved together a moderately successful administration. He was able to usher several of his long-standing fixations across the finish line with acceptable consensus. Some of those achievements were broadly popular (the infrastructure bill); others were controversial but nonetheless hugely necessary (the long-overdue retreat out of Afghanistan). When the 2022 midterms rolled around, pundits predicted a harsh repudiation of the Biden coalition, due in large part to the gathering malaise that has yet to clear from the American consciousness. But that rebuke never materialized. Under Biden’s stewardship, career wingnuts like Kari Lake, Dr. Oz, and Herschel Walker were barred from Capitol Hill, thrust forever into make-work programs propped up by MAGA benefactors. (Walker is currently waiting to be approved for his position as ambassador to the Bahamas.)
Sure, President Biden did also cultivate a vast collection of familiarly shaped neoliberal failures across those four years, earning a simmering distaste from many of the people who helped put him into office. (Biden’s feigned helplessness on Gaza was especially flagrant, but, again, deference to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel remains to this day a bipartisan moral stain.) What I am trying to say here is that if you are capable of ignoring all of the metaphysical baggage, Biden orchestrated a remarkably ordinary Democratic presidential administration. The man did the job in the precise way he always envisioned he might do it—which, more to the point, is the only thing anyone could have ever reasonably expected of him. He’s 82, and it’s basically clear that he got everything he’s always wanted.
And that is why I find it so compelling, and a little bit poetic, that everyone has come to hate him for what that ascent hath wrought. The reign of Biden is now regarded, by a rare consensus within the Democratic Party, to have been a massive blunder. His legacy? A regrettable blip briefly interspersing the Trump order, starring the wrong man in the wrong moment. It is a status that makes the Biden presidency totally unique, in the worst possible way.
It is almost unnerving to consider just how quickly the worm turned for someone who was so accustomed to being liked. The No. 1 requirement for participating in Democratic Party politics remains the hatred and opposition of Donald Trump. But what comes in at No. 2? Right now, I’d argue, it is to distance oneself as far as possible from Joe Biden, and to admonish the former president at every turn for being stubborn, out of touch, unfathomably old, and cosmically incapable of meeting the rigors of the job.
The prime arbiter of this bloodletting is, of course, Kamala Harris, who waited a brisk nine months after the conclusion of her 2024 campaign to empty the notebook on her former superior. Harris’ memoir, 107 Days, aims to rehabilitate her reputation, and naturally, she concluded the easiest way to do so is by exposing a clueless, doddering Biden near the terminus of his term. The excerpt that received the most attention during the press cycle featured a paranoid president calling Harris minutes before her debate with Trump to accuse her of supposedly bad-mouthing him to a cabal of midlevel donors—an extremely unflattering anecdote that made Biden look something close to Bobby Moynihan’s drunk uncle. (In another gnarly reproach, Harris wrote about the “recklessness” of leaving the fate of the country up to “an individual’s ego.”)
It’s hard to think of many other vice presidents who have been granted the political latitude to go for the jugular, but Harris has plenty of cover in her upbraiding of Joe Biden. Everyone is getting in on the action. Pete Buttigieg, the administration’s former transportation secretary and a man Biden once compared to his dead son, has dropped all pretenses. He’s freely telling NBC hosts that his old boss shouldn’t have run for reelection, and that the country now faces the “decisions that come next”—cannily laying the rubble of the party at his feet. The same spirit can be found within Beto O’Rourke, who passed through the Pod Save America podcast studios with a message of ashen contrition shortly after the 2024 campaign wrapped up. (Democrats must admit that they “fucked up, and made a terrible mistake,” said O’Rourke, referring to anyone who endorsed Biden’s electoral murder-suicide.)
The list goes on. Some Democratic lawmakers extol vibes-based neuroscience. Sen. Chris Murphy asserted that there was “no doubt” the president’s cognition was in decline, as did Ro Khanna. (They’re both correct, but neither of them are doctors.) However, I think the most withering barbs came from Nancy Pelosi, who, in 2024, remarked to the New Yorker that Biden should set aside his bid not just because of his advanced age, but because, plain and simple, she didn’t have much faith in his electoral instincts.
“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she said, shortly after ushering the president out the back door. Ouch.
It must be reiterated how much this is a departure from tradition. A culture of decorum has protected innumerable other party bigwigs for decades, no matter their enveloping scandals or embarrassing electoral pratfalls. Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and John Kerry have all been redeemed in the baptism of big-tent clemency, and Biden, in comparison, never suffered the same humiliations of these other characters. He beat Trump, remember? Alas, the constituency is out for vengeance, and in these angry times, it has been unfathomably easy to let Biden’s head roll.
And what, exactly, has all of this pain earned us? The political designs that Biden structured his whole presidency around have gone kaput. His obsession with strengthening NATO, highlighted during his final campaign, where he frequently touted Finland’s admission into the alliance to bemused press pools, was desecrated almost immediately after Trump’s reelection. The multi-polar world that Democrats like Biden have always feared—where America has shed its international primacy—is at hand, and who knows if the previous status quo will be reasserted. Meanwhile, Biden’s handling of the Gaza crisis will surely be remembered as singularly representative of a fecklessness that left the party alienated from its ostensibly youngest and most passionate voters. It required a humbling defeat for Democratic officials to begin toying, gingerly, with a rational stance toward Israel. Biden is the mascot for this deprecated doctrine.
Some of his social programs might be recalled more fondly in the future. His college debt forgiveness plan, or flirtations with a minimum wage hike—both resulting in a wild-eyed freakout from conservatives and moderates alike—gestured toward a badly needed redefinition of Democratic politics. But of course, those ventures make it even more ironic that Biden was tapped for the nomination in large part to stall the momentum of Bernie Sanders. Yes, Joe Biden did beat both an aspiring fascist (first-term Trump) and a socialist. And now that he’s out of the picture, with his shortcomings burning in public recollection, those two ideologies are more invigorated than ever.
You have to wonder how he is processing all of this. Biden’s political career was thoroughly shaped by the chip on his shoulder—this insatiable feeling that he was continually being underestimated by a wealthier and more genteel Washington elite, always gossiping behind his back. That he scaled the mountain and made himself president only for his administration to become saddled with grumblings, caveats, and second-guesses—the kind of points-scoring, publicly aired disrespect that none of his contemporaries faced—must be the ultimate confirmation of his greatest fears. The things everyone believed about Joe Biden, namely that he wasn’t quite presidential material, turned out to be vividly true. And you know what? That does leave me with a touch of sympathy for the man.
With that said, it is also hard to argue that Biden didn’t bring all of this contempt on himself, and that is what truly underscores the tragicomic irony of this juncture in the American storybook. Think of the off-ramps passed by, or the narrative flourishes declined. How different would a Biden presidency feel if one of its fundamental projects had been the cultivation of Kamala Harris into an heir apparent? What would we be saying about him if he had presided over those successful 2022 midterms before graciously bowing out of the 2024 cycle? Yes, maybe the Democrats would have still lost, and many of the questions we’re asking about the party’s policy diet would remain as salient as they are now.
But Biden himself, unfailingly legacy-conscious as he is, would be shrouded in a much different light. Here was an old man standing athwart the tide of fascism, rather than one propping open the door. Ultimately, to make those choices, Biden needed to be a much different person—someone less headstrong, and less paranoid about the ways the political world has tilted against him. Someone who, perhaps, did not covet the presidency as much as he did. But Biden was always going to do things his way, and he’ll be paying for that for the rest of his life.