It is universally agreed that Joe Biden’s legacy is in tatters.
With Trump’s victory, Biden failed to fulfill the fundamental purpose of his presidency: putting “the adults” back in power and ending the movement Trump began. Even worse for Biden, Democrats have pinned the blame for Kamala Harris’s loss on him for his long refusal to exit the race. “The biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden,” concluded former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Several liberal op-eds reacting to the election, including one at the Atlantic, simply ran with the headline “Blame Biden.”
But post-election, the Democratic Party’s alienation from Joe Biden has escalated even further.
That estrangement reached its culmination this week when the president dropped the bomb that he would pardon his son Hunter for offenses he may have committed during a more than 10-year-long period. Crucially, the president blamed the politicization of the justice system for the charges against Hunter, saying that “raw politics has infected this process,” and refused to acknowledge his repeated promises that he would not pardon his son.
Outrage echoed from all levels of the party. It was damning and deafening. So much so that, per Axios, members of the Biden family were “shocked.”
Michigan Sen. Gary Peters deemed the pardon “an improper use of power.” Vermont Sen. Peter Welch called the move “unwise.” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis blasted the president repeatedly, at one point saying, “This is a bad precedent that could be abused by later Presidents and will sadly tarnish his reputation.” Arizona Rep. Greg Stanton said, “This wasn’t a politically-motivated prosecution.” California Rep. Adam Schiff concluded, “It sets a bad precedent.” Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet said Biden “put personal interest ahead of duty.”
Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom — who stuck wholeheartedly with Biden during his darkest days following the botched presidential debate — slammed the president for his decision, marking his full break with Biden. “With everything the president and his family have been through, I completely understand the instinct to protect Hunter,” Newsom told Politico. “But I took the president at his word. So by definition, I’m disappointed and can’t support the decision.” Newsom, who is ginning up a presidential run of his own, was forced to accept that support for Biden is now toxic in the Democratic Party.
The pardon broke the dam on the anger over Biden’s refusal to step down from power and its cost: Trump’s reelection.
But the pardon did more than that. It has also prompted Democrats to finally confront a hard truth: Biden’s presidency has been an unmitigated failure. Not in the sense that Biden would have been better as a transitional leader without ambitions for reelection. Rather, Democrats have realized that Biden should never have assumed the presidency at all.
In the New Yorker this week, Isaac Chotiner reckoned with the possibility that Biden’s selfish pardon of Hunter was representative of his presidency rather than a break from it. “It would be comforting to think that this nearly final act from Biden is a break from his legacy, and his Presidency — the regrettable lapse in judgment of an aging lion who has given his country a life of service and made it a better and fairer place,” he wrote. The pardon, Chotiner said, “has once again forced Americans to ask whether he is acting in the national interest or in response to private whims and grievances.”
This acknowledgment of Biden’s character flaws and weakness in leadership is a long time coming. Since the first year of Biden’s presidency, Democrats have not been satisfied with him and have wanted him gone, though they wouldn’t say it.
In December 2021, following a year punctuated by the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan (from which Biden never really recovered), the New York Times reported that Democrats were already chattering about who could replace Biden in the 2024 race: “Conversations about possible alternatives are beginning far earlier than is customary for a president still in the first year of his first term.” The New York Times provided the explanation for why in another article that month: “Mr. Biden’s presidency has been dogged by a sense of failure.” In the first year of his presidency, Biden had only passed a small proportion of the significant spending that he had promised, and Democrats in Congress seemed to be at a standstill. Moreover, many were blaming Biden for the legislative failures. In January 2022, Time magazine reported on a meeting between Biden and members of Congress in which Biden had utterly failed to lead. Time said of the meeting: “As [Biden] was leaving, a member approached him and pleaded, ‘Mr. President, we need a plan.’ Biden didn’t answer, according to a source familiar with the exchange.”
Alas, Biden suddenly had a breakthrough in July 2022 when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin agreed to a plan that would later become the Inflation Reduction Act. The law would be used by the president’s allies to tout him as having “achieved more legislatively in his first two years than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson.” However, this plan only came together when Biden was in a weekslong COVID isolation.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Democratic Party’s successes in the 2022 midterm elections helped silence Democrats’ worries that Biden should be replaced. Yet much consternation still remained. One House Democrat told CNN he was concerned that Democrats were overthinking how much Biden had contributed to his party’s victory. “A lot of things went right at the right time to end the year the way we did,” he said. “I’m behind him, but my concern is that they’re overreading just how responsible they are for what came together.”
Amid Democrats’ weariness at nominating Biden again, some liberal voices claimed Biden had an incredible record and was one of the greatest American statesmen ever. “Lost in the gloom is that Biden has assembled the most impressive legislative record of any president since Lyndon Johnson,” asserted Steve Israel in the Hill. The Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher told the New Republic “Of course he should run. The very question is annoyingly myopic.”
By early 2024, Biden was poised to be the nominee, as he was running nearly unopposed in the primary, and yet Democrats were still in a quiet panic. However, instead of an honest reckoning, more browbeating followed. For instance, in February 2024, Stuart Stevens wrote in the New Republic: “A plea to my Democratic friends: It’s time to start calling Joe Biden a great president. Not a good one. Not a better choice than Donald Trump. Joe Biden is a historically great president. Say it with passion backed by the conviction that it’s true.”
When Biden’s cognitive failures were displayed for all to see in the debate, Democrats were forced to acknowledge that Biden had lost it. And when he refused to step down, liberals were forced to acknowledge that Biden was of low character and was clinging to power for his own sake. The New York Times editorial board wrote of the president in July: “Mr. Biden has disregarded the concerns of those voters — his fellow citizens — and put the country at significant risk by continuing to insist that he is the best Democrat to defeat Mr. Trump.” But upon Biden’s exit from the race, any dissatisfaction had to be hidden until after the election. Thus liberals switched back to lauding Biden as an oh-so-wonderful statesman, with the New York Times saying: “President Biden’s decision to exit the 2024 presidential election is a fitting coda for a man whose life has been devoted to public service.” That is, they did so until Kamala Harris lost the election.
*****
The only real surprise here is that Democrats did not wait until the end of Biden’s term to stop pretending he was a good president. This will leave us with an unusual two months in modern American politics in which a sitting president’s own party makes their disdain for him clear. The whole disaster is made even more pitiful by the reports that Biden’s mental decline has been accelerating in recent weeks. The Democrats are in for a long winter.
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