This year, Inauguration Day will be historic in more ways than one. Donald J. Trump will officially become the first US president sworn in for a second non-consecutive term since Grover Cleveland in 1893. He’ll become the first president sworn in for a second term after being impeached (twice, at that). He’ll become the first president sworn in after being convicted of a crime. And at seventy-eight, he’ll become the oldest person to assume the nation’s highest office.
But for once, Trump won’t be able to hog all the glory. Because he skipped the ceremony in 2021—making him the first president to snub his elected successor’s inauguration since Andrew Johnson in 1868 (who, as it happens, was the first president to be impeached)—Trump will be collaborating on an achievement so idiosyncratic it’s almost a brainteaser. Today, at noon, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., will become the first president to attend the inauguration of the very successor who, as predecessor, didn’t bother to show up at his.
Historical trivia like this is, well, trivial. But it’s worth considering for one simple reason—or, rather, because of one simple man: Biden himself. Over the arc of the American saga, there have been presidents who better represented era-defining change; there have been presidents who were more consequential, or at least served in more consequential times. But Biden does have one distinguishing characteristic: there has been no modern president so attentive to the story of the institution, or so desperate to write himself into its annals.
Barack Obama pushed forward, toward the realization of the American promise; Ronald Reagan staked his claim on the present, the last stand of the American dream; Joe Biden looked to the past, promising the restoration of America’s soul. It’s only fair, then, to judge his legacy accordingly. And on those terms, Biden has been an epochal failure.
We might as well start with the day at hand. Pundits have made a great deal of Biden attending Trump’s inauguration—his willingness to extend the sort of courtesy he did not receive. This, they say, is an expression of Biden’s devotion to the continuity of government and the peaceful transfer of power.
That’s no doubt true. Over the course of his long career in public life, Biden has been described again and again as an institutionalist. But what looks from one angle like magnanimity might also be described as pathology. Democrats have spent the better part of a decade hectoring the public not to normalize Trump; Kamala Harris, in the waning days of her presidential campaign, joined in calling him a fascist. And yet, today, she and her soon-to-be-former boss will stand in the Capitol Rotunda, gazing patriotically on as the man they call a would-be dictator takes the oath of office for a second time.
On the morning of January 20, 2021, Trump fled DC. Why shouldn’t Biden, in a final rebuke for the man and his movement, return the favour? Johnson wasn’t the first president to skip his successor’s inauguration; that honour belongs to no less a statesman than John Adams, who passed on Thomas Jefferson’s. If there were ever a moment to object to politics as usual, Trump’s return is it.
Of course, that won’t happen. Democrats call themselves the party of democracy, but really, they’re the party of decorum, more invested in politesse than power, learning all the wrong lessons from the past eight years. They’re attached to normalcy as an end in itself, even when the times are anything but normal. If all that sounds familiar, it should. Unthinking adherence to precedent is Biden’s signature. After their resounding defeat in November, Democrats across the party’s ideological spectrum are eager to turn the page. But whether they like it or not, Biden doesn’t just remain their leader. He’s their avatar.
Another assessment of Biden’s legacy might begin further back, on April 25, 2019, when he announced his (third) campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. After an invocation of Charlottesville, Virginia, as both the home of Jefferson and the site of the most high-profile white-power march in living memory, Biden declared, “If we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation—who we are—and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”
Biden’s main purpose in running for president was to sweep Trump into the dustbin of history. By that measure alone, he has failed, catastrophically. Trump didn’t just win re-election: he did so in the supposedly career-ending wake of the January 6, 2021, insurrection; he did so after a four-year term of unequalled political entropy and corruption; he did so even when Republican voters, and the American public, were offered a bevy of alternatives (Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and a number of others in the primaries; Harris, in the general election).
But Biden’s failure is even more profound: he’s helped Trump come back stronger than ever. After four years in the wilderness, Trump and his allies have had plenty of time to learn from their mistakes. They’ve completed their takeover of the Republican Party, built or absorbed a network of think tanks and political action committees, cowed the last holdouts in Silicon Valley, and wooed Wall Street. America, and the world, would probably have been better off if Trump had just been re-elected in 2020. As it is, the situation is a bit like taking away a drunk driver’s keys and then handing them back once he’s downed a couple more drinks.
Biden’s defenders will argue that he alone can’t be held responsible for Trump’s victory. They’re right, although not in the way they think. If anything, they’re more culpable than Biden himself. Much as journalists and academics have forensically examined the alleged cover-up of Reagan’s dementia, future presidential biographers will have to sort out who exactly understood the depths of Biden’s apparent cognitive decline and when. Which of his family members, aides, and allies may have worked to conceal it and which looked the other way? How much of this was his doing and how much was that of his entourage? Biden was at once a beneficiary and casualty of media partisanship, with his surrogates claiming that any criticism of his mental fitness was conspiracy theory or Fox News propaganda or both. But they quickly ran up against the fact that everyone, all around the country and the world, could see and hear the plain truth: Biden was not his old (or, rather, young) self.
The first televised debate between presidential candidates, held in 1960, is considered a profound shift in the history of American elections. The pale, bestubbled, washed-out Richard Nixon—until then the frontrunner—dripped sweat beneath the studio lights as John F. Kennedy, rakish and at ease, seduced the cameras. It was the dawn of politics as spectacle. Those of us who watched the now-infamous Biden–Trump debate live, on June 27, 2024, felt a similar sense of history: a world-altering meltdown was happening before our eyes. Biden froze, blank faced and open mouthed, before looking up from the podium and saying—God help him—“We finally beat Medicare”; later on, in response to Biden’s halting description of his border policies, Trump delivered one of the great knockout blows in debate history: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
That June evening, there were no more cards for the illusionist to play. Biden, the president of the United States, one of the most powerful men in the world—the only person who’d ever defeated Trump and declared himself the only person who could do so again—struggled to string a sentence together. And still, in the minutes and hours that followed, the Democratic spin machine kicked into gear. Harris: “It was a slow start.” Obama: “Bad debate nights happen.” Bernie Sanders: “Yeah, he’s not as articulate as he should be.”
Even as they spent the entire Trump era lamenting the end of a shared reality, nearly every level and faction of the party lied to our faces and asked us to disbelieve our own senses. Is it any wonder the Democratic brand is now toxic?
Historical counterfactuals are, generally, not much use. By definition, they’re fictional and unprovable. But the catastrophe of Biden’s short-lived re-election campaign and the drubbing that Democrats received up and down the ballot have made for an unusually unified postmortem. Even as different wings of the party point fingers at each other, there’s one thing every Democrat (or at least every Democrat not personally indebted to the president) agrees on: Biden should never have run again. And so it’s helpful to game out some alternate timelines in order to imagine how differently things might have gone if Biden had done what was, by any measure, the only sane thing and stepped aside after a single term.
The immediate result would have been deafening acclaim. In the textbooks of the future, rather than being the man who handed the White House back to Trump, Biden would have become a paragon of Washingtonian selflessness as he retired to the biblical mansions of rest. In the process, he would have spared himself the humiliations to come: his dazed and confused turn on the debate stage, his eventual Caesarian stabbing in the Curia of DC.
The more important result would have been a Democratic ticket with a fighting chance. There’s no guarantee that someone not named Joe Biden or Kamala Harris would have prevailed over Trump; after years of inflation and crisis, the global anti-incumbency mood is real and pan-ideological. But a Democratic candidate untainted by the administration’s unpopularity would have been much better positioned for victory, able to run away from the White House when necessary and embrace it when convenient. (Crucially, that candidate would also have been up against a Republican opponent with rock-bottom approval ratings of his own.) Even if Harris had, ultimately, come out on top in an open primary, she would have been on much more solid footing than the situation in which she found herself, forced to build a glass-cliff campaign with 107 days to go.
But Biden held on long past the point of no return. And according to his final presidential interview, recently granted to USA Today, he has learned no lessons, telling the paper he still believes he would have won. For context: the Biden campaign’s internal polling reportedly showed him heading for a once-in-a-generation rout, with Trump projected to sweep several blue states on his way to winning 400 electoral votes. Either Biden is lying or his campaign lied to him. At this point, it hardly matters which.
The peculiar circumstances of Biden’s time in office—Trump, COVID-19, that disastrous debate—and a handful of his truly significant legislative accomplishments—the $2.2 trillion (US) Inflation Reduction Act, the $1.2 trillion (US) infrastructure law—have sometimes obscured the rest of his long career. But it’s worth remembering where he’s stood on the issues.
Where to begin? Well, as a senator from Delaware—the country’s limited-liability-corporation capital and the closest thing the continental United States has to a tax haven—Biden was one of Congress’s staunchest opponents of financial regulation, sponsoring laws friendly to the credit card and banking industries and making it more difficult for individual consumers to declare bankruptcy. He also supported changes to the Glass-Steagall Act that allowed commercial banks to return to speculative risk taking (which, of course, contributed to the 2008 financial crisis).
The list goes on. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, his eventual vice president’s sole breakout moment occurred when, on the debate stage, she confronted Biden about his long-time opposition to busing, an integrationist policy of which Harris was a personal beneficiary. As a creature of the famously genteel Senate, Biden apparently had no qualms about palling around with segregationist colleagues, even delivering a eulogy for Strom Thurmond. He co-wrote not just the infamous 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which helped fuel America’s epidemic of mass incarceration, but also the drug laws that established racist sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he oversaw the panel’s notorious smearing of Anita Hill when she described the sexual harassment she faced from future Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.
Biden voted in favour of both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Iraq War, which went on to become two of Trump’s most powerful weapons in the great realignment of American politics. No one should consider Trump a genuine opponent of free trade or foreign wars. But Democrats’ abrogation of those issues allowed Republicans to—dishonestly but plausibly—take them up instead. This isn’t petty re-litigation. Then as now, these are some of the most pressing matters in American politics. And Biden was on the wrong side of every single one, until it became politically expedient to change his mind.
There are many other stains on Biden’s legacy we could name. But there’s one more particularly worth discussing: his unflinching support for Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. Last week, Israel and Hamas finally agreed to a ceasefire and hostage deal—a deal Biden admits is nearly identical to one he proposed months ago. This raises the question of why the war dragged on as long as it did. The answer, at least in part, is Biden himself.
Over the past year, White House officials repeated ad nauseam that they were “working around the clock” for a ceasefire. But their words rang hollow, thanks to the unrestricted flow of US military assistance and weaponry to the war’s most powerful belligerent. Israel, one of the wealthiest countries per capita, is the single largest cumulative recipient of US military aid since the Second World War. Without that aid, it would have been forced to stop the devastation within weeks, if not days.
Support for Israel is a cornerstone of American foreign policy, and it would be naive to think Biden, an avowed Zionist, might suddenly change course. But since the war began, other Western governments have, to varying degrees of sincerity and efficacy, responded to their citizens’ outrage by curtailing—and, in a few instances, even eliminating—military aid or arms sales to Israel. Biden, on the other hand, drew one red line after another, then shrugged when Israel rampaged across them. The invasion of Rafah, the attack on Lebanon, the blockade of humanitarian aid—at every point, Israel has done whatever it wanted, knowing that, whatever the latest strongly worded statement from the White House said, Biden would keep footing the bill.
Trump has described Biden’s foreign policy as one of weakness and appeasement. In this case, he happens to be right. But American support for Israel hasn’t always been as sacrosanct as it is today. Even if no US president has been a great friend of the Palestinians, some have been more than willing to use their considerable leverage against Israel. In 1948, during the war over Israel’s creation, Harry Truman refused to arm either side. In 1956, when Israel first invaded Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, Dwight D. Eisenhower threatened sanctions, forcing it to withdraw. And in 1982, during Israel’s ruinous bombing of Beirut, Reagan, of all people, called prime minister Menachem Begin and told him to end it, reportedly saying, “Menachem, this is a holocaust.” Thirty minutes later, Begin ordered the bombs to stop.
What is Biden’s place in this pantheon? Well, last May, he paused a single bomb shipment to Israel. Then, weeks later, he reversed course, allowing half the munitions to go through in a pointless—and quintessentially Biden-esque—act of splitting the difference. Indeed, far from cutting off Israel in an attempt to end the war, he opened the floodgates. A Brown University report puts US military aid to Israel between October 2023 and October 2024 at $17.9 billion (US), an all-time single-year record. And there was more to come. Earlier this month, with two weeks left in his presidency and the onslaught in Gaza still at full force, Biden approved one last gift to Israel: another $8 billion (US) in weapons.
