During his four years in office, Joe Biden notched significant legislative victories with the narrowest of majorities in the Senate. He presided over a virtuoso rollout of the COVID vaccines, the rapidity of which saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and he invested billions in the preservation of an independent Ukraine, which helped stymie the fulfillment of Russias revanchist dreams. Americas primary adversary, China, is measurably weaker than when he assumed the job. The U.S. economy is measurably stronger. The sum total of achievement is enough that it might someday tempt historians into declaring Biden an underrated president.
But such revisionism will never be convincing. As clearly as any recent president, Biden proposed the standard for judging his performance. From the time he began running for office, he presented himself as democracys defender at the republics moment of greatest peril. Battling autocracy was the stated rationale for his foreign policyand the same spirit infused his domestic agenda. He said that hed designed his legislative program as a demonstration project, to show that our democracy can still do big things.
When Biden issued his public warnings about the systems fragility, he tended to deliberately avoid mentioning Donald Trump by name, but the implication was clear enough. The inability to stave off a second Trump term, and the stress on democracy that it would inevitably bring, would be the gravest catastrophe of them all. By stubbornly setting off on his reelection campaign, by strapping his party to his shuffling frame, he doomed the nation to realizing the nightmare scenario that hed promised to prevent. He created the ideal conditions for Trumps return, and for his own spectacular failure.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.s obituary will be stalked by the counterfactual: What if he hadnt made the selfish decision to run for reelection? What if he had passed the torch a year or even six months earlier? That makes for a grim parlor game.
The way that events unfoldedhis catastrophic debate performance, the stark clarity with which the nation came to understand his geriatric state-beggars belief. Why didnt Democrats stage an intervention earlier? Why didnt his aides stop him from running? The absurd premise of the Biden reelection campaign, that it made sense for the nation to trust itself to a president who would finish his term at the age of 86, invites conspiratorial explanations.
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And in the age of conspiracies, these theories will gain wide purchase. They posit a broad cover-up hatched by aides bent on preserving their own power. In this imagined scenario, as Biden aimlessly wandered around the White House in a state of near-dementia, unable to perform the essential functions of the presidency, his inner circle suppressed the evidence of his decay, and a cabal of Democratic pols and corrupt journalists abetted them.
But turning this into a story about nefarious elites both oversells and underplays the scandal. It oversells it by baselessly suggesting that Bidens age prevented him from carrying out his constitutional duties. And it underplays the scandal because his advisers and protectors are guilty of one of the greatest lapses of common sense in political history. A cabal intent on preserving its own power would never have blundered in such tragically self-defeating fashion.
When Biden came into office, I chronicled his first two years for a book about his White House. You didnt have to be Bob Woodward to see that the president was an old man. I heard stories about him failing to conjure names; he confused the current Virginia Senator Mark Warner with the late Virginia Senator John Warner. In conversations, his anecdotes would meander excruciatingly into cul-de-sacs. His schedule didnt begin until late in the morning, which suggested a deficit of stamina.
I also interviewed hundreds of aides and politicians who spent extended time with Biden. As I learned about his management style, I didnt encounter evidence of a president who was catatonic. I heard stories about his temper, how he snapped at aides who failed to bring him the information he wanted, how he raged against pundits who disparaged him. As his advisers told it, he would micromanage them, sometimes unproductively, and overprepare for meetingsa product of his deep insecurities.
Aides and lawmakers almost always noted his age. Oftentimes, they did so with admiration. One of the virtues of an old president is experience, and the wisdom that comes with it. During the most impressive stretch of his administration, he leveraged his long history of working in the Senate and traveling to foreign capitals. He didnt need on-the-job training. His closest political confidantes, most of whom have worked with him for decades, regarded Biden as a father figure, which meant that they suffered from a very human problem: the difficulty of judging the decline of an aging parent.
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Decline is a matter of perception, and those perceptions are sometimes tainted by wishful thinking, by the hope that a parent still has a few hurrahs left in them. (Now that Biden is a political loser, insiders will rush to publicly say that they saw evidence of his decline before the rest of us did.)
Perceptions are also tainted by a lifetime of memories. Every human has their foibles, which tend to grow exaggerated with age but remain consistent with familiar patterns. So when Biden would get lost in stories, it was possible to say: Thats just Uncle Joe, always reminiscing about the good old days, always a bit verbose. When he fumbled for words, well, that was his childhood stutter rearing its head.
Whats undoubtedly true is that, over the past four years, Bidens aging accelerated, because thats what happens in the White House. When members of an administration leave the West Wing, its as if they have been subjected to a biological experiment that wrinkles their skin and whitens their hair, compressing 20 years of biological deterioration into four. Biden would have been a supernatural being if his body had resisted these changes. He absorbed the stresses of managing multiple wars and the toll of a presidential campaign (albeit a sclerotic one).
All that said, I have never seen evidence that he made bad decisions because of his age. Ive never seen evidence that his aides were actually dictating policy without his consent. At worst, his flagging energy undermined his credibility as a leader and projected weakness to his adversaries, at home and abroad, although those cautious tendencies arguably predated his decline.
Theres no need to go searching for hidden scandals, however, because the visible one is sufficiently terrible. Democrats ignored a cascade of warning signs. The evidence that Biden wasnt fit for a second term was abundantly clear in his public appearancesand in the public appearances that he studiously avoided. Advisers knew that Bidens instinct was always to invest faith in his own capacities, but they never made a concerted effort to talk him back from his decision to run, until it was far too late. Donald Trump is their legacy too.