This Is (Almost) The End Biden’s Political Career Deserves

(Drew Angerer/Getty via the New Yorker)

On July 21st, Joe Biden finally acknowledged what a majority of Americans have known for years: he is too old to be president for another term. Had he sooner recognized that being an octogenarian with a consistently lousy approval rating made him a poor candidate, there could have been an actual primary to determine his successor. As it is, the odds seem to be on Kamala Harris being more or less handed the nomination, rubber-stamped by the party insiders at August’s Democratic National Convention. 

Biden stepping down puts his own party in an unprecedented, and hardly desirable, position. It was a decision that came only after a terrible debate performance, public calls for Biden to drop out by many Democratic politicians, and polling that consistently showed him well behind Trump, both nationally and in key swing states. All of that makes it particularly rich that a number of liberal commentators have praised it as some selfless act of political heroism. If the Democrats lose to Trump in November — as well they might — no single person will be more to blame than Joe Biden.

It’s a fitting end to an awful career: a defeated, embittered Biden with his approval rating in the thirties, forced to step down by his own party because he’s too unpopular and too inarticulate for them to take a chance on. The first incumbent president since LBJ not to run for a second term. The only more appropriate end would have been for Biden to stay in and lose, cementing his legacy as an unpopular one-termer whose ego brought Donald Trump back to power. But as much as Biden might deserve that, the rest of us don’t deserve the havoc of another Trump term — though, again, we might still get it anyway. 

Why do I render such a harsh judgment on Joe Biden, of all people? Let’s count the reasons. Biden’s national political career started in the Senate, where he served for decades. His record there was so long and abominable that a list of his Greatest Hits should suffice. There was the time he led the liberal opposition to desegregation busing, working with ardent racist James Eastland to do so. Or when he supported tough-on-crime legislation to the right of what the Reagan administration wanted. Or when he helped put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Or when, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, he not only supported the Iraq War but invited a slate of witnesses whose rampant falsehoods helped justify it. Or the disgusting bankruptcy bill he helped foist on us, making it more difficult for people drowning in debt (including medical debt) to discharge it. 

Biden had presidential aspirations from early on. He first ran in the campaign for the 1988 election but self-sabotaged when he got caught plagiarizing a campaign speech and telling blatant lies about his life and academic record. Incidentally, this sort of reckless dishonesty and outright stupidity is a consistent throughline in Biden’s life, from the time he failed a class in law school for plagiarism to the plentiful, easily disproven lies he’s told in recent years. He ran again in 2008 and flopped again, but got enough attention to end up getting tapped by Obama to be the half of the ticket that wouldn’t scare racist whites away. That, of course, paved the way to his 2020 bid — which nearly ended in another failure, and would have if the Democratic Establishment hadn’t been desperate to keep Bernie Sanders from the nomination.

Then we come to Biden’s presidency. As I noted before, he is probably, on economic policy, the best president of my lifetime, or even since the end of the New Deal era. It says little either way, and one shouldn’t overstate Biden’s differences from his predecessors. We didn’t get a 15-dollar-an-hour minimum wage. We didn’t get a public health insurance option. We didn’t get $10,000 apiece in student loan forgiveness — the clumsy, means-tested way Biden went about it gave the courts plenty of time to block the program before a single cent was forgiven. The liberal narrative has been that the economy is doing swimmingly, but most people disagree, and there are plenty of indicators to show that the working class isn’t thriving. “Better” is something, but it still isn’t good enough.

And, of course, Biden’s active assistance in Israel’s genocidal violence against Gaza overshadows the rest of his middling presidency at this point. Spitting in the face of many of the young voters, left-leaning voters, Muslim voters, and Arab voters who helped put him in the White House, Biden has spent the better part of a year providing material assistance and diplomatic cover for a hard-right government to carry out mass murder. The Lancet estimates, conservatively, that the death toll from the violence so far may end being 186,000 or more. To add insult to injury, Biden has let himself be used and humiliated by Benjamin Netanyahu, who clearly favors Trump in the upcoming election. Biden’s role in the Gaza genocide is more shameful than anything from the Obama or even Trump years. 

And so, now that he has announced he won’t run for reelection, we see Biden’s horrific political career drawing to a close. He is an exemplary case of the Banality of Evil — a man who, through a combination of ego, careerism, and stupidity, has helped unleash untold suffering across his country and the world. In a better world, instead of a debate stage, he and Donald Trump might have shared a cell.

SCOTUS' Presidential Immunity Ruling Punches a Hole Through Democrat's Favorite Excuse to Do Nothing

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite via The Orange County Register)

In case you weren’t already aware, the Supreme Court recently ruled on Trump v. United States (the case charging Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election). Trump’s team had argued that he had absolute immunity for any official acts as president, while the government argued that he had no such immunity. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, landed in between, stating that “the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” and “at least presumptive[]” immunity for all official acts. Roberts elaborates:

At a minimum, the President must therefore be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 754.

I have to agree with much of the chattering class here that this ruling is Not Good. Presidents have long enjoyed a sort of de facto immunity (consider how many charges Reagan faced for Iran-Contra or that George W. Bush faced for… everything). Codifying it like this is not a positive development. Given the actions of American presidents current and past, the thought that they might be “apprehensive that criminal penalties may befall” them and the prospect of “prosecutions of ex-Presidents… becom[ing] routine” strike me as appealing, rather than something to avoid. But that’s one reason I’ll probably never be on the Supreme Court.

Still, this is what the court ruled. And much as we may dislike it, I can think of one interesting effect of this ruling: it punches a huge hole in one of the Democrats’ favorite excuses to do nothing. When a Democratic president fails to deliver results, the typical line is that it’s someone else’s fault. Don’t think the Affordable Care Act went far enough? Don’t blame Obama, blame Congress. Mad that Biden hasn’t erased your student loan debt? He tried, blame the Supreme Court. These excuses are already unconvincing, if one really wants to get into the details. But this ruling makes them even flimsier.

Faced with crises like climate change and runaway inequality, the president could just… do something. Don’t wait on Congress, where good ideas go to die. Don’t let the courts get in your way. Just act. The Supreme Court just said that you’re permanently and absolutely immune from prosecution for any acts that fall within the core and exclusive powers of the presidency, which would include orders as Commander-in-Chief of the military. Even when we get outside of those core, exclusive powers, you still enjoy at least presumptive immunity for all official acts. Seems like something to take advantage of!

Say you, the president, do something your opponents don’t like. What are they going to do? Impeach you? As long as you’ve got 34 senators in your corner, impeachment means nothing. The last president who got impeached is currently leading in the polls for this November’s election. What if the courts block you? Ignore them—it’s been done before. Judicial review isn’t actually in the constitution anywhere. 

Or, hey, if climate change and economic exploitation don’t strike you as urgent enough to merit this approach, how about Saving Democracy? We keep hearing that democracy is on the brink, that if this election goes the wrong way we could plunge into fascism. I’ve made it clear I think this is overblown. But if you don’t, what excuse can you make for Biden not to take full advantage of the power the Supreme Court just handed him? That it would set a bad precedent? The whole reason Trump is supposed to be so scary is that he doesn't care about precedents! We’re already hearing about how, should he win again, he’s sure to abuse his authority even more with the license the Supreme Court has given him. 

So what else is there? The concern that the voters won’t like it? I have a feeling that if the president, say, unilaterally issued a new round of relief checks, they might find it in their hearts to forgive that abuse of executive authority. Aside from that, the only reason to hold back is for fear of provoking an actual coup. That’s something to consider, but it would still seem to allow for a pretty substantial degree of latitude. 

The president enjoys a pretty sweeping set of emergency powers he can invoke at any time (Trump did so to redirect funding to his border wall). The fact Biden hasn’t taken greater advantage of these already is indefensible, but now there’s even less excuse. If all of this sounds unprecedented, well, I was under the impression we were living through unprecedented times. So, seriously, put up or shut up. 

The US Lacks a Serious, Functional Political Party

UPI Photos via The Hill

Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 28, 2024

The tweet above was obviously meant to rally support behind Biden after his performance in June’s debate (“dismal” is maybe the adjective I’ve seen used to describe it most often). But for me, it has a different effect. Obama’s reference to his own underwhelming performance in his first debate with Mitt Romney launches me into a sort of Proustian reverie. The year is 2012, Breaking Bad is still in its original run, dubstep is the big musical trend, and we have two remarkably normal choices in the presidential election.

Obama vs. Romney was such a normal, Serious presidential election it’s hard to believe it was that recent. There were plenty of antics in the GOP primary, from Rick Perry forgetting which agencies he wanted to abolish to pizza magnate Herman Cain’s brief stint as frontrunner. But ultimately the Republicans ended up with Romney, the strait-laced, Mormon former governor. He had been sort of a centrist during his governorship in Massachusetts, but had tacked more to the right and chosen arch-fiscal conservative Paul Ryan as his running mate. But there was nothing bizarre or outlandish about the ticket. You could hate Romney and Ryan’s politics, or even hate them as people — and I did both — but on paper they were perfectly reasonable candidates for a serious conservative party to pick.

On the other hand, you had Obama, the incumbent. His presidency had hardly lived up to the hype Candidate Obama generated in 2008, as the banks got bailouts and Bush’s War on Terror rolled on. But it was easy to overlook some of that as Obama shifted back into campaign mode, singing the right notes when it came to economic issues. His gaffe-prone vice president Joe Biden was not much of a factor, except when he managed to mop the floor with Ryan in the vice presidential debate. 

None of this is to say that things were good back then, or even better, really. There’s an accelerationist sort of case to be made that it’s better to have candidates as unappealing and outrageous as the system they represent. But the point is, once you got past the circus that was the GOP primary, both parties did a pretty good job of appearing Serious and Functional. That was the last presidential election, to date, where that was the case.

At first, it looked like the unseriousness and fundamental dysfunction would be a Republican problem. While the party was successfully hijacked in 2016 by Trump and his supporters (who were, in reality, the Republican base all along), the Democrats stuck with a candidate who was far from outlandish. Hillary Clinton was unpopular precisely because she was everything bad that people associate with politicians: an insider, close with Big Business and Wall Street, willing to say one thing in private and another in public. She lost for the same reasons that Mitt Romney lost four years before: both were so “normal,” politician-wise, they were uninspiring and even alienating.

But four years later, the Democrats took a big step toward their own form of unseriousness. In the face of Bernie Sanders’ surge of support and the failure of every other centrist in the race to gain real traction, the establishment lined up behind Biden — despite the fact he had looked to be dead in the water after Iowa and New Hampshire, and had doddered and rambled his way through pretty much every debate performance he’d had. He would have almost certainly lost (in the Electoral College if not the popular vote) had it not been for COVID.

And now, here we are. One candidate is a twice-impeached ex-president and convicted fraudster. The other is an octogenarian with an approval rating in the thirties and obvious signs of cognitive decline. Why the Democrats didn’t ditch Biden matters little. Whether it was because no one could convince him to step aside or because they really felt there was no better alternative, it does not speak well of the Democratic Party’s competence. Even if, after bombing at the first debate, Biden does step aside, that hardly shows that the Democrats have got it together. And, until proven otherwise, I expect our choice in November to be between the white collar criminal reality TV host and the unpopular, frequently incoherent geriatric. And, of course, RFK, Jr. — an antivaxxer with the voice of a goblin and a literally worm-eaten brain.

Again, this isn’t about policy. It’s about the fact that even before you get into questions of policy it should be obvious these are two terrible candidates. Even if you love Biden’s policies, his age and obvious cognitive limits at this point should clearly disqualify him from another term in the White House. Trump was an absurd candidate even in 2016, but at this point the only reason it isn’t flabbergasting that he’ll be the GOP nominee again is that this is the third consecutive time it’s happened. I cannot emphasize enough that, before you even get into The Issues, it should be overwhelmingly clear that neither of these people is a remotely reasonable pick for Leader of the World’s Sole Superpower.

As noted, one could argue this is all for the better, in some sense. Obama spent his eight years in office helping Wall Street reap record profits and blowing brown people to bits with remote-controlled death machines. Romney thought all that was good but wished taxes on the rich were even lower and that we could escalate tensions with Russia and China (one wish he would certainly get, in time). Both were horrible, and the real difference now is that our candidates are more obviously bad choices. Transparency is a virtue of sorts.

But, speaking subjectively, this does not feel good. The debate had some surreally funny moments, such as the golf argument the two got into. But most of it gave me the same feeling I might get watching No Country for Old Men in a room slowly filling up with carbon monoxide — a sort of existential despair mixed with disorientation and nausea. This election is a sight that’s impossible to look away from. But I’d certainly like to.