Throw Biden under the bus

Sleepy Joe landed us in this mess with bad, selfish decisions

When Joe Biden stepped aside in favor of Kamala Harris, the overwhelming majority of Democrats praised him for the decision and painted an overall flattering portrait of Biden’s presidency and his career. I think that was the right way to approach the situation. Voluntarily relinquishing a claim to power is a big ask, and the way to align incentives for the future is to praise people, like Biden, who do the right thing and criticize people who act like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

But I found it increasingly painful to watch Democrats heap praise on Biden during the lane duck period and the Trump/Biden transition.

Of course, many good people served in the Biden administration. And the administration did a number of admirable things. But on a fundamental level, Biden defined his entire post-2016 political comeback in terms of averting the Trumpian threat to American political institutions. And he failed, catastrophically! It’s not just that Trump won, it’s that he has returned more powerful than before. It’s that we are genuinely much worse off than we would have been if Trump were narrowly reelected in 2020. It’s that Biden alienated an entire cohort of young people, along with many of the leaders of the most important companies in America.

And in his lame-duck interviews, Biden expressed nothing but arrogance about his political and policy choices. He even boasted that he believes he’d have beaten Trump had he stayed on the ticket and seems to be nursing a grudge against Nancy Pelosi.

The sheer bad manners of talking Harris down like that was the last straw for me.

The obvious reality is that Biden and a relatively close circle of aids mislead many of their own appointees and fellow Democratic Party elected officials. They lied to the public, not convincingly enough to persuade most Americans, but convincingly enough to persuade most Democrats, and in the process, made their friends and supporters look ridiculous. They selected a VP nominee they didn’t have confidence in as a party leader and whom they did not set up to succeed. And they put the whole Democratic Party in a series of impossible situations because of their hubris, or vainglory, or I don’t know what. And I’m concerned that we’re now in a situation where the only people who want to say that publicly are either Republicans or, to a lesser extent, leftists.

There’s an urgent need for common sense Democrats to buck the establishment and admit what everyone knows: Biden fucked up, badly, in his handling of his age, and the effort to keep this under wraps seems to be related to some of the ideological failings of his presidency.

A brand in crisis

I think an underrated contributor to the recent normalization of Trump is Joe Biden’s own failure to uphold the standards of normalcy and integrity that one would, ideally, like to hold up as a counterpoint.

To take a lame-duck example, the White House blocked Nippon Steel’s purchase of US Steel on an incredibly flimsy national security pretext that was really about delivering the desired outcome of the United Steelworkers of America. This is the kind of abuse of power that many of us worry about with Trump. Tweeting randomly that the Equal Rights Amendment is now ratified was, in some ways, less egregious, because it plainly has no actual effect on anything. But it’s also dishonest in a way that I find disquieting. And, of course, in both cases, the president wasn’t capable of speaking to the public and answering questions in an effort to explain himself. He also, notably, pardoned members of his own family, as well as some of the people Trump had threatened to try and prosecute.

Those pardons seemed to retroactively validate the conservative argument that Democrats had been waging “lawfare” against Donald Trump during the prior four years. It suggested that Joe Biden’s view was that you cannot rely on the integrity of the courts and the legal system.

That’s just the lame-duck period. The larger issue, obviously, is the specter of a coverup about Biden’s age and limited capacities. And the problem for Democrats is that since most voters thought Biden was too old before the debate and before the pressure to step down, the implication is that if you don’t think there was a coverup, you’re part of the coverup. Republicans now hold an edge in party identification.

The generic ballot for 2026 is leaning toward Republicans. And voters trust the GOP more on the issues that are more important to them.

Nothing lasts forever in politics, and I don’t want to be heard as saying that these problems are unfixable. My point is, in fact, the opposite. Public perceptions of political parties can shift rapidly — the idea of a Republican candidate drawing even with a Democrat on Social Security and Medicare would have sounded absurd 10 years ago. But Donald Trump remade the GOP’s image. I’ve also seen evidence (not yet public) that there’s been a massive deterioration in the Democratic Party’s trust level on education over the past four years.

So Democrats have serious problems, but they’re also very fixable. It’s just that to fix them requires high-profile people to do a bit of high-profile position-taking.

When Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, she declined to engage in any major breaks with Biden. You can understand that decision on a number of levels:

• Maybe she sincerely didn’t think Biden made any mistakes.

• Maybe she thought it would be a bad look for her to appear disloyal.

• Maybe she feared retaliation from the White House staff.

• Maybe she didn’t want a news cycle about Dem infighting.

• Maybe she’s an indecisive person, and even though almost everyone on her team thought some kind of break with Biden was a good idea, they couldn’t reach a consensus on what it should be.

But whatever happened, the Democratic nominee wouldn’t articulate any clear policy differences with a deeply unpopular incumbent who didn’t really acknowledge why he wasn’t on the ticket anymore or explore the implications of that.

This is what I think often goes missing in purely tactical conversations about the 2024 campaign. A more skillful communicator with a better outreach plan would have been great. But fundamentally, what you say matters. The message that “Biden was perfect in every way and totally mentally competent” was not something a person could reasonably stick to during a long, unstructured conversation. Trump, in comparison, actually had a very self-critical message, focused on the idea that his big mistake in his first term was failing to do a massive purge of the civil service.

Trump’s anti-Bush politics worked

Whatever was on Harris’s mind, the good news is that other Democrats are not constrained in precisely the same way. And for the 2028 presidential race — and for challengers in 2026 — Americans will be waiting for a Democrat who can adhere to the party’s core values while also articulating some of the obvious problems with Biden and his administration.

A good model for this, I think, is Trump, who came into the 2016 primary cycle talking about Iraq and the myriad failures of the George W. Bush administration. The GOP establishment perversely tried to foist Jeb Bush on the party rather than saying that the enduring principles of conservative politics were bigger than one guy (or one family). When Jeb said “my brother kept us safe” at a GOP debate and Trump called bullshit, it was a crazy moment. Are you allowed to point out that’s not true and still be a Republican? Trump proved that it was. And it was an incredible way of reaching out to potential swing voters without actually contravening any of the policy aims of the GOP base. You only needed to be in touch with reality to know that it wasn’t actually true that Bush kept the country safe.

By the same token, Biden’s already gone, Harris already lost — there’s nothing more to lose and plenty to gain from Democrats admitting the obvious.

Biden screwed Democrats most of all

Most people believed Biden was too old for the job and shouldn’t have been running for re-election before he face-planted at the debate. Some of us kept faith until that moment. I know a lot of people refuse to believe that anyone could have not seen it earlier, so I want to remind everyone that the debate happened for a reason. There were people (I was one of them) who thought he would do a good job and put the doubts to rest. He did not. And then a very misguided set continued to stand behind him for weeks. That was all a huge mistake. And while I, as a writer, need to be persnickety about the reality that an open primary might well have ended with an even worse outcome, a politician is allowed to engage in a little rhetorical idealism and just say things like, “It was really bad that Biden ran for re-election and denied Democrats the opportunity to have an open primary.” I think the vast majority of people agree with that. And the minority of people who don’t agree with it are super-partisan Democrats who really want to beat Republicans and win elections.

When you look at specific critiques about how Biden couldn’t make choices and set priorities, or was too reluctant to say “no” to liberal interest groups, or wasn’t enough of a fighter or had bad vibes, they all trace back to a president who couldn’t put in a full-time schedule or be forceful.

As long as Biden was in office, it made sense for Republicans to focus on his infirmities and for Democrats to be defensive. But at the end of the day, it was good for Republicans that Biden was so old and doubly good for Republicans that Biden chose a relatively weak politician as his VP. The people who got screwed by this decision-making were you and me, and thousands of down ballot elected officials who were harmed by his unpopularity, and tens of millions of people whose SNAP and Medicaid are now imperiled by the GOP trifecta.

I’m angry about this!

I have mixed feelings expressing that anger, because I know a lot of people who worked in the Biden administration, and the vast majority of them are wonderful people who are justifiably proud of their service and don’t love to hear people complaining about the administration they served in.

But the party as a whole really did get screwed by selfish decisions made at the top. And politicians who have the courage and nerve to say that clearly are going to take a lot of shit in the short-term, but I think they’ll win respect and, ultimately, the confidence of the American people. Right now, the whole party has a kind of Biden stink. And I think everyone knows that, but they’re just kind of hoping the stink will leave the room. But someone has to open the windows and mop the floors and make something actually happen.