WASHINGTON (AP) — In 2022, a lively President Joe Biden sat in the Oval Office behind the iconic “Resolute” desk and described the challenge of leading a psychologically traumatized nation.
The US had been through a life-changing pandemic, a staggering rise in inflation, and now a global conflict with Russia invading Ukraine. And, in his view, Donald Trump was a persistent threat to democracy.
How could Biden heal this collective trauma?
“Be confident,” he said emphatically in an interview with The Associated Press. “Be confident. Because I am confident.”
But over the next two years, the trust that Biden wanted to convey steadily dwindled. When the 81-year-old Democratic president showed his age in a disastrous debate against Trump in June, he lost the benefit of the doubt and withdrew his candidacy as his party’s nominee on Sunday.
Following the debate, there was a sudden split among Democrats, united in their determination to prevent another Trump term, and Republicans, reeling from the chaos in Congress and the former president’s criminal conviction, banded together – improbably – in defiant unity.
Biden never figured out how to get the most powerful country in the world to believe in itself, let alone him.
He lost the trust of his supporters in the 90-minute debate with Trump, even though his pride initially led him to overcome the fears of lawmakers, party elders and donors who urged him to drop out. Then Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and, on cue, clenched his fist to show his strength. Biden, who was in Las Vegas during his campaign, tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday and retreated to his beach house in Delaware to recover.
The events of the past three weeks led to a departure that Biden never wanted, but that Democrats believed was crucial to maximize their chances of victory in November.
Biden seems to have completely misjudged the breadth of his support. While many Democrats had deep admiration for the president personally, they did not feel the same affection for him politically.
Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University, said Biden would be a relief for a nation exhausted by Trump and the pandemic.
“He was the perfect person for this moment,” Brinkley said, noting that in an era of polarization, Biden proved that bipartisan legislation was still possible. But voters viewed him as a placeholder, and he was never able to go beyond the text of his speeches to visually “embody the spirit of the nation with a sense of momentum, energy and optimism.”
As his re-election campaign entered its final days, Biden was still trying to prove himself and mobilize voters despite fears that Trump would doom American democracy.
There was never a “Joe Biden Democrat” like there was a “Reagan Republican.” He didn’t have movement-style idolizing supporters like Barack Obama or John F. Kennedy. He wasn’t a generational candidate like Bill Clinton. The only groundbreaking dimension of his election was the fact that he was the oldest person ever elected president.
Although he repeatedly considered moving into the Oval Office from his position as Senator from Delaware, voters repeatedly rejected him.
His first attempt at the White House ended in self-inflicted injuries from plagiarism in 1988, and he failed to advance to the first round of nominations. When he ran in 2008, he dropped out after the Iowa caucuses, where he received less than 1% of the vote. In 2016, Obama advised him not to run, even though he was Obama’s vice president. A Biden victory in 2020 seemed unlikely when he finished fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire before making a dramatic surge in South Carolina.
He won the nomination and then did something occasional in American politics: He defeated incumbent President Trump, who had been a catalyst for a simmering sense of polarization. Then he had to survive the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters who falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged.
David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama, said history will be kinder to Biden than voters, not only because of his legislative accomplishments but also because he defeated Trump.
“His legacy is significant beyond all of his many accomplishments,” Axelrod said. “He will always be the man who stood up and defeated a president who put himself above our democracy.”
“That alone is a historic achievement.”
But Biden could not overcome his age. And when he showed weakness in his steps and his speech, there were no supporters to stand by him. It was a humiliating end to a 50-year career in politics, but hardly reflected the full legacy of his time in the White House.
His accomplishments include legislation that will assist rebuild the country and that will likely have an impact over the next twelve years, even if voters do not immediately appreciate it.
“It takes time for it to happen,” Biden told BET News on Tuesday. But in the same interview, he also made it clear why the calls for his resignation had become so raucous: He could not remember the name of his Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and referred to him as “the bogeyman.”
These recent incidents stand in stark contrast to a list of accomplishments that most presidents would envy and employ as a solid foundation for their re-election. The optimism about the country’s future that Biden said drove him may come true after he leaves the national stage.
Harvard University economist Jason Furman, a key adviser during the Obama administration, said Biden “took office when the economy was in the throes of the COVID pandemic and helped oversee the transition out of that crisis to an economy that is now growing faster than all comparable economies while experiencing lower inflation than them.”
Furman pointed out that Biden increased spending on longer-term investments in the economy but kept Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Chairman, giving the Fed the ability to raise interest rates and reduce inflation without harming the labor market.
In March 2021, Biden provided $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief and created a series of recent programs that temporarily cut child poverty in half, stopped evictions, and helped create 15.7 million jobs. But shortly thereafter, inflation began to rise. Biden’s approval ratings, as measured by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, fell from 61% to 39% in June.
He then issued a series of executive actions to unbundle global supply chains and a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure package that not only replaced aging infrastructure but also improved internet access and prepared communities for climate change.
However, the infrastructure bill also revealed how challenging it was for Biden to raise public awareness of his accomplishments, as many of the projects will take decades to complete.
In 2022, Biden and his Democratic colleagues followed up with two measures that gave recent momentum to the future of U.S. manufacturing.
The CHIPS and Science Act provided $52 billion to build factories and facilities to manufacture computer chips, ensuring that the United States has access to the cutting-edge semiconductors it needs for economic growth and national security. There was also the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided incentives to move away from fossil fuels and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Biden also sought to compete more aggressively with China and rebuild alliances such as NATO. He completed the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers, an effort that was widely criticized. The president was also criticized for his handling of the southern border with Mexico, as illegal border crossings led to concerns about his handling of immigration.
In addition, he was involved in a number of global conflicts that exposed further domestic political divisions.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 exacerbated inflation as Trump and other Republicans questioned the value of military aid to Ukrainians. Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack in Israel sparked a war that exposed divisions within the Democratic Party over whether the United States should continue to support Israel as months of counterattacks left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead.
Biden privately lectured his aides that when listening, they should not focus on differences but look for agreement. He held on to the ideal of bipartisanship even as Democrats broke with the Republican Party.
And yet, just days before dropping out of the race, Biden felt his work was unfinished and his legacy incomplete.
“I have to finish this job,” he told reporters after a NATO summit.
But given the height of the stakes and the fear of Biden’s defeat, Democrats are betting that the tasks he has begun could best be completed by a younger generation.
“History will be kinder to him because the voters were on board in the end,” Axelrod said.
