Reckoning with the Biden Lie

What did it mean to play pretend for so long?

The vast number of journalists, pundits, and regular Democrats who pretended, for nearly four years, that Joe Biden was capable of running for president and serving until he was eighty-six would like to forget any of this ever happened. They will be like the many prestige reporters, commentators, and politicians who boosted the Iraq War and paid no professional penalty. Pick up a famed news magazine or the New York Times, and find more than enough men and women who said, back in 2003, it was our moral duty to invade that country and get some killing done. Biden is days away from vanishing into the ether, and no one is pretending anymore he would be ready to lead this nation in 2025. What other illusions, one wonders, must still be shattered?

This is a question I’ve begun to ponder as I pick through the wreckage of this political and epistemological failure. Over the summer, I considered what was worse: ignorance or deception. Was it more damning that the liberal class, broadly, believed Biden was fine until the June debate against Donald Trump? Or that many knew he would only limp through but had to pretend otherwise to placate Biden’s inner ring? Or conform to a kind of groupthink? This is all the past now, but it’s the recent past, and it’s very much a media story. Since I operate within the media, I am going to keep caring about it. Other working journalists, editors, and columnists should too. It is, if anything, among the great reporting failures of the twenty-first century. What is regarded as consensus now (“It is hard to imagine that he seriously thought he could do the world’s most stressful job for another four years,” Peter Baker of the Times wrote recently) would have been called, by many on the left, a conspiracy theory just seven months ago. What does this say about politics? The state of the discourse? Our sanity?

None of this should be misconstrued as a harsh judgment of Biden’s policy legacy. On the domestic front, he was among the more successful presidents of the last sixty years. (Conservative readers who were salivating at my prior paragraphs will no doubt be fuming now.) The green energy and industrial investments will pay dividends over the next decade as America begins, finally, to manufacture its own semi-conductor chips and reduce its dependence on China and Taiwan. The Biden administration was the first in many decades to meaningfully challenge corporate power—blocking mergers, demanding new rules, holding accountable both Google and Amazon—and it’s this anti-trust legacy that is likely to be safeguarded, to some degree, by Donald Trump, who has quietly made appointments that satisfy the anti-trust left. Delivering on a long-running Democratic campaign promise, Biden granted Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices. Even the cash the Biden administration pumped into the economy in 2021, long derided for nudging inflation higher, was responsible for saving the budgets of local governments that were facing a dire fiscal crunch. There were no mass layoffs of teachers, sanitation workers, or police. The devastating layoffs and hiring freezes that hit state and municipal governments in the late 2000s and early 2010s were absent this time around because the Biden administration recognized it was better to pump too much stimulus into the economy than too little. The Obama administration didn’t understand this. If Barack Obama succeeded in passing a singular, memorable policy that will long outlast him—the Affordable Care Act—Biden can claim even more victories that could prove, as time passes, quite significant.

Biden, in part, was done in by forces beyond his control. Inflation is a global phenomenon. The housing crisis was more than a decade in the making, sending home prices and rents soaring. The Biden administration, certainly, didn’t do enough to combat it—there were no grand affordable housing or home-building policies coming out of the government when Democrats controlled Congress—and Trump is unlikely to take any significant action. Immigration damaged Biden greatly, and management of the border falls under his purview. From 2022 onward, Republicans controlled the immigration narrative because Biden was so incapable of making any contrary arguments. Mass migration is deeply unpopular, but it’s also mass migration that reinvigorated America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many American cities today, particularly in the post-industrial north, have suffered large population losses. These migrants can revive cities like St. Louis, Buffalo, and Detroit, opening businesses and working towards citizenship. In time, they could stabilize and grow these municipalities’ tax bases. Few Democrats, Biden included, were able to make a case for immigration or at least lay out a vision for a tough border—there’s no virtue in an illegal crossing—and a humane revision of our laws to make it more straightforward to become a legal citizen. America will wither if it cuts off immigration completely.

Unlike Jimmy Carter, Biden will not have a lengthy post-presidency to burnish his legacy. If Biden was a much more successful president than Carter—and, through his policymaking, helped to chip away at the neoliberalism that Carter championed in the 1970s—he will not have decades to reinvent himself as a humanitarian or perform acts of service that could prompt Americans to rethink his four years. Professional historians, I do believe, will judge Biden well, but the popular imagination is another matter. He will be remembered as the elderly president who stumbled over words, forgot basic facts, and didn’t quit until it was too late. He will be sandwiched between two Trump presidencies, and the sheer force of Trump’s charisma and mania will, for the time being, overwhelm these four years, a kind of interregnum. Future scholars will also ask how media and political elites could defend, for so long, Biden’s diminishment. Who were they deferring to? Why? When I wrote, in 2022, Biden shouldn’t run for president again, I had no special insights. I was not a White House reporter and I was not traveling with Biden. I was not working in Democratic politics. I simply paid attention to how he was speaking and behaving in public. None of it seemed normal. What was abnormal, too, was the degree to which Biden’s aides plainly shielded him from interviews. They were afraid of press conferences and one-on-one sit downs. And yet they believed, somehow, a country could be run this way through 2028. This is only slightly less delusional than DOGE’s commitment to cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget.

Some of the defense of Biden, in retrospect, was grounded in fears of Kamala Harris running against Trump. Many Democrats privately believed she was not a strong general election candidate. And they were right. Biden wouldn’t have been much better; Biden or Harris would have lost to Trump. Biden was too old and Harris was a political cipher and a dismal communicator. Her presidential campaign was among the very worst I have witnessed, perhaps only topped by her attempt to run in 2019. A different Democrat, though, could have eked it out. Trump won the popular vote, but not by very much. He underperformed his fundamentals—2024 was an anti-incumbent year, and parties holding power were thrashed across the world—and there were plenty of Democrats, down the ballot, who won tough races. Harris did not prove a woman can’t be elected president of the United States. On the same night Harris was defeated, Jacky Rosen, Elissa Slotkin, and Tammy Baldwin all triumphed in states Trump won. They will be the reason Democrats have a chance to retake the Senate in the next decade.

This is a strange moment. The anti-Trump resistance is muted and Trump himself, three elections in, is playing with his strongest hand yet. Still, this is not the stuff fascism is made of. Republicans barely control the House. They are far from a filibuster-proof Senate majority. Trump might have more loyalists in his government now and more determination, theoretically, to enact the policies of his choosing, but his attention can never hold for very long. He is restless, bilious, and very stubborn. He can barely organize himself, let alone others. What he ends up doing next, no one truly knows—himself included. Democrats, at least, will have time to let their new stars emerge. There are no more Clintons, no more Obamas, and no more Bidens looming over them. The future, as it should be, is wide open.