Joe Biden exits stage left

Today, Joe Biden, the 46th president of the United States, will complete his term in office and depart for Delaware. His successor (and immediate predecessor) in office, Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, will take the oath of office and become the 47th president. Within hours, Trump will head to the White House, and Biden will leave public life. In just about every way imaginable, this is not what Biden had planned. In the closing months of his single term in office, even his own party wanted him gone. He had become an embarrassment and a huge political liability. In 2020, he was claimed to have saved his party from disaster. By 2024, Biden was the disaster.

Joe Biden entered American public life as a boy wonder, elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate at age 30. The political world took quick notice. But Biden’s entry into national life came with unspeakable tragedy as his wife, Nellie, and daughter Naomi were killed in a horrible auto accident just days before Biden’s term was to begin. Biden did begin that term in office and would continue a senate career until 2009 when he became vice president of the United States under President Barack Obama.

Biden established himself as a “centrist” Democrat and began working his way into Senate leadership. He opposed school busing and cultivated a blue-collar persona as “Joe from Scranton.” He told endless stories and developed his own convoluted speaking style. He set his sights on higher office and worked his way forward. As a senator, trained as a lawyer, he wanted to establish his claim to leadership on the national level and spent years as chairman or ranking member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Biden’s public role put him at the center of huge controversies with the confirmation hearings for two nominees to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork in 1988 and Clarence Thomas in 1991. Biden’s shallowness showed.

His ambition led him to enter the race for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. He, his second wife, Jill, and their children were presented as a new face for the Democratic Party and the nation, but Biden’s campaign stumbled on messaging and then crashed into a scandal over his plagiarism of a British politician’s populist speech. It would later be revealed that Biden had an issue with plagiarism in law school. Biden went back to work in the Senate until he decided to make a second run for the nomination in 2008. He never had a chance to win, but Barack Obama did choose him as his running mate. He hoped to be Obama’s successor, but Obama tapped Hillary Clinton instead. Biden never forgot the slight.

When Biden left office at the end of the Obama administration, most thought his career in national politics was over. But Biden planned a comeback and entered the 2020 primary season old but ready for an unexpected opportunity. That opening came when faced with an unexpectedly strong run by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Democrats panicked and appointed Biden to carry their flag. But Biden would be the oldest man elected president—hardly a sign of the future. Biden spoke of himself as a “transitional” figure. The party heard that as a promise to run for only one term and then get out of the way. Clearly, that wasn’t Biden’s plan. Instead, he veered far to the left of his senate career.

Constantly claiming a Catholic identity, Biden was pro-abortion for decades, emulating the moral evasiveness of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and Sen. Ted Kennedy. But he had long supported the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting the use of taxpayer monies for abortion. He reversed himself on the Hyde issue and turned himself into the most pro-abortion president in history. His shape-shifting on major moral issues was already well-established. In the Senate, he had opposed same-sex marriage, even voting to define marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman. As vice president, Biden famously declared his newly discovered support for same-sex marriage.

Biden won the White House in 2020, declaring that the age of Donald Trump was over. He set out to be the most progressive and activist president since Franklin Roosevelt, winning legislative approval for massive spending bills, partly under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic. His administration applied draconian policies during the pandemic, and the Biden administration charged into several political disasters. He presided over a colossal humiliation as he withdrew American armed forces from Afghanistan in 2021. And, even as he offered support for both Ukraine and Israel following invasions and attacks, his actions often failed to match his words. He reversed Trump administration policies on immigration and predictably lost control of the nation’s southern border, leading to millions of illegal crossings. Even so, Biden announced he would run for a second term.

As it turned out, the biggest problem Biden faced was the deterioration of his mental capacities. He had a reputation for fumbling his message, but a severe loss of cognitive ability became impossible to deny, especially after a disastrous debate with Donald Trump on June 27, 2024. He was forced to withdraw from the race, anointing Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee. Harris, as we now know, was trounced by Trump. Thus, in the opinion of his own party, Biden ended his presidency in decline and led his party to lose the White House and control of both houses of Congress.

He wasn’t done. He went on to issue more pardons and commutations than any previous president. He then went on to do what he had promised he would not do—he pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for serious crimes his son had clearly committed. It is likely that future investigations (sure to come) will look deeply into patterns of corruption and family complicity going back especially to Biden’s years as vice president. His pardon of his son is a scandal in itself, but it was true to Biden’s moral character. He has always looked out for his own.

Furthermore, he has always been a hollow man, driven by titanic ambition. He commuted federal death sentences but lacked the courage to drive legislation ending the federal death penalty. In the closing days of his collapsing administration, Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment was the law of the land, even though it failed to achieve ratification decades ago. If Biden really wanted to press that argument, he could have done so early in his term and then defended it in court. He didn’t. In the end, it was all political theater.

And, in the end, his own party has predictably ditched him. Day by day, more will be known about who was complicit and responsible for hiding (and falsely denying) Biden’s loss of mental abilities. More will be known about the Biden family’s corruption. Officials will admit they knew what was going on and try to justify their silence.

Maybe the most telling sign of Biden’s character came in his last major interview with the print media, conducted by Susan Page of USA Today. Biden insisted that he could have beaten Trump if he had continued in the race. That was a direct insult to his vice president, Kamala Harris. Bizarrely, Biden then told Page, “And then when Trump was running again for reelection, I really thought I had the best chance of beating him. But I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old. And so I did talk about passing the baton. But I don’t know. Who the hell knows? So far, so good. But who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?”

So, Biden declared he thought he had the best chance of beating Donald Trump in the 2024 election, even as he was 82 and his cognitive decline was obvious. But he went on to say that he might not have been able to do the job at age 85 or 86—when he would have been in his second term. Did he not listen to himself?

Joe Biden leaves the national stage today at age 82. He has always been extremely concerned about his historical legacy. He has good reason to be concerned.