Adam Smith: Historian

This piece appeared in The Sunday Times on 14 December 2024

This is not the way it was supposed to end. Joe Biden has faced more than his fair share of setbacks. “When you get knocked down, get up!” his father, Joseph Biden Sr, would say. And Biden will get up this time, too, after a fashion, handing power gracefully to a man he despised as the worst of all character types: a bully. But at this stage in his life there will surely be no further plot twist. This is the final chapter, and it is a deeply melancholy one.

On a personal level Joe Biden’s inauguration nearly four years ago was an incredible triumph against the odds for a consistently underrated politician whose first run for the White House had been more than 30 years earlier. And on a national level his supporters saw it as a moment of redemption. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s unprecedented refusal to concede the 2020 election and the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — for which Trump, in the words of the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, was “practically and morally responsible” — Biden seemed like the balm America needed. He was the anti-Trump who would replace sky-high self-regard with a bottomless well of empathy. US history, Joe Biden said on that cold, clear day, is “a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal, and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear and demonisation have long torn us apart”. But at that point the good America had defeated the ugly.

It is an amazing fact that Biden was born closer in time to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln (77 years) than to his own presidency 78 years later. And through his long life the United States has always been for Biden, as it was for Lincoln, the last, best hope of Earth. He is perhaps the last true believer in the Lincolnian idea of American exceptionalism — the faith (for it is an idea rooted not in evidence but in belief) that the US has a special mission in the world, to keep alive the ideal that all men are created equal. Biden has always been more likely to quote his mother, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, than Lincoln, but the essential point is the same. “My mother’s creed is the American creed: no one is better than you. You are everyone’s equal, and everyone is equal to you.”

Of course, Biden is all too aware that America, like his own life, is suffused by tragedy. Aware, too, that the American project is shot through with hypocrisy — a trait from which he is hardly immune, given his decision to issue a presidential pardon to his son Hunter.

Most inaugural addresses — Trump’s dark meditation of 2017 being a notable exception — contain conscious echoes of previous speeches, weaving an American rhetorical tradition. And in 2021 this was especially true. On the eve of the Civil War Lincoln insisted that “though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection”. Biden similarly hoped the time had come when “we can see each other not as adversaries but as neighbours” and, like Lincoln, invoked the “better angels” of our nature. In 1933, amid the catastrophe of mass unemployment, Franklin D Roosevelt spoke of the need to restore the temple of the American republic to its ancient truths and warned that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. In 2021 Biden called for “an American story of hope, not fear”.

As Biden told the tale, he had been compelled to run one last time by President Trump’s inability to distinguish right from wrong, even when one side — as in the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 — was spewing racist hate. Surely, Biden repeated as a mantra, “this is not who we are. America is better than this.” Four years ago, albeit by the capricious tiny margins of a closely contested election, the electorate appeared to agree.

We now know that was not the end of the story, but Biden almost seemed to anticipate the reversal. He spoke of his 2021 inauguration as “the triumph” of “the cause of democracy”, but it was not a triumphal speech. “The battle is perennial,” he warned. “Victory is never assured.” And, sure enough, the twice-impeached, multiply indicted Trump burst out of the political tomb in which he seemed to have interred himself. Like an over-the-hill heavyweight, Biden could not resist one last fight against his old enemy. And then his own team pulled him away, knowing he no longer had the strength to win.

Biden leaves the White House with a mixed record. But in time no one will remember the details of his policy failures and successes. The presidents who matter most are the transformers who change the country’s direction, or create enduring institutions. In some cases historians even name “ages” after them. That will not be the fate of poor old Joe Biden, the only president other than Benjamin Harrison (and who remembers him?) to be succeeded by the man he beat. In the largest sense, it is almost as if the “triumph” of 2020 never happened.

The Biden story began in the coalmining city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Joey — as his family called him — was born on November 20, 1942. He was the eldest of four siblings and, from birth to the present day, has been surrounded by his big, self-confident and self-consciously “Irish” family. His father, Joseph, was a handsome salesman who had made, then lost, a lot of money. Throughout most of Biden’s childhood the family were strapped for cash. When he was a teenager the family moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where his father had found work, but “Joey” kept in touch with his old Scranton pals and the Pennsylvania working-class origin story has always been core to the Biden political brand.

Joey was not academically brilliant, but he was sporty, tall, good-looking and cheerful, with a dazzling smile. He overcame a childhood stutter and, by his late teens, was known for his blarney. His head could be turned not only by a pretty girl but also — his father’s influence, no doubt — by a fancy car or an opulent mansion.

Biden’s upbringing provided him with a store of politically useful wisdom. One came from an incident in the early 1960s when Biden’s father was managing a car dealership in Wilmington. One year the company had held a staff Christmas party at which the owner threw a bucket of silver dollars on the floor and watched with amusement as his employees scrambled to pick them up. Biden Sr turned to his boss and said, “I quit, dammit!” and walked out. “My dad saw that as an abuse of power,” Biden recalled in his memoir. “I realised that it’s the thing that has always pushed my button.”

A self-serving anecdote from a politician, perhaps, but a telling way of framing himself and an insight that makes sense of much of Biden’s career. His sister, Valerie, with whom the president has an extraordinarily close relationship, recalled their parents instilling in them a basic principle of decency and justice. “If you went and attacked someone where they were most vulnerable just because it felt good, that would have been the biggest disappointment to my parents,” she once told a Biden biographer. “All [my parents] had to say was, ‘Oh, I’m so disappointed,’ and that was like a knife through you.”

The formative moment in Biden’s life was December 18, 1972. On the morning of that day, the 30-year-old Biden was on top of the world. He was a father of three with a beautiful wife, Neilia, whom he had met on holiday in the Bahamas nine years earlier. He had just been elected as one of the youngest ever US senators, defeating an incumbent Republican. In the small world of Delaware politics Biden had risen fast. That day he was in Washington, establishing his new Senate office with Valerie — now his campaign manager. Back home in Delaware, Neilia took their children to buy a Christmas tree. She pulled out of a junction in their family station wagon, straight into the path of a semi-trailer truck. Neilia and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in the crash. Their two sons, Beau and Hunter, then aged three and two, were injured but made full recoveries.

In the weeks that followed the family put its arms around Joe and the boys. “I have no memory of ever being physically alone,” Biden later wrote about that time. His faith was tested but also strengthened: in the aftermath of the tragedy he even sought the advice of a Catholic bishop about getting a dispensation to become a priest. But Capitol Hill was his calling and Joe Biden set about balancing a political career with being a father to his boys, commuting home to Wilmington from Washington on an Amtrak train.

In 1975 Biden’s brother Frank set him up on a date with Jill Jacobs, a teacher eight years his junior. They married in 1977, and Beau and Hunter were joined by a daughter, Ashley. In 1987, with a national profile as chair of the Senate judiciary committee during the time that it was scrutinising controversial Supreme Court nominations from President Reagan, Biden announced his first run for the presidency. Back then his argument was that it was the turn of a new generation of leaders. His loquaciousness was the stuff of legend. His staff passed reporters a note before campaign events saying “Senator may stray from prepared remarks”, and his campaign was brought to an ignominious end when, in one extemporised peroration, he was accused of plagiarising the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock.

It would never have happened without Peter Mandelson, who, as the Labour Party’s director of communications, commissioned the Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson to make a ten-minute party election broadcast dubbed Kinnock: The Movie. That film, passed around US political professionals, featured a clip from a party conference speech in Llandudno, in which Kinnock had asked why he was the first in his family “in a thousand generations” to go to university. Was it because they were weak? Those people who worked eight hours underground, then came up and played football? It was not! It was because they “had no platform on which they could stand”. It was a line, and a sentiment, that resonated with Biden, so much so that he made it his own, transposing Bidens for Kinnocks and the coalmines of Scranton for those of South Wales. It was far from the last time that Biden, who can be an effective orator when on form, created trouble for himself. His reputation for being gaffe-prone has dogged him to the end, as he created unnecessary trouble for Kamala Harris’s campaign in October by appearing to refer to all Trump supporters as “garbage”.

Twenty years later, Biden ran for the presidency once more, and again had to pull out at an early stage. But this time, with more than 30 years in the Senate and his thinning hair having turned white, he was the perfect man to balance Barack Obama’s inexperience and racial otherness on the Democratic ticket. Boasting that, as vice-president, he insisted on always being the “last man in the room” when the president made a decision, Biden formed an effective political partnership with Obama. At a time when internet memes were becoming a thing, the “bromance” between the unlikely couple burnished Biden’s image. And in 2015, when his son Beau died of cancer aged 46, his very public stoicism bestowed on him a strength that overshadowed everything else, rekindling the early public image of Biden as a politician whose touchstone was personal tragedy.

When he took office in 2021, Biden hung a portrait of Franklin D Roosevelt above the fireplace in the Oval Office. It is hard not to resist the interpretation that in doing so Biden was revealing the president he really wanted to be: not John Kennedy (Irish but too flashy), not Lyndon Johnson (too earthy) and certainly not Jimmy Carter (too naive), but the political grandfather of those Democratic presidents, the man who had sat in that office at the time when Joey was born.

Roosevelt had presided over the New Deal, a huge expansion of the federal government, the creation of a welfare state, the build-up of US arms and its entry on to the world stage, leading the fight against the Axis powers. In those decades, when the US was the uncontested “leader of the free world”, politicians of all parties spoke of Americans’ solemn responsibility to assure the survival and the success of liberty, to be a shining city on a hill giving hope to the world. It was the time when people spoke glibly of “the American century”. Biden embraced the optimism of that vision and the sense of responsibility that came with it. At home the Democratic Party dominated mid-century US politics because it was willing to take on vested interests and stand up for ordinary working people.

Born into the world FDR made, Biden has fought all his life to defend it. As he sees it, it is a world in which international institutions shaped by the US try to sustain global stability, and its aim is an America in which the rich guys don’t get to push the ordinary Joes around. Biden’s support for labour unions, an attachment that is as emotional as it is political, is probably the strongest line of continuity through his career.

In other ways, as the political scientist Robert C Lieberman has pointed out, over five decades Biden has somehow managed to position himself wherever the centre of the Democratic Party happens to have been: in the 1970s, while strongly supporting the overall aims of the civil rights movement, he was vocally opposed to the bussing of children to desegregate public schools. In the 1980s he was never really a Clintonian “New Democrat”, yet neither was he associated with the party’s left. This chameleon ability makes his opponents suspicious, but it reflects a pragmatism that was key to his selection as Obama’s running mate and that has enabled him, for all his failing powers, to mostly hold together the cacophonous band of the Democratic Party throughout his time in the White House.

This instinct for party management is also in the tradition of FDR, for whom, like Biden, ideology was less important than doing deals and getting stuff done. It is with good reason the journalist Franklin Foer titled his biography of Biden The Last Politician — the last man standing who trusts in institutions and genuinely believes in the back-and-forth trades of a Washington world before the rise of the venomous partisan polarisation of the modern era. “Biden set out to prove the eternal relevance of politics,” Foer writes. “He wanted to show that dealmaking, coalition building and persuading the other side were still effective ways to get things done.”

Up to a point it worked. Judged by the metric of getting legislation through Congress, Biden’s presidency has been a success: far more so than most commentators initially predicted. At the president’s urging, Congress authorised more than a trillion dollars of spending on highways, subsidising the green economy and incentivising semiconductor manufacturing among other things. All over the US construction companies have full order books thanks to the Biden administration’s spending. FDR had done the same but, unlike Roosevelt, Biden hasn’t been thanked for it by voters. Not only was the government investment invisible, it also helped fuel inflation, which reached a four-decade high of 9 per cent in June 2022. Stickers were placed next to the price listing at petrol stations with a picture of the president saying “I did that”.

After decades chairing hearings in the Senate and eight years rubbing shoulders with world leaders as vice-president, Biden’s strong suit was supposed to be foreign affairs. He filled the administration with the supposed best and brightest strategic minds of their generation, from the secretary of state Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan down. But just as John F Kennedy’s bright generation led the US into the quagmire of Vietnam, the sad irony of the past four years has been that an internationalist president has only underlined US weakness rather than strength.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 was bungled, infuriating allies and abandoning the country to the Taliban. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine at first seemed to prompt a renaissance of a western alliance under American leadership of a kind not seen since the 1990s. Nato even gained members. Yet despite the billions of US taxpayers’ dollars that have been poured in, the Ukraine war is so far proving to be a strategic win for Putin, who has strengthened ties with China and India and is wielding ever greater influence in the rest of Europe. Nowhere and no one feels safer now than when Biden took office. The conflict in Gaza was a uniquely lose-lose crisis for a Democratic president, given the party’s historically strong support from Jewish Americans and the strength of pro-Palestinian feeling on the left. Biden has ended up satisfying no one — and his inability to restrain Israel has contributed to a perception of weakness.

Even more damaging was the administration’s failure to deal — and to be seen to deal — with the influx of undocumented immigrants at the southern border. Border crossings rose sharply in June 2023, when Biden lifted emergency pandemic-era measures — before introducing stricter controls this June. In 2023 3.2 million “encounters” were recorded by US Customs and Border Protection, compared to 1.4 million in 2019, the highest number during Trump’s presidency.

Even without Biden’s unforced errors, the lack of economic confidence made its mark. Inflation fell to under 3 per cent this year, but too late to save the Democrats. With the cost of a grocery shop and filling the tank still high, the 2024 election was always going to be a likely defeat for the incumbents.

For the Democrats in this situation to renominate a visibly ageing man who would be 86 at the end of his second term was political malpractice of the highest order. It is true that he had never unequivocally pledged to be a one-term president but he had certainly implied it. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” he told an interviewer in March 2020, having clinched the nomination.

His first big decision as presumptive Democratic nominee in 2020 had been to select Kamala Harris as his running mate, but he never behaved as if he truly trusted her to take over from him. Harris’s perceived weakness together with slightly better than expected results for Democrats in the midterm elections of 2022 were overinterpreted by Biden’s team as a rejection of Trumpism. In early 2023 he took the catastrophic decision to run again. In the president’s tight circle of advisers, Jill, with a bond forged in frontline politics over 47 years of marriage, was the most important voice, along with his sister Valerie. Without their fierce support Biden would never have taken that leap.

Yet it was a tragic failure of collective leadership that no one of importance in the Democratic Party had the bravery to oppose this hubristic decision, leaving Biden to win the primaries with no proper opposition. A White House omerta surrounded the president’s visibly declining health, the details only revealed after dogged investigation by The Wall Street Journal.

And then came the presidential debate with Donald Trump on Thursday June 27, 2024, one of the most consequential events in modern American politics. For an excruciating 90 minutes the president rambled in a voice close to a whisper, his eyes staring into the middle distance, failing again and again to challenge Trump. But even this humiliation did not compel him to step aside. Jill leapt to his defence, telling her husband in front of the cameras what every viewer knew to be untrue: “You answered every question, you knew all the facts.” The actor George Clooney made an early break from behind the curtain, calling for Biden to step down in The New York Times. The liberal “luvvies” had turned. Obama soon pulled his confidence from his former wingman.

In the face of internal polls showing him losing all the swing states, Biden clung on for almost a month. It was a self-defeating stubbornness born of lifelong experience — “Get up, Joe!” — and it took the steel of Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker and at 84 even older than him, to bring him down. By then it was too late for the party to select a candidate through the public fire of a primary campaign. Vice-President Harris and Governor Tim Walz probably ran about as good a campaign as they could have done, but could not climb out of the electoral hole they had inherited. Unsurprisingly Democratic insiders from Pelosi down have turned on Biden since the November 5 poll. In The Atlantic, Biden’s biographer Franklin Foer condemned him for paving “the way for the return of Donald Trump. That is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.”

The 2016 election had been winnable for the Democrats and Hillary Clinton lost by a whisker. In contrast, 2024 was an election where the Democrats faced a huge uphill struggle, yet they came less than two percentage points behind the winner. But that doesn’t exculpate Biden from the consequences of his hubris. If he had made clear two years ago that he was not going to run, it is possible that Trump may still have won. But it is also possible that, through an open primary, a reinvigorated Democratic Party might have found a candidate who could have distanced themselves from an unpopular incumbent sufficiently to have found a way of getting over the line. Maybe, in such an alternative universe, facing a new and energetic Democrat, wavering Republicans would have resisted the atavistic appeal of Trump. Maybe. The what ifs will haunt the Biden years for ever.

In fairness, probably not all of the Biden administration’s work will be obliterated. In its final weeks it is rushing to spend the remainder earmarked to incentivise the US chips industry and other infrastructure projects. Most Republicans opposed these measures when they were passed, but red states have benefited from them. For similar reasons of electoral self-interest, the new Republican congressional majority may also find it expedient to allow Biden’s health insurance subsidies to remain. On tariffs and trade there may well be more continuity than Trump’s bluster would suggest. Time will tell.

But in fundamental ways the new administration will define itself in opposition to everything Biden has believed in all his life. Trump doesn’t want America to “lead the world” as Biden does; he sees international relations as entirely transactional. Meanwhile, the federal government edifice that Roosevelt built — the national state that tried to enact a fair society — will be under renewed assault, as civil servants are fired or intimidated and federal protections for everything from airline refunds to water quality eroded. Foer is surely right that Biden’s presidency will be remembered, at best, as a curious interregnum between the Trump terms. He wanted to be the man who restored normality after the aberration of Trump’s first term. Instead Biden will be a character in Trump’s story.

We still don’t know for sure exactly what that story will be. If Biden meant what he said in his inaugural address and in his increasingly stark warnings about Trump ever since, it is a story that will be told with a tear in the eye. After all, Biden has told us that Trump is a literal threat to American democracy. On the third anniversary of the violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, President Biden went to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington’s Continental Army shivered and nearly starved itself out of existence in the harsh winter of 1777-8. Every American should visit Valley Forge, Biden said, because it “tells the story of the pain and the suffering and the true patriotism it took to make America”. Yet, in 2024, the question was whether democracy is “still America’s sacred cause”. Trump was willing to “sacrifice” American democracy.

The darkest view is that the president that Biden most resembles will not be FDR but James Buchanan, the Democrat elected in 1857, whose poor judgment inflamed the sectional crisis that led to civil war in 1861 — a well-meaning, long-serving public servant from Pennsylvania who preached the language of unity yet dithered in the face of surging populism and plunged the nation into cataclysm.

If that seems overwrought, it is Biden who has done as much as anyone to suggest such a cataclysmic outcome by dramatising Trump’s threat. The final irony may be Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter, who had been facing the prospect of prison for his conviction for offences relating to gun possession and tax fraud, on the grounds that the prosecution was politically motivated. Understandable as this decision is on a human level, it subverts Biden’s claim that Trump was unique in his willingness to abuse the latent autocratic power of the president.

The New York Times, of all places, published a scathing editorial on December 4, its sentiment hard to disagree with: “This was a significant misstep that could leave lasting damage. It will not only tarnish Mr Biden’s own record as a defender of democratic norms, it will also be greedily embraced as justification for Donald Trump’s further abuses of pardon power and broader attacks on the integrity of the justice system Mr Biden has now ‘normalised’ the abnormal.” At a stroke of his pen Biden has gifted Trump an everlasting alibi.

The light of Biden’s world is dying. It was a world in which the United States, however hypocritically and imperfectly, had the power and confidence to serve as an example of a pluralist liberal society bound by the rule of law, and in which the federal government felt its responsibility to the folks of places like Scranton. Biden was born precisely when that world was coming into being. He leaves office as it finally dies.