History Will Not Be Kind to Joe Biden
If, that is, it remembers him at all.
Welcome back to Doomsday Scenario, my newsletter on history, politics, and geopolitics, examining whether things are really as bad as they seem. I hope you won’t find that I abuse your attention. If you’re reading this for the first time, I hope you will subscribe here too:
Let’s start today with Millard Fillmore, who as the 13th president of the United States, the last of his kind, the final Whig to hold the presidency. He is remembered today as little more than a punchline—shorthand for a little-remembered and inconsequential presidency.
Assuming the office after the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850, Fillmore’s less-than-four-year term actually did see some foreign policy achievements—including the forced opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry—but was dominated at home by the rising struggle over slavery and Fillmore’s controversial enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, among other accommodations to the slave-owning states. It was, by all measures, a terrible time to lead the United States. In just the 23 years from 1837 to 1860, eight men churned through the presidency as the specter of civil war rose. Almost all of them today rank at the bottom of C-SPAN’s presidential rankings, including Fillmore’s successor, Franklin Pierce, and his successor, America’s generally-accepted worst president: James Buchanan.
In the wake of this month’s stunning Democratic electoral defeat, it appears Joe Biden may very well soon find himself a new entry to that bottom tier of American history—that is, *if* history remembers him at all.
Biden had appeared to be on track to be an enormously consequential president—legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and more had started generation-shaping investments in America’s future, overseas he had helped build NATO into the strongest it had ever been, and by seemingly any measurement that economists care about, he had delivered a roaring “Goldilocks” economy that was the envy of any other western country. Green energy had been turbocharged even as the United States produced more crude oil than any country, ever. Biden regulators had fought hard for American consumers, targeting “junk fees,” and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spent years hopscotching from one country-reshaping infrastructure-related ribbon-cutting to another. Domestically, Biden could have been one of the greats.
Biden’s foreign policy record will take some time to come into focus; he appointed a team filled with the brightest Democratic foreign policy minds of their generation, but the achievements of those Jake Sullivans and Antony Blinkens will likely be judged harshly. The Biden administration pursued a foreign policy that tried to thread too many needles too carefully — on Ukraine, China, or Israel — and never actually committing to one value set or outcome, leaving all sides frustrated. There will be some amazing books about this era’s “Best and Brightest” similarly squandered perhaps the last moments of America’s global power.
And yet almost none of that will be why Biden is someday remembered.
Tragedy has always defined the public pathos of Joe Biden’s political career. And he will be a uniquely tragic figure now in American presidential history, for reasons that will be seen as entirely within his own control.
Biden’s presidential legacy will be defined historically by creating the circumstances that allowed Donald Trump to regain the White House, allowing a man to return to the presidency despite during his time out of office having been found liable of sexual assault, convicted of 34 felonies, and charged in three more serious state and federal criminal cases, including one that involved an attempted coup.
Biden’s decision to not run for re-election earlier, despite his visible public decline, will surely rank as one of the most far-reaching in American politics, a turning point that altered the path of the country, perhaps for generations. (Here’s my prediction, from last week, about how that turns out.)
Biden, of course, does not own Trump’s return alone — plenty of weak-kneed Republicans, including most culpably Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, facilitated his return to party leadership after January 6th — and much of the national media, despite nearly a decade of covering the same mendacity, lies, and grifting, never figured out how to respond to Trump.
But Biden’s decision was the main BFD, as he would say. I believe that when the dust settles on this election, this presidential race will be remembered differently from Hillary Clinton’s race in 2016, which is seen by pundits as a winnable race that she lost. This election in 2024 will be remembered as an unwinnable race for Democrats where Kamala Harris nevertheless almost managed to pull off an upset. (If you missed Monday’s look at justhowclose this election actually ended up being, read it here!)
Yes, Harris paid the price for two decades of the Democratic Party’s failed approach to a media revolution, culture war, and a foreign-adversary and US oligarch-enabled information war, and, yes, she ran in a year where, according to the Financial Times, “every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened”:
But one problem for Harris outweighs everything else: Most of all, she ran for too short a period of time atop a party that never had a chance to have a clear and meaningful debate about its future leadership, in the shadow of one man who chose ego over country.
Nothing in this election looms larger now than Biden’s decision last year to stick it out in the White House as an unprecedented octogenarian.
The second-guessing about how and when and why Biden dropped out of the 2024 race will unfold for decades, and the what-ifs about what more Biden could have done to stop Trump — including the apparent near year-long delay by attorney general Merrick Garland to even start an investigation into Trump’s actions around January 6th — will really never be conclusively answered. But it now appears that Biden’s historical legacy may most closely resemble that of James Buchanan himself—a man who unsuccessfully navigated the changing national tides and set the country up for a coming political earthquake and national cataclysm.
While he carefully never actually gave a one-term pledge, Joe Biden originally seemed to promise he would be a transitional figure. Campaigning in March 2020, he said, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”
In office, though, he decided to run again, a decision that now appears to threaten nearly everything he accomplished both during his four years as president and even his eight as vice president. His legacy as a president seems almost certain to start being rewound and undone by the Trump administration immediately on January 20th. Depending on its ultimate success of Trump’s retribution-heavy policy agenda — the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to-do list outlines a remake of the federal government equaled perhaps only by FDR’s New Deal — it’s possible that within a few short years there are almost no signs Biden’s administration existed at all.
While the most grandiose of Trumpian promises and policy desires may simply be unworkable — few imagine that daunting cost, impact, and simple logistics of deporting every undocumented immigrant in the US or the reality of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget make such claims feasible — even the lower-hanging fruit, like gutting civil service protections, rolling back public health protections, weaponizing the Justice Department and federal agencies against political enemies, privatizing weather data, and abolishing the Department of Education, would reshape daily life in America in profound ways. Or even just the day-to-day wreckage and long-term damage that a Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., or Dr. Oz (!?!) could do to the vital institutions and mechanics of government.
Few men have ever entered the White House wanting to be a one-term president — there’s one notable exception, James K. Polk, a chief executive who accomplished what he promised and then went home, as promised, and today sits solidly in the middle of the pack historically — but the reality is that most presidents (and especially most of the one-termers) end up more footnotes than chapters in the history books: Just 21 of the nation’s 45 presidents have served more than a four-year term, either winning a full second-term or being elected in their own right after first assuming the office as vice president.
The path to having a lasting impact in a single term of just 1,461 days has always been a hard one and history rarely is kind to them. (Again, there’s a notable recent exception: While Jimmy Carter was originally seen as a weak president, history has looked at him more kindly and recent biographies like Jonathan Alter’s His Very Best argue that on issues like defense he was more consequential than remembered and Carter, too, sits in the middle of the presidential pack according to historian rankings.)
It's taken forty years of the arc of history to reevaluate Carter’s presidency in a more friendly light, but it’s hard to imagine a future, regardless of the distance from today, where Biden’s gamble last year that he was in good enough shape to run for re-election — his hubris that because he was the only Democrat who had beat Donald Trump he remained the only one who could — doesn’t overshadow every other decision of his presidency.
That is, if America continues to be a place where history is allowed to be openly written, debated, and studied at all, which at this moment feels a more open and pregnant question than I’d ever imagined it would be in my lifetime….
GMG
PS: I hope to grow this newsletter into a reliable twice-weekly narrator of the coming instability and change in the United States, providing history and context (and lots of book recommendations) about the time and challenge ahead. I hope you’ll consider sharing it with a couple people in your life who you think might find value in it:
PPS: If you’re curious, here’s what historians consider the current top tier of US presidents, at least as of 2021:
And the bottom — although the verdict on Donald Trump will change a lot in the years to come:
