About a month from now, President Joe Biden will be replaced by his predecessor, Donald Trump—a man consumed by visions of revenge against his perceived enemies, determined to shred basic government functions and agencies, and besotted by the idea of an unforgiving, brutalist American nationalism.
At least six members of Trump’s cabinet are billionaires; many others are centi-millionaires. And the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has been charged with bypassing normal regulatory and Congressional oversight processes to rapidly cut trillions of dollars in government spending over the coming years—and, at the same time, to eviscerate regulations that in some small way rein in men such as Musk and his uber-wealthy administration colleagues.
Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky/National Affairs Correspondent
Presumably they also include Biden himself, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and the Obamas, all of whom Trump has threatened at one time or another to imprison. That it has come to this reflects an abysmal failure on Joe Biden’s part. He always struck me as a decent, humane, human being. Yet, ultimately, his undoing—and the country’s tragedy—was his inability to realize that it was past time to pass the torch. That the 81-year-old Biden seriously thought he was the only person in America capable of defeating Donald Trump in 2024 is one of history’s most extraordinary, and consequential, misjudgments. It flew in the face of reason, and it flew in the face of Biden’s own pronouncements in 2020 when, as a 77-year-old candidate, he all-but-promised that he would be a one-term president, that he would gracefully use his time in office to stabilize the country after the calamity of the Trump era and would then pass the torch to a new generation. He saw himself, he said, as a “bridge” figure to the next generation of Democratic leaders.
Unnamed but reportedly close advisers told Politico that it was almost inconceivable that, as an octogenarian, he would run for another term. Had Biden bowed out after the 2022 midterms, when his strategy of highlighting the dangers to democracy posed by a GOP firmly in thrall to the Trump cult led to a surprisingly strong showing for Democrats in the mid-term elections, he would have gone out a hero. He would also have given Harris the chance to carve out her own legacy and her own relationship to voters. And he would have provided his party with time to hold an open primary for nominating the presidential candidate in 2024. As the sitting president, Harris would have obviously entered that primary race in a strong position, but the party would have had the chance to debate policy positions, to work out which senior figures were best able to connect with key constituencies in critical swing states, and so on.
Instead, Biden meandered through 2023 and 2024 in an increasingly visible stupor, his physical energy diminished, his mental capabilities clearly in decline. Meanwhile Trump and his insurrectionist forces went from strength to strength, utterly subjugating the GOP to their will and pushing the national rhetoric further and further to the right. It was as much a recipe for a catastrophe as was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s equally hubristic decision to stay on the Supreme Court through the Trump presidency.
If history is written by the victors, as Winston Churchill allegedly once pronounced, I have no doubt that much of the next several years will be an exercise in massive revisions of the American record. Trump’s insurrectionary forces on Jan. 6, 2021, will likely be redefined as patriotic heroes, and those released from incarceration for their roles in the uprising will be lionized as martyrs. Trump’s felonious conduct will be erased from the history books, and his prosecutions and impeachments instead redefined as egregious abuses of power ordered by Biden and carried out by nefarious members of the Deep State.
The loss of control over the historical narrative will be among the most consequential of Biden’s legacies. Young people will be taught that A is Z and lies are truth. And, as in Putin’s Russia, it will take a brave individual to stand up to a ruthless state. So much for Biden being a bridge to a progressive future.
