If you will allow me to belabor the obvious for a moment: History will not be kind to Joe Biden. In fact, history will almost certainly judge him as one of the least effective presidents in history — and no more deserved rating has ever been accorded to an American president.
Friday, on CNN, reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere opined that Joe Biden will be largely remembered as the guy who was between Donald Trump's two terms — the guy who beat Trump and then the guy who lost to Trump.
"I think back to an interview that I did with Joe Biden," Dovere said. "He’d been president for about three weeks, I was talking to him for a book that I wrote. And part of the takeaway that I had from it was him trying to assert himself as Joe Biden, the guy who got elected president."
"Not just Barack Obama’s vice president, not just the guy who beat Donald Trump," he continued. "But now that is part of who he is, and it may define who he is. A couple weeks before the election, I had a conversation with a senior person in the White House, and I said, if Harris loses, most of the way that Biden is going to be remembered, at least in the short-term, is the guy who was just in between the Trump terms."
"At this moment, that is the way that he is acting," Dovere said.
As Biden's sole, failed term comes to an end, though, it's certain that history — and I mean history, not hagiography — will judge Joe Biden much more harshly than this. My colleague Nick Arama has done excellent work documenting the failures in the final days of the Biden administration:
See Related: New Report on Biden's Twisted 'Regrets' and the Infuriating Reason He's Going to See the Pope on Our Dime
There's a lot more to it than that. What will President Joe Biden be remembered for?
1: His mental and physical decline. Joe Biden, in all candor, never was the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was vindictive, petty, and corrupt, yes — but an intellectual giant, no. Even in the 2020 campaign, the infamous "basement campaign," his decline was already becoming apparent. As his presidency dragged on, it became more and more difficult for Democrats to deny - and yet deny they did, right up to Biden's embarrassing — nay, disastrous — 2024 debate performance against Donald Trump. Which brings us to:
2: The Democrats using a big Warner Brothers-style hook to yank Joe Biden off the campaign stage, and the anointment of Kamala Harris in his stead. It is as yet unknown who played Barry Goldwater to Biden's Nixon and "belled the cat," telling the old man that there was no way he was going to win — and then Biden went on to heartily endorse his vice president for the role, and we all know how that turned out.
3: Failure in international affairs. It's hard to think of a national leader who took Joe Biden seriously. Tsar Vladimir I certainly did not. Italian President Giorgia Meloni spoke for the world with her eloquent eye-roll while waiting for the befuddled old American president to show up for a NATO summit. Cap it all off with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and you have a record of failure that's hard to top — until you go to domestic policy.
4: Domestic policy. Inflation, joblessness, rising interest rates; the American people saw their paychecks presenting less buying power week by week, while the Biden administration lectured us on DEI and climate change, appointed incompetents to government posts, and spent, spent, spent, raising our national debt to over $36 trillion.
In the end, you have failure. At every turn, failure. But there is one party of Joe Biden's legacy that is positive: Just as it took a Carter to give us a Reagan, it took Joe Biden to give us a second term of Donald Trump. And that, we can be sure, will be the major part of Joe Biden's legacy.
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