Donald Trump's Second Term Is Joe Biden's Real Legacy

“Victory has a hundred fathers,” John F. Kennedy remarked, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, “and defeat is an orphan.” The failure of the Democratic Party to prevent Donald Trump’s reëlection is a catastrophe of yet-to-be-known proportions, and Kennedy’s remark is a reminder that everyone involved will try to shirk the blame when confronted with the wreckage. Morally, that blame must of course begin with the estimated eighty million people who voted for Trump. They have chosen to return to office a man who has already tried to throw out the votes of their fellow-citizens once, and who would surely have tried to throw them out again if he had lost on Tuesday. Kamala Harris must take a certain amount of responsibility for her truncated, insufficient campaign. But, among Democrats, the blame for Trump’s victory overwhelmingly lies with one person: Joe Biden. Indeed, Trump’s triumph will be Biden’s real Presidential legacy. Little of the rest of what he accomplished is likely to survive another Trump term.

The single biggest reason this defeat should fall on Biden’s shoulders is that his stubbornness in refusing to step aside as the Democratic nominee until July short-circuited the possibility of staging a primary, and left Harris as the only real choice to replace him. Enough has been written about Biden wheezing through campaign appearances before eventually dragging out his farewell for weeks after the calamitous summer debate. But Biden’s arrogance remains astonishing to behold: well before 2024, he was quite simply too old to ask people, in good faith, to keep him in office through 2028. He did so anyway, insuring that his age became the biggest political story of the first half of the year. The result depressed Democrats across the country and allowed the Trump campaign to attack its opponent in a manner it hadn’t been able to since 2016.

Harris began her campaign with a burst of excitement—she raised almost half a billion dollars in the first month—which suggested that Democratic voters were desperate for any candidate who was not Biden, or perhaps just any candidate born after D Day. As her race against Trump got under way, Harris had some fine moments, such as her debate performance. She evinced an ability to feed off the energy at large, boisterous rallies, and she spoke about the best two issues the Democrats had this cycle—abortion and January 6th—with real passion.

Still, this was far from a perfectly executed campaign, and she was far from an ideal candidate. Her unwillingness, or inability, to give coherent interview answers—which led to her staff keeping her in bubble wrap until the final month—led to some embarrassing moments, such as her strange decision to refuse to distance herself from Biden on “The View” and elsewhere. Though the campaign released a series of policy proposals about the “care economy,” Harris never developed an economic vision that registered with a sufficient number of Americans. It’s hard to think of a Democratic Presidential campaign in the postwar era that felt more constrained in its messaging, or more reactionary in its focus on the (admittedly myriad) flaws of its opponent. When the subject turned to foreign policy—whether in Ukraine or Gaza—Harris could do little better than mumble platitudes.

Imagine, then, Kamala Harris in a contested primary: someone who is not good in interview settings, who has few well-communicated policy ideas (something that appears to matter more these days to Democratic primary voters than to the general electorate), and who is unlikely to be seen as electable because she is tethered to—indeed part of—an unpopular incumbent Administration. Harris would have had certain advantages in terms of name recognition, and perhaps fund-raising, but very little of what we saw during these past few months should make anyone think a primary campaign would have gone better for her than it did in 2020, when she flamed out months before the first primary votes were even cast.

One could argue that a bruising primary this year might have left the Democrats with a nominee even weaker than Harris. That was always possible, but the Party is relatively stacked with popular swing-state governors and senators, many of whom ran ahead of Harris last night. (Why Harris did not choose one of them as her Vice-Presidential running mate is another question.) At the very least, a non-Harris nominee would likely have been someone without her baggage from the 2020 primary—her brief support for Medicare for All and for looser immigration restrictions were a centerpiece of the Trump campaign’s attack ads—and someone who had shown an ability to win an election in a battleground state.

But the most crucial attribute that another candidate would have had? Not being the sitting Vice-President of the most unpopular Administration since George W. Bush’s second term. It’s perfectly reasonable to argue that the Democrats’ central weakness was having presided over a worldwide inflationary period that has already wounded incumbent political parties of varying ideologies, from the United Kingdom to Japan—in a word, that this was the Republicans’ election to win, no matter the candidates. Yet this should have been another reason to pick a nominee with at least some distance from the current Administration.

Meanwhile, the entirely unhelpful role that Biden played after Harris became the nominee, with his fumbles and missteps on the stump, only served to remind people how much they disliked the incumbent. (The most infamous of these was Biden seeming to call Trump supporters “garbage,” recalling Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables” comments from 2016.) We may never know why Harris did not break more fully with Biden, and why, in the course of multiple interviews, she declined to throw him under the metaphorical bus, but given the President’s touchiness and self-regard it’s possible that at a personal level this was a hard thing for Harris to do. Perhaps this is a point in her favor as a colleague and as a friend, but it certainly hurt her campaign.

Many of Biden’s defenders will argue that, however gruesome these months have been—capped off by this week’s disaster—he leaves behind a legacy of policy achievements that rivals Lyndon Johnson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s. Biden oversaw an economic recovery that was remarkable by international standards, and passed an enormous climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. He embarked on a new era of antitrust enforcement and closeness to the labor movement, and started the process of bringing important manufacturing sectors back to the United States. He has made numerous strong appointments, from the federal judiciary to the Federal Reserve. And he has helped to keep Ukraine from being fully annexed by Russia.

But Trump is expected to try to roll back or repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, and to overturn all of the Biden Administration’s actions to regulate climate change. There is no reason to think he will have trouble doing so, especially with Republicans confident about holding the House after already capturing the Senate. As for Ukraine, and whether it will even exist in several months or a year, the less said the better. The one area of continuity—other than aspects of China policy, the wisdom of which remains to be seen—is probably going to be with regard to Israel and Gaza, where Biden’s policies have been alternately inert and disgraceful. The legacy Biden “leaves behind,” then, is now quite likely to be paltry.

Perhaps it’s best to judge Biden by the standard he set for himself. Five years ago, he announced that the impetus for his 2020 campaign was to defeat Donald Trump, and all that he represented, which in Biden’s mind was (understandably) captured by Trump’s handling of the 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville. “In that moment,” Biden said, in the video that kicked off his campaign, referencing Trump’s infamous “both sides” remark, “I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.” He continued by insisting that we were “in a battle for the soul of this nation,” and that, if Trump could be kept to only four years in office, history would look back on those years as “aberrant.” But, Biden continued, “if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.” It’s in no small measure thanks to Joe Biden that all we can do now is hope he was wrong. ♦