Joe Biden had one job. And he failed | Mehdi Hasan

4 hours ago 1

“You had one job.”

As we bid farewell to the 46th president of the United States, I can’t get that Ocean’s 11-inspired internet meme out of my head.

Joe Biden had one job. Not getting bills passed or executive orders signed. Not fighting foreign wars or securing the border. No. It was defeating Donald Trump. Denying him the presidency. Ending the threat he posed to our democracy.

That was Biden’s one job. He said so himself. From the moment he announced his (third) campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, he made clear that he wanted to lead us to victory “in the battle for the soul of this nation”. When he formally accepted his party’s nomination at the Democratic national convention in the summer of 2020, he said he was running to “save our democracy” and to ensure the United States became “a light to the world once again”. This was a battle, he declaimed, “that we, together, will win”.

Less than three months later, in November 2020, he won a record 81m votes in the presidential election, 7m more than his Republican rival.

Yet here is the haunting paradox of Biden’s presidency: from the moment he secured victory over Trump in 2020, he began laying the groundwork for the return of Trump in 2024.

First, there was his failure to prosecute a political and legal case against the defeated president in 2020 and 2021. Biden came into office with both a mandate and momentum; Trump, in the wake of his failed coup and insurrection, was weak, isolated, unpopular.

Yet the then president-elect privately told aides that he didn’t want his presidency to be dominated by political or legal investigations into his predecessor’s actions. One adviser told NBC News that Biden made it clear that he “just wants to move on”.

It was a monumental mistake. Biden may have wanted to look forward, not back; he may have wanted to believe Trump was in his rear-view mirror. But the former president was able to regroup at Mar-a-Lago, retake control of his party and stage an audacious political comeback – all in plain sight and all without any real pressure from Biden’s Department of Justice between 2021 and 2022.

In fact, the day after Trump incited an armed mob to attack the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, Biden announced his nominee for attorney-general: not the hard-charging former Democratic senator Doug Jones, but Merrick Garland, a mild-mannered, cautious, centrist judge, once beloved of Republican senators like the late Orrin Hatch.

Garland dispensed vague platitudes about accountability, but dragged his feet on actually investigating and prosecuting Trump. “You couldn’t use the T word” at the DOJ, said one former official.

Biden himself later “grumbled to aides and advisers”, reported Politico in September 2024, “that had Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded”.

Yet Trump now returns to the Oval Office without having faced any trials for any of his criminal acts on or around 6 January 2021. On Biden and Garland’s watch, we witnessed, to quote former DOJ prosecutor Ankush Khardori, “the greatest failure of federal law enforcement in American history”.

Second, there was Biden’s failure to push for the reform of broken, dysfunctional political institutions and processes that have been used by Trump and the Republicans to undermine both small-d democracy and big-D Democrats.

Take the Senate filibuster, an anti-majoritarian relic of the Jim Crow era. Biden took office in 2021 with only the narrowest of Senate majorities and yet the president, a 36-year veteran of the Senate, refused to call for the abolition of the filibuster. “President Biden served in the Senate for a long time and he believes that if we can leave the filibuster in place, that’s what he prefers,” Ron Klain, then the White House chief of staff, told me during Biden’s first 100 days in office.

Republicans used the filibuster to hobble the president’s ambitious policy agenda and try to turn him into a “half-term president”. It wasn’t until 2022 that Biden came out for mild reform of the filibuster – but only for voting rights and abortion rights. It was too little, too late.

Take the supreme court. Biden took a report from his commission on supreme court reform and kicked it into the long grass. He publicly disavowed suggestions from Democratic senators and House members to expand the supreme court. It wasn’t until the summer of 2024, after a supreme court packed with Trump appointees offered Trump presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution, that Biden called for a binding code of conduct for supreme court justices and term limits for the nine justices. Again, too little, too late.

I could go on and on about the myriad ways in which Biden failed to play hardball. Remember when the unelected Senate parliamentarian blocked Democrats from including a minimum-wage increase in a coronavirus relief bill? Biden’s spokesperson said the president was “disappointed” but “respects the parliamentarian’s decision”.

Third, he failed to step aside in time. Biden, to put it bluntly, overstayed his welcome. As Trump vanquished his Republican rivals in the primaries and ascended in the polls, the octogenarian president refused to quit the race and allow a better, younger, more popular, more mentally competent Democratic presidential candidate to run in his place … until it was too late. When he finally, and oh-so-reluctantly, quit the race on 21 July, there was no time for the Democrats to hold a “blitz primary” or an “open convention” to pick the best possible candidate to face Trump. Kamala Harris got the nod – but had only 107 days to try to turn around a sinking ship. It was a near-impossible task.

What happened to the Biden who, in 2020, pledged to be a “transition candidate”, a “bridge” to a younger generation of Democratic party leaders? Had the president publicly pledged to serve one term only and then step aside, perhaps a Democrat and not a rightwing autocrat would be preparing to take the oath of office next week at the Capitol.

Yet Biden has no remorse or regret – in fact, the opposite. In a recent interview with Susan Page of USA Today, the president insisted that he, unlike Harris, would have won against Trump in November. Sorry, what? If Biden wasn’t delusional before, he certainly is now.

To be clear, I say all of this more in sorrow than in anger. While promoting my book, Win Every Argument, in the spring of 2023, I was interviewed in this newspaper and asked to give my assessment of the Biden presidency. I listed his various domestic policy wins and compared him favorably to his five predecessors: Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama and Trump: “I never imagined I would say this – I was born in 1979 – I think he’s the most impressive president of my lifetime.”

That was several months before the horror show in Gaza had begun, in the fall of 2023, which Biden helped enable both with his lies about beheaded Israeli babies and his supply of near-unlimited weaponry to Benjamin Netanyahu. That was more than a year before the televised humiliation of Biden, in the summer of 2024, when it became crystal-clear to more than 50 million Americans watching at home that he and his team had misled us about the state of his mental health.

Joe Biden had one job. But because of his arrogance and intransigence, his caution and complacency, he failed.

Today, I consider Joe Biden to be not the most impressive but perhaps the second-worst president of my lifetime because he helped deliver a second term to the worst president of my lifetime.