President Joe Biden—forgotten but not gone as Jim Geraghty so nicely put it over at National Review—is a much-reduced figure, and one naturally wants to be charitable toward him as his failure as a politician and his failure as a father are fused together in the waning days of his presidency, a period dominated by his dishonest and impolitic pardon of his son Hunter, who was duly convicted of tax and gun offenses in a case brought not by some overreaching political enemy but by Biden’s own Justice Department.
Charity is a virtue. But, as journalists refresh their pre-writes of the president’s obituary (and I do not mean the political one) and the historians begin their first drafts in earnest, honesty is a superseding virtue. There is simply no way to tell the truth about Joe Biden’s life and career without kicking him while he is down—it is not like he is about to get back up and make of himself a more sportsmanlike target.
The defining qualities of Joe Biden the political man were arrogance and dishonesty, compounded by stupidity. That Biden lasted as long in politics as he did—he first was elected to the Senate the year your gray-bearded correspondent was born—and that he rose as high as he did is an indictment of the state of Delaware, the Democratic Party, and the American electorate, which was wise to choose Biden over Donald Trump in 2020 but foolish to put itself in such a dilemma to begin with.
Biden will forever be paired with Trump in the history books and will be the smaller figure—Shemp to Trump’s Curly. But there is a certain justice in that: Biden became vice president in part because Barack Obama believed, with good reason, that Biden, having already failed in more than one presidential campaign, was unlikely to ever be a serious contender for the big chair. No, Biden managed to become president due almost entirely to the fact that he was not Donald Trump—a figure whom he, perversely enough, resembles in many important ways: Both are East Coast white men born to prosperous (the Trumps much more so than the Bidens, of course) families in the 1940s, both are habitual liars and serial fabulists, both are plagiarists, both substitute insult for argument, both are intellectual mediocrities, neither speaks a foreign language or ever has uttered an original thought in English, each believes that his surname carries some sort of incantatory power, both embrace economic nationalism of a particularly ham-fisted and superficial kind, both abstain from alcohol, both have embarrassing adult children in their 40s and 50s who require more hand-holding than you’d think, and both revel in the abuse of presidential powers.
(Jill Biden’s ex-husband reports, in some detail, that Biden also resembles Trump in the matter of adultery, a claim the Bidens deny.)
If you need someone to accommodate your whataboutism here, I am happy to oblige: Yes, I think Donald Trump is the worse of the two by a nontrivial margin and would have preferred that the voters in November had elected Kamala Harris, a deranged hippopotamus, or an egg-salad sandwich rather than Trump. I also wish that my dachshund would not express joy and surprise by becoming incontinent, the difference being that there is some hope that a dachshund can be trained while voters heroically resist learning their lessons no matter how many times history rubs their collective nose in it.
My only personal memory of Joe Biden was watching him on the train, an affectation that was part of his Scranton-lunchbucket routine. His minders taped off about half of a first-class car, and a dozen or more Secret Service agents and other minions would swarm the platform every time the train came to a stop, as Biden—and this was a decade ago, well before he was elected president—sat there looking terrified and confused, lost as last year’s Easter Eggs. It was a lot of dog-and-pony show business to allow a vice president to pretend that he was a regular guy, or maybe to accommodate a graybeard loon already entering his second childhood and indulging his love of choo-choos. It was a contemptible little spectacle.
Biden fancies himself a foreign-policy man, a man of diplomacy, and here the history books will probably all cite former Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “He has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” One could go through the greatest hits: Biden’s despicable performance in the Clarence Thomas confirmation fiasco, his batty racial politics (“You ain’t black!” “Put y’all back in chains!” “Jim Crow 2.0!”), his creepy handsiness, his administration’s bizarre if maybe not technically criminal coddling of Iran, his reality-proof incompetence in the face of persistent corrosive inflation, his lawlessness on student loans, his stupidity on uranium, allowing the chaos at the border to fester and intensify, hobbling Ukraine at every turn until forced to relent, etc.
But what sticks in my mind about Biden is his slander of an obscure nobody, truck driver Curtis Dunn, whom he spent years lying about. Dunn was the other driver in the accident in which Biden’s first wife and his infant daughter died, an accident investigators at the time said was almost certainly caused by Mrs. Biden, who apparently pulled into oncoming traffic with the baby in her lap. Biden repeatedly claimed that Dunn was a drunk driver, a menace “who drank his lunch,” even though there was absolutely no evidence that this was true. It was, politically speaking, a better story, and Biden has always put his own selfish, greasy little interests ahead of those of ordinary people in the real world.
Biden is a failed politician. The only thing he had going for him was that he had denied Donald Trump a second term, and, now, he has given that second term to Trump at a time when the once and future president is even more dangerous and depraved than he was in 2020. Biden’s final significant act in office will have been going back on his word and pardoning his impenitent, drug-addled, pocket-lining miscreant of a son—who isn’t the only Biden who traded on the family name for personal enrichment. Biden could have protected his son from whatever it is that Kash Patel might get up to as head of the FBI without vacating the legitimate tax and firearms convictions that have already been handed down, but, as it turns out, his “word as a Biden” has the same value as an IOU signed by Donald Trump.
The matter will soon be in the hands of the obituarists and historians, and, soon enough, in the purview of a higher Authority than these. I hope that God will have mercy on Joe Biden—history will not.
