Joe Biden will not be remembered as a hero

He resisted as they tried to force him away. He showed his defiance. Then, after a struggle, he gave in and was removed. 

That could be a description of the near-assassination of Donald Trump last weekend. Or the words might equally apply to Joe Biden’s experience since his abysmal debate performance last month.

There’s a curiously asymmetrical relationship between the two old men now. Whereas Donald Trump, seventy-eight, survived his brush with death, Joe Biden’s political career died on that debate stage in Georgia. He staggered on for almost a month but, as leading Democrats lined up to tell him to go, his position was untenable. 

Now that Biden has withdrawn from the 2024 presidential election we’ll hear a lot in coming days from senior Democrats about what a noble leader he is to have fallen on his sword for the greater good. “A patriot of the highest order,” Barack Obama called him last night.

The truth is that Biden wasn’t really fit to lead, even before he took over the White House in January 2021

The truth is that Biden wasn’t really fit to lead, even before he took over the White House in January 2021. He’d suffered two aneurysms in 1988 — and, although he made a full recovery, he was clearly not firing on all cylinders in the presidential election campaign of 2020. Thanks to the pandemic, however, he was able to campaign mostly from his basement and over Zoom — and he won.

In office, it was only Biden’s stubbornness, the lack of good alternative candidates and the willingness of those who knew better to deceive the public about his health that kept his presidency going. From the very start, his press conferences were curtailed, his public appearances limited — and he spent a shockingly large amount of his time on holiday.

We probably won’t know the truth about how bad Biden’s health has been until his term ends on January 20 next year — but the Democratic Party’s evident cover-up of his condition for the past four years may well go down as one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics.

He did appear to deteriorate more dramatically in recent months, as the strain of running the free world and campaigning for re-election took its toll. There was his disturbing not-all-there performance on D-Day, his bizarre frozen moment during the Juneteenth celebrations and then, of course, last month’s debate.

Many Democrats, including the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, have framed the conversation about Biden as if the problem was the perception, rather than the reality, that he was too old to go on. His presidency will be heralded as a series of successes; the praise will go along the same lines as his withdrawal announcement letter today.

“Today, America has the strongest economy in the world,” he wrote in his statement. “We’ve protected and preserved our democracy. And we’ve revitalized and strengthened our alliances around the world.”

There’s no doubt America’s economy is performing very well in the post-Covid world. But voters are not feeling all that great about Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar “Invest in America” program. It made inflation worse and caused the cost of living to rocket. Today, some two-thirds of Americans say their country is on the “wrong track.”

Biden may have made America’s allies feel more comfortable on the world stage than they did under Trump. But, now he’s a one-term president, Biden’s foreign policy cannot easily be dubbed a success. He has supported Ukraine with huge amounts of money and weaponry — but that war is a long way from won. The Middle East is in turmoil. Under Trump, no major new wars broke out. Under Biden, the world order has become ever less stable. 

Biden did end the war in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. But that was a disaster. America’s hasty and clumsy withdrawal from the twenty-year conflict turned into a humiliation. The Taliban almost immediately filled the vacuum — and America left enormous amounts of military hardware in their hands. Biden’s approval rating never really recovered from that episode. 

He will be dubbed a latter-day George Washington, a man with such humility to give up great power. But Biden’s time in the White House will be remembered in the many videos of him fumbling and stumbling on the world stage.

Biden says he is standing aside for “the best interest of my party and the country.” He truly believed his almost sacred purpose in life was to keep Trump out of the White House. Yet he leaves his party in limbo, with Kamala Harris the uncertain and unpopular likely nominee, and Trump ahead in the polls in all the swing states. Unless the Democrats can somehow turn this election around, Joe Biden’s one term must go down as an extraordinary failure. 

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This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.