We haven’t been hearing or reading much about him but Joe Biden is STILL President. He’s doing the job. Signing bills into law, crafting executive orders, dealing with pardons and commutations etc. I’m sure he’ll be busy right up till the end. The question is what happens next? Prior to Trump Presidents tended to shy away from the spotlight after leaving office. Sure, they’d write a book or two and go around promoting it. Also go on the lecture circuit albeit mostly overseas and rack up some hefty speaking fees. But they pretty much stayed out of commenting on what their successor’s administration was up to. That of course changed with Trump. Trump as we know intended to run again which of course he did. He pretty much never stopped campaigning. So the old custom of ex-Presidents staying out of current politics was broken. Like so many other traditions and norms Trump broke.
For all the world it seemed like President Biden intended to go back to the old school ways. Stay quiet, stay away from the spotlight. He’s surely been through hell in the last year and I for one wouldn’t blame him if he just kicked back and enjoyed his remaining years being a husband, father and grandfather. After a literal lifetime of extraordinary public service he’s certainly earned that. However, after reading an article from The Independent a little while ago I’m not so sure we’ll have heard the last from Joe Biden after he takes that last flight on ‘Special Flight One’ (the Presidential Plane is only Air Force One when the current President is on board so they come up with the special designation for that last ride) back to Wilmington.
I say that because the linked article repeats something we’ve heard from the Biden camp before – he believes he could have beaten Trump. Look, the knives were out from fellow Democrats long before that disastrous debate. And while The Independent mentions some who claimed Biden was always going to be a ‘transitional President’ and serve only one term – a NOT TRUMP term to remind folks of how things are supposed to work I never got that feel from Biden. At most it was a hint of ‘we’ll see in a couple of years.’
I for one think he was badly served by his closest staff much of the time. Because of his stutter he’s been a gaffe machine his entire career. The fact his MIND works faster than his mouth is rather ironic. But it worked (and still does) better than most people’s. And physically he has been in good health. Breaking his foot in a fall and being a dickhead and not rigidly following his therapy was a mistake. The guy who would bound up steps or a ramp had to start being careful when he walked and frankly that hurt his image. On the other hand I’d have love to see him and Trump meet up at Haines’ Point and play nine holes of golf on a FLAT public course. Walking, albeit with caddies carrying their clubs. Biden could have done it. Trump wouldn’t have made it more than three or four holes. If that. THAT is a challenge Biden should have thrown down to Trump!
My point is that Biden’s team kept him too shut off for fear of having to clean up verbal gaffes. For most, even critics that was simply part of the personae of Joe Biden and if his staff had simply accepted that each gaffe that WAS made wouldn’t have become the BFD they always did. What matters though is that being kept away from the media as much as he was fed the narrative that Biden was no longer sharp. I watched a guy who navigated an incredibly complex situation with Gaza, dealing with as much criticism from fellow Democrats as Republicans. I watched how he worked like hell to get hostages out. I watched how he negotiated that incredibly complex deal to get some of our wrongly detained prisoners out of Russia. THIS was a guy who was “losing it?” Not to me.
Still, we can’t ignore that disastrous debate performance. Perhaps he’d have completely recovered crossing all those time zones in the week after he got back from a huge foreign trip but he also (as we learned) got hit with a mild bout of Covid. Between that and his staff’s debate prep I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. As Biden proved in that MASTER CLASS he threw down on a pack of DC journalists expecting to put the ‘coup de grace’ to Joe Biden, along with his leading of the NATO Summit in DC all around the time of the debate he just had a bad night. He didn’t need a bunch of debate prep of stuffing his head with facts/data and issues. He knew all he needed to know.
What they SHOULD have done was tell him to ‘let er rip’, to let Dark Brandon loose for a romp. Just imagine if when Trump spouted a couple of minutes of bullshit Biden LAUGHING at him and to Trump’s face, over and over proclaiming “What a load of Malarkey!” Then picking just one point out of the Trump b.s. to make a point and actually call it out as a LIE with Trump standing there. I believe the election could have been won right then and there. Trump would have melted down like the Wicked Witch of the West. And in retrospect I think Biden has come to the same conclusion.
Alas, things went the way they went. Harris to her credit took no part in pushing him aside. He’ll remember that. And for those asking about what Harris does next they, all of us should keep in mind the loyalty she showed to her boss. It might, because of the war in Gaza have cost her the election. But the Democratic Party OWES her a great deal of consideration in the future if she chooses to stay active. It owes even more to Joe Biden.
Which brings me back to the question of whether Joe Biden does the normal ex-President thing of fading into the background or speaks out some. I say that because as the linked article note just recently he’s been raising the matter of whether he’d have beaten Trump again:
Joe Biden still regrets pulling out of the 2024 presidential race and believes he could have beaten Donald Trump for the White House, according to a report.
The outgoing president backed out of the race over the summer following a disastrous first debate against his Republican rival, low approval numbers, and dwindling donations.
But Biden recently told people that despite the issues his campaign faced he is confident he could have defeated Trump in November, sources familiar with the conversations told The Washington Post.
Why would Biden be bringing all this up again? I don’t think it’s out of the blue and here’s why. In this same round of talks with people that have made it into the news Biden also brought up something else. Something many of us have thought and even said:
Biden also admitted to aides that he had made other mistakes, including the selection of Merrick Garland as attorney general, according to the Post.
The president has said privately that Garland was too slow to prosecute Trump over January 6, while his Justice Department aggressively prosecuted and convicted his son Hunter. Biden earlier this month pardoned Hunter, despite saying he would not use his executive authority to do so.
Well now. THAT sure as hell gets MY attention. Of the many ‘what ifs?’ that will be written about Trump getting back into the WH will be the question of what if Garland had put a special prosecutor on the Jan. 6 Insurrection right off the bat. And, when Trump after a couple of requests REFUSED to return classified material he’d STOLEN on his way out of the WH added a new one, or wrapped that up in the overall mandate of the J6 Special Prosecutor? Had that been done Trump’s fat orange butt would have been hauled up in federal court a year before charges were actually filed. SCOTUS might well have been less inclined to create the ridiculous immunity ruling too. The point is that Garland blew it, and that Biden is admitting Garland wasn’t the guy to lead DOJ after all. That Biden is pretty much saying Garland blew it is HUGE.
Add all this up, and that’s why I say it’s an open question as to whether Joe Biden will just fade away, or become a voice in the opposition to what a second Trump administration attempts to do. Especially on foreign policy matters like NATO and Ukraine. We are supposed to only have one President at a time, and that’s particularly true when it comes for foreign policy. Trump said ‘f**k that’ and mucked around in it, and had pals do so whenever he could. And don’t think the appalling situation in Gaza would have played out and still be ongoing (and about to get worse) except for Trump and Bibi Netanyahu having their own private chats!
We are in for some interesting times if Joe Biden decides he’s NOT done serving his country after Trump is sworn in again. I for one am thinking Biden might become Trump’s worst nightmare if he chooses to do so.
Excellent points that I totally agree with. Biden is the most ethical Master Politician and has been for decades. Yep he’s my Man!
Biden thought he was going to leave his legacy in good hands. it didn’t work out that way so he’ll have to take care of it himself.
Why are we still rehashing the election? Isn’t this hard enough to deal with without going over what coulda, woulda, shoulda? There are more important things to be doing. Like survival.
Those of us who do think Biden is important are very much connecting him with the future, and with survival.
Let’s get something clear here. Biden’s days for campaigning for himself are over. The best thing he can do for us in his remaining time in office is to work like a busy bee signing legislation, pardons, and executive orders that will limit the damage that Trump can do.
If he wants to campaign for others, that can come later. Right now the time crunch is on, and he needs to get things done while he still has the power to do them.
“…because of the war in Gaza have cost her the election.”
I’ve never understood this. Sure, the Gaza situation was/is horrible.
But why didn’t the Democratic Party say:
“Yes, Gaza sucks, but Israel is doing it, and if you think it’s bad now, under trump it will be FAR WORSE.”
I would think that this was THE answer. I never heard anything like it. It seems they just didn’t try to deal with it. Dumb..
The U.S./Israel relationship has been hugely complicated from the early hours when Truman chose Clark Clifford’s view over that of SecState George Marshall and formally recognized the State of Israel. Marshall wanted to try and get a handle on how the situation with Palestinians would be dealt with and Clifford was in a ‘you have to do it now so other countries will join in in the next couple of days to solidify things.’ So what we got was a “punt” on a Palestinian homeland, with the treaties and the U.N. agreeing the West Bank would be set aside and that the “details” would get worked out. Israel has fought doing so from the beginning.
Yet we can’t dump them as an ally either. They’d done some dirty stuff to us to be sure, but also done some dirty work FOR us. However there can and should be limits to support given so much of what Israel has done in ever increasing Jewish “settlements” in the West Bank and the appalling conditions in the Gaza strip. Now Israel, or to be more specific Netanyahu and his cronies want to engage in full blown ethnic cleansing up to and including genocide. Biden and his team worked tirelessly publicly and behind the scenes with fierceness to rein in Bibi but with limited success. How in the fuck people of Palestinian heritage in the U.S. could vote for Trump, or at least refuse to vote for Biden is a mystery to me. WTF? How in the hell could they think Trump would do anything other than give Israel a green light to commit genocide? But like MAGAs cutting off their noses to spite their faces over cultural and economic issues (voting against their own interests) hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the U.S. did the same. Alas, it was quite enough to hand Michigan to Trump and probably PA too.
I don’t get it. I really don’t. A Harris administration WOULD have ramped up the pressure on Israel and everyone knew it. However, as sitting VP she couldn’t openly challenge what the current administration had done. But I’d be willing to bet she and Biden had some long, LONG talks about steps she could take once she was sworn in. That’s all water under the bridge. So any Muslim I talk with, or someone who supports their attitude and actions in November’s election is someone I will have NO sympathy for when the true shit goes down in Gaza. Netanyahu is counting the days until Trump is sworn in. And then all hell, in a quite literal sense will be unleashed in that narrow strip of land.
American Muslims and their friends who agreed with them that Biden wasn’t tough enough on Israel will go ape-shit. And when the killing and suffering of tens, even perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians happens will have ONLY themselves to blame. Because they wouldn’t support Harris. Because Harris refused to say she’d cut off relations with Israel which is the ONLY thing they wanted to hear from her!
Looking back, seems to me that the Democrat Party has been “dropping the Ball” for YEARS” Especially, after Obama. Our LW have been WEAK & ineffective.
It always seemed to me that Biden gave Garland the AG spot as a sort of consolation prize for not getting on the Supreme Court. It think he’d have made a great justice, but AG just wasn’t his forte.
In my view he should do what the mouse running the DOJ refused to do…recognize the truth and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. What? Stop Trump the criminal traitor from standing in front of the nation, desecrating the Bible, and the Constitution, by lying through another oath, and taking control of our government once again. Declare the election stolen and invalid, which, given the gerrymandering, the constant traitorous actions of the media, Supreme Court, congress, etc., is true…use the powers of immunity for official acts; and STOP THIS TRANSITION TO A FASCIST government run by this criminal. Civil War? Damn right. We had to fight one before to save the Union. Then it was the federal government against the southern states. That’s where we are at the moment. Once trump takes office, it will be the federal government against the rest of us…magas included. Biden doing that would end our history of democracy you say. Where have you been? It’s over the day Trump takes power. THE DAY HE TAKES POWER. In the most severe crisis, EXTREME actions must be taken. What the hell do you think Trump would do if the situation were reversed?????????? The people in this country are in for an evil rude awakening. As Dylan sang in Like a Rolling Stone: when you got nothing…you got nothing to lose.
I fear, Scott, that the whole Trump Saga must play out like a classical Greek tragedy, right to its final scene. Any intervention now, at so late a date, would make Trump the martyr he’s always wanted to be and could, indeed, move us into a civil war. Of course the election was stolen, by a GOP which began the process decades ago with its gerrymandering policies. Add in Russky troll farms, useful idiots in the rightwing media and spineless Republicans in Congress and voila, Trumpler 2 is upon us. Now begins the final struggle and it will last as long as Trump does; 4 years maybe, maybe not. Donald may become a non-combatant, strolling the links while the fight involves his proxies against the defenders of democracy who remain. Their Trumpist takeover of the govt won’t be as easy as they think. Their fascist policies will meet surprising resistance, often from equally surprising sources. It will be a civil war but without arms, fought in the courts and in Congress, with the fate of our democracy up for grabs. It had to come down to this, in the end.
Maybe…but looking at the injustices I’ve personally suffered at the hands of the courts, and the fact this man is now free to run the game one more time, leaving bodies and broken laws in his wake…I have no faith in the law. None. If it truly held for equal treatment and consequences, George Floyd would have been with his family this Christmas, and this pissant would be in jail for serious time. The law and the lawmakers ARE THE REASON WE ARE HERE FACING THE DISSOLUTION OF OUR DEMOCRACY AS A LEGAL OFFICIAL ACT OF PRESIDENT TRUMP. I wish I were completely wrong, but I’ve had to be a realist my entire life. Giving this man power, ultimate power, says the highest court in the land…the return of the king isn’t just a Tolkien fantasy. I’d take the noble Aragorn…this man has no conscience. I know the type well. Buckle up…it’s going to feel like we’re on a plane with engines burning 20,000 feet above the earth, deciding to let the drunken buffoon give it another try. I used to skydive back when no one heard of tandem jumps. The first jump, I remember how I was so relieved to have my parachute open, I forgot I was still falling at a pretty good clip. That is until gravity showed the ground rapidly approaching with a certain immovable object called the ground zooming toward me. I later quit, after almost getting myself killed, jumping seven times in a day. The last time, my chute tangled, and I flipped over at 120mph. The boys in the plane thought I was a goner. So did I. To celebrate upon reaching the ground alive, these flying cowboys, at a little airfield in Oregon, and I shared a large joint and several beers. I stopped jumping that day. It’s important to recognize the risk before the disaster hits. After nine years we should be afraid…very afraid of the hard landing we’re in for. Or we can move to Egypt. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt my friend.
SMJ Which is it? Cat with 9 lives OR hard to kill a Bad’un? May you live long and prosper
Thanks…but for the grace of God…go I. I have no explanation…just reporting the experiences. I have others, but I find people are really only interested in THEMSELVES. There are no reasonable explanations for me still being here while babies freeze to death in Gaza. I have covered the bell curve from end to end…from giving the middle finger to whomever or whatever created this child killing planet, to lying in tears praying to the same mystery. Some believe we just are cosmic accidents, a product of physics, gravity, and chemistry. Others believe we are truly unique, created by a divine force for a purpose shrouded in mystery. I have pushed the envelope in ways most wouldn’t do in searching for the truth. Ultimately it’s a mystery, which is why people invent beliefs to give them a faux certainty. That isn’t faith willing to challenge and accept the unknowns…which is why we’re killing each other…fear of our constructs falling apart. As Dylan once sang: you say you lost your faith…you know it’s not like that…you had no faith to lose and YOU KNOW IT. Keep yours my friend and keep searching. An unexamined life isn’t worth living someone said long ago. Sounds true to me.