If former President Joe Biden had a single message throughout his political career, it’s that he was always been leveling with us.
“Folks,” he would say at his campaign rallies. “You think I’m kidding. I’m being totally serious!” Other Bidenisms — “No joke!” and “No, really!” — all meant the same thing: Biden was giving it to us straight. He was telling the truth.
But now, through leaked White House recordings and a new book from journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, we’re learning that the most fundamental claim of all — that Biden was up to the job of president — was not always true. Were the Democrats who vouched for him in the dark, or did an intense desire to keep Donald Trump out of the White House make a feeble Biden seem better than the alternative?
As Democrats contemplate their way forward out of the mess they’ve made, understanding how and why Biden’s reelection campaign got as far as it did should be the first priority because the former president did not act alone. With the safety of Americans and the integrity of government on the line, Democrats put their own survival ahead of everything else.
It all started well. With his party in control of the House and Senate and COVID retreating into the background, Biden’s first years in the White House included passing a series of major Democratic priorities long stalled in Washington. The midterm elections came and went, with Democrats retaining control of the Senate.
But as time passed, Biden was quickly aging in plain sight. Behind the scenes, we are now learning, it was even worse. The president not only had good days and bad days, Tapper and Thompson write — he had good hours and bad hours.
The president’s schedule was compressed to make sure he could take important meetings during the windows when his energy was high. His exposure to people outside of his trusted inner circle began to shrink. Even members of Congress and the Cabinet were kept away. Why would any of this seem OK?
While it’s difficult to assess all of the claims in the book since many come from unnamed sources, the newly released audio of interviews between Biden and special counsel Robert Hur from the fall of 2023 put Biden’s growing infirmities on full display.
In one recording, a confused Biden struggled to remember basic information like the words for “fax machine.”
“What do you call it when they send these?” Biden asked his attorney in the middle of an answer. “Fax machine,” the lawyer said. A few moments later, Biden had to be reminded again.
At other points, Biden was confused about major dates and times in his past, including when he was vice president and when Trump took office. “Was I still vice president? I was, wasn’t I?” he asked of the year 2009. Another interview included him asking when his son Beau had died.
All of this would be heartbreaking if it wasn’t also so alarming. Because at the same time he could not remember the dates and times he was vice president, Biden was also in the midst of running for reelection as president.
And this is where the other Democrats come in. With the president intent on running and no real alternatives ready to challenge him, party leaders seemed to lock arms and forge ahead. Even after Biden’s terrible debate performance in Atlanta, when he said nonsensical things like, “Look, we finally beat Medicare,” Democrats rallied around him.
Standing in the spin room after the debate, U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock focused on Trump, calling him, “A man who stood there and lied for 90 minutes straight.”
U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, then the chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, joined a public letter of leaders from battleground states sticking with Biden. “We know that Democrats can and will win up and down the ballot, from President Biden and Vice President Harris down to state legislative candidates in toss-up seats to school board races,” they wrote. “The key ingredient is something that is up to all of us: focus.”
Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Biden ally who had an office in the West Wing from 2022 to 2023 and later joined the Biden campaign, told the AJC that Biden should stay in the race.
“He made it clear he is not going anywhere. I don’t think he should go anywhere,” she said. “We just need to rally around the person who we all rallied around in the primaries, when people had an opportunity to choose someone else and they didn’t.”
Weeks later, Biden did drop out of the race for president. With just over 100 days to mount a campaign and no primary to test her appeal, Vice President Kamala Harris stood in for Biden and lost. Voters made a decision after Democrats refused for so long to make one themselves.
Before Republicans spend too much time enjoying the struggles on the Democratic side, they should ask themselves whether they are ready to do better than the Democrats if their own nearly 80-year-old president has a clinical demise that mirrors Biden’s. Are they ready to take the reins of power from Trump? At the moment, Republicans in Congress hardly use the power they already have.
When the history is written about Joe Biden, and God willing it won’t be for a long time, I hope it will reflect the totality of his decades in public service. I also hope it describes the kindness he always showed to people from every walk of life. But through his own choices, the last, sad, destructive chapter of Joe Biden’s story, namely the end to his time in public life, will be the one he wrote himself.
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