It’s not impossible that the US president’s party could eventually come to regret forcing him out
By Maxim Suchkov, Director of the MGIMO Institute for International Studies (IIS)
Back in July 2022, when US President Joe Biden was last struck down with Covid, a subsequently debunked fake viral post, falsely attributed to Donald Trump, was doing the rounds. “Joe, I wish you a speedy recovery, even though you are taking America in the wrong direction. No one wants Kamala (Harris),” it read.
The reason many people fell for it is that it sounded Trumpian and contained a grain of truth. Plenty worried about Biden’s ability to recover quickly at such an advanced age, and genuinely feared that Harris wouldn’t be up to the job if it were foisted upon her.
“Joe, I wish you a speedy recovery, even though you are taking America in the wrong direction. No one wants Kamala,” – This was the phrase Donald Trump used to ‘cheer up’ Joe Biden in July 2022, when the American president first fell ill with a coronavirus and many worried about his ability to recover quickly at such an advanced age.
Two years later, everything is repeating itself, this time for real: isolated in his coastal Delaware home, Biden has again been treated for coronavirus, and Vice President Harris looks likely to take his place as the Democratic Party’s presidential election candidate.
On Sunday, Biden published a statement on the X (formerly Twitter) social network saying that he would not seek re-election for another term and was withdrawing his candidacy. At the same time, he stressed that he would remain in the White House until the end of his term.
Nevertheless, his domestic critics are already demanding proof that he is fit to lead a nuclear power for almost six more months. Meanwhile, here in Russia our foreign ministry has called for an investigation into the collusion of US media and political elites in concealing the true state of affairs about the head of state’s mental health.
Biden on Sunday also expressed his ‘full support’ for Harris as the Democratic nominee in the November election.
Trump, on the other hand, told CNN that Joe Biden would go down as the worst president in the country’s history, while expressing confidence that Kamala Harris would be much easier to defeat.
Most success stories have to do with being in the right place at the right time. Biden’s situation is the opposite: he became president at the wrong time for America and at the wrong time in his own story. Had he been elected president in 1988, when he was 46, or in 2008, when he was 66, he might well have joined the pantheon of the country’s more successful leaders. But on both occasions, the former senator failed to run the gauntlet of intra-party selection: the first time he was young and embroiled in a ridiculous plagiarism scandal, and the second occasion he failed to overcome the experienced Hillary Clinton and the youthful Barack Obama.
Biden made it to the political Olympus in 2020. By then, his country was in a deep socio-political crisis, and the man himself was not at his best.
But the party said: ‘we’ll have to make do.’ In the four years of Trump’s presidency, the Democrats had failed to find a better alternative, and there was no way they were going to let the maverick Republican get re-elected easily.
Biden was promoted as a highly experienced politician, and his years in the Senate and the presidential administration were presented to voters as a mark of the Democratic candidate’s competence and a guarantee of ‘America’s return to normalcy.’ Whether voters believed this story – or voted against Trump rather than for Biden – was not so important at the time. Because nobody really believed that Trump would make a third bid for the White House.
But the tycoon is back, and once again the Democrats have fudged their four-year opportunity to find a better candidate: Harris, the great hope of 2020, hasn’t showed up well.
Behind the Democrats’ apparent discomfort with Biden (he could say the wrong thing, fall in the wrong place, sniff someone or shake the hand of an imaginary friend), there was a moderate level of elite satisfaction with the status quo. The president was a convenient figure for most of the players in American big politics: the military-industrial complex, considered a Republican stronghold, is getting rich from the Ukrainian conflict; IT companies are perfectly integrated into the techno-geopolitical confrontation with China; hydrocarbon producers, who feared that Biden’s “green agenda” would cause problems for them, feel quite secure against the background of the reorientation of the Western European energy market.
Biden’s fellow party members on the Democratic left may not be entirely happy with him, but on the whole they have done well under him in terms of economic initiatives and social reforms.
But as the main event, Election Day on 5 November, became closer, Biden’s entourage found it increasingly difficult to hide their man’s condition. And it is doubly hard to carry a suitcase without a handle when Trump is hot on your heels. The last straw was the failed debate. The administration’s awkward attempts to downplay the debacle were soon replaced by statements from even the most loyal of Biden loyalists: ‘Joe has to go.’
The distance from claims that ‘the president is fine, his handshake is firm’ to ‘I’m tired, I’m leaving’ was shorter than one might expect. The stakes are too high, and there’s no time to stand on ceremony.
Biden risks going down in history with a negative reputation – it’s the home straight that counts in political lives, and he hasn’t been on top form lately, no matter how you look at it. Sic transit gloria mundi. But all evaluations are eventually clouded by comparison with those who come before and after.
Perhaps very soon everyone will remember him as not being that bad after all.
This article was first published by Kommersant, and was translated and edited by the RT team.
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