A Word About Joe Biden
The ex-president seems preoccupied with how history will remember his legacy. The human tragedy is that he is unlikely to find out.
Somber one today. Let’s get right into it. Happy Monday.
Joe Biden’s Uncertain Legacy
by Andrew Egger
The news of Joe Biden’s cancer—prostate, stage 4, metastatic to the bone—is a sledgehammer. It’s also a Rorschach. Some see the story and focus on the human tragedy: the father now afflicted with the disease that claimed the life of his firstborn son.
Others can’t help seeing it—particularly given the ongoing stream of revelations about the yearslong coverup of Biden’s failing health—as yet another reaffirmation of the former president’s hubris. If things had gone as Biden had hoped, he’d be announcing this diagnosis four months into a second four-year term. How could such a thing have gone unnoticed? And how could he ever have thought he was up to the task?
But I don’t want to belabor the latter point, which is a somewhat pointless exercise—not to mention a bit grotesque at this moment. No, Biden shouldn’t have run again, as this news confirms yet again. Yes, he and his aides must account for why they insisted he could—and why they seemingly chose not to have him screened for prostate cancer while he was in office. But however much blame they shoulder, it all comes to the same thing now: The voters picked Trump. We are where we are.
Instead I want to linger for a moment on a different element of the story: the element of legacy.
Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton. The two George Bushes. Barack Obama. All the presidents I’ve seen in my lifetime were blessed or cursed to live for a while alongside their legacies—to see the outcomes that their successes or failures set in motion.
Some lived long enough to see their legacies go through multiple arcs. Carter, who spent many post-presidential decades as a political punchline, eventually saw himself rediscovered as an exemplar of the sort of decent, devout, and unassuming politician we now desperately lack.
Others would scarcely have imagined what twists their legacies would take after their deaths. Reagan went out in 2004 the undisputed, universally beloved godfather of the Republican party—only for “zombie Reaganism” to become a term of derision in that same party a few years later.
Biden, who left office frail and fading as the oldest president in American history, was always unlikely to get to walk very far alongside his own legacy. The news of his serious cancer foreshortens that scarce time. Think of how it must eat at him. To have faced professional failures and personal tragedies and struggled doggedly on, to have ascended to the presidency at a moment of grave national peril to bring the nation back from the brink, only then to see Trumpism triumphant again, in no small part due to his own weakness and vanity. My God, wouldn’t you want to know how the story ends? Wouldn’t you want to try and mold it?
Last week, Biden shuffled onto the set of The View for a painful interview in which he repeatedly lost the ends of sentences—Jill Biden, seated beside him, cut in to finish them for him with the ease of long practice. He preposterously claimed, for the umpteenth preposterous time, that he could have defeated Trump last year. Why would Biden subject himself to this, if not for a need to shape his legacy while he still can?
There are, in fact, two Biden legacies. The first is his legacy as a foil for Donald Trump—the figure of resistance against the MAGA zeitgeist who was worthy of the fight once but not twice. The more Trump succeeds in defacing America’s liberal democracy and fundamentally altering the character of our nation, the more Biden will come to be defined by the sole fact of his having allowed it to happen.
The second is the quieter legacy, the legacy of the presidency Biden actually wanted—one defined not by the cataclysmic ideological clash against Trump and his allies, but by the diligent humdrum work of public service. This was the president who helped guide the country out of a generational pandemic and back to normalcy and prosperity, who presided over boring-but-useful legislation like the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act, and who preached faith in the American experiment when so many were losing it.
This is, of course, a somewhat sanitized version of the Biden presidency. There were serious policy failures too. But that’s the thing about legacies: You get to litigate them. Biden in all likelihood won’t have that luxury.
Still, if the MAGA fever ever breaks, this second Joe Biden may yet be the one history will remember. It’s certainly the one he hopes they’ll remember. It’s how he closed his swan-song speech last summer at the Democratic National Convention: “Let me know in my heart when my days are through—America, America, I gave my best to you.”
Which Joe Biden will history remember? The brutal truth is we can’t know. It certainly isn’t up to him. But we can pray alongside him it will get to be the latter.
In the Spirit of Heaney
by William Kristol
If life were a novel we know how things would have gone. Donald Trump would have come along and won the presidency in 2016, putting much that is admirable and noble about the American experiment at risk. But then in 2020 he would have been defeated decisively by a dynamic young man or woman, a representative of the next generation. This victory would have closed the book on Trump’s political career, but also on three decades of baby boomer presidents, and would have ushered in a bright new future for America.
Life is not a bad novel, but it does take novelistic twists. Trump was defeated instead by someone older than he. And that man, Joe Biden, may have been the only person who could have defeated Trump in 2020. So in 2020, the man met the moment.
On the other hand, it also turned out that Biden’s presidency wouldn’t mark the end of the Trump era. It would be an interlude between two Trump terms.
This is not, I believe, fundamentally Biden’s fault. He was a decent president, and though slow to step aside in 2024, he ultimately did so. The fault of Trump’s return lies not with Biden (though his stubbornness didn’t help) but with the American people.
What this does mean, though, is that the Biden presidency will be viewed by historians not as a new beginning. It will be seen either as merely a brief interruption in American decline, or—hopefully!—as a prelude to a real reversal of that decline that could only truly be accomplished later.
Biden has long said that his favorite poet is the late Seamus Heaney, and he’s often quoted Heaney’s famous lines from his 1991 work, the Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes:
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Perhaps it’s too much to hope that a tidal wave of justice is going to rise up in America, and that hope and history will come to rhyme.
It might be more helpful, in thinking about the challenges we face, to recall this more prosaic counsel from Heaney’s charming 1996 commencement address at the University of North Carolina: “The next move is always the test. Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”
Heaney’s advice here to young men and women graduating college is less grand than his poetry in the Cure at Troy. But it happens to capture, I think, what is impressive about Biden’s life and political career. And it also captures the task and the test now before us: Not to await some tidal wave of justice to rise up, but to exhibit a hopeful and resolute determination to move against injustice and toward a better future—and then to move again, and then again.
AROUND THE BULWARK
If it’s Sunday… An interesting guest joins BILL KRISTOL for The Bulwark on Sunday. TOM MALINOWSKI digs into the Qatar jet and UAE crypto deals, and suggests the first may be a shakedown (not a benevolent gift) and the other a dangerous deal linked to Trump’s lifting AI chip restrictions.
How to Take Medicaid from Millions of Americans, in Less Than 72 Hours… There’s a reason Republicans are in such a rush to get Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through Congress, writes JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
Why Dems Are So Giddy About Trump’s Qatar Airliner Gift… They see the 747 plane as a symbol—and a chance to recreate the ‘culture of corruption’ charge against Republicans that worked so well in the past, observes LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
Trump’s SCOTUS Judges Humiliate Him… On George Conway Explains it All (to Sarah Longwell), the two talk about the Supreme Court case on nationwide injunctions, the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine birthright citizenship, and why a $400M plane from Qatar raises serious constitutional questions.
Quick Hits
ISRAEL SURGES FORWARD: How alarmingly aggressive has Israel’s “Gideon’s Chariots” operation been? Enough that even the Trump administration wants some diplomatic distance. Axios reports this morning that Vice President JD Vance decided against a possible stop in Israel this week because “he didn’t want his trip to suggest the Trump administration endorsed the Israeli decision to launch a massive operation at a time when the U.S. is pushing for a ceasefire and hostage deal.”
The plan, which Israel began to put into effect on Friday, calls for the forcible displacement of the entire population of Gaza to an unspecified “humanitarian zone” and the flattening of every remaining structure in the region. It has so far been marked by massively increased ground operations and bombardments over the past few days. Israel said that “dozens of terrorists” had been “eliminated” over the weekend, while Hamas said more than 160 people were killed across Gaza since Saturday.
For the civilians trapped in Gaza, ABC News reported this morning, conditions are “getting worse not day by day, but hour by hour as bombardments intensify and access to emergency care becomes nearly impossible.”
MUSK’S FADE: We’ve been writing for weeks now about the vanishing act of Elon Musk, who has gone from shadow president to administration afterthought in just a couple months. This morning, Politico brings the receipts:
On Truth Social, where Trump is known for sharing his unfiltered thoughts, the president used to mention Musk every few days but now has not posted about him in more than a month. Trump’s fundraising operation has largely ceased sending emails that name-check the Tesla CEO. The billionaire’s name, once a staple of White House briefings, now hardly gets mentioned at all. Even members of Congress have essentially dropped him from their newsletters.
Musk’s last major public appearance as a central administration figure was more than a month ago: the cabinet meeting at which he offered his latest revising down of DOGE’s budgetary savings, from a campaign-trail pledge of $2 trillion all the way to a (still wildly inflated) $150 billion.
Musk had been deeply unpopular in public polls all year, and the public plainly assessed that he was making a dog’s breakfast of DOGE. So it’s not that surprising that Trump would try to put him out to pasture. What is surprising is how little difficulty he’s apparently had in doing so. We’d have expected that Musk—with his monumental ego and public megaphone—might prove more difficult for Trump to shake off than the median Trumpworld hanger-on. Appears not.
FBWHY?: FBI director Kash Patel attempted to bring MAGA conspiracy theorists back to earth on Sunday with an interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo. The early reactions suggest he didn’t succeed. Both Patel and his deputy, former talk radio host Dan Bongino, have taken heat from the right over perceived inaction on fringe agenda items, like proving Hillary Clinton murdered Jeffrey Epstein or that the deep state engineered the Trump assassination attempts. The two tried to throw cold water on both topics in their Bartiromo interview, insisting that Epstein killed himself and that the Trump assassination attempts were each the work of lone gunmen. Instead of convincing the MAGA grassroots to back off, though, the interview seems to have convinced conspiracy theorists that the two FBI leaders have also been subsumed into the conspiracy theory themselves. “I call bullshit,” Alex Jones said. “Deep state traitor!” fumed a one-time Bongino fan.
—Will Sommer
Cheap Shots
In my opinion, the US would now be far, far better off with a President Biden - with or with out cancer or cognitive issues - than we are now with Trump. In a coma, Biden would be better. My cat would be better. The voters made a disasterous choice.
I don't know about "history," but I know how I will remember Joe Biden: As one of the most effective, humanistic, decent and unfairly dumped on presidents we've ever had.