Joe Biden Is Our Greatest Living President

On the most unlikely great president in modern history.

(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: Shepard Sherbell/CORBIS SABA/Corbis, J. David Ake, MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

A president gets, at most, two lines above the fold on his Wikipedia page. That’s it. That’s how history judges them.

Here is Joe Biden’s legacy: He beat back America’s first authoritarian attempt. And when he realized that he could not do it a second time, he stepped away so someone else could.

This is enough to make him—already, today, on July 21, 2024—our greatest living president.

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Biden’s presidency was unexpected. Prior to 2020, there had been nothing in his 47-year career to suggest that he was more than a pleasant, ambitious, Irish pol from central casting. He had been a senator, and a man running for president, over the course of four decades. His selection as Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008 seemed like a nice capstone for a rather average career in national politics.

For the first two years of Trump’s presidency, no one expected Biden to challenge him.

But the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville became a hinge-point in which this ordinary politician found his moment.

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History had its eye on Joe Biden. Now it has its eye on the rest of us. The coming weeks are going to be wall-to-wall history. Come and navigate it with us.

This is the time. These are your people. The only way through is together.

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People often forget that Joe Biden led the 2020 presidential race almost wire-to-wire.

Biden led the Democratic primary campaign for all but a brief period between Iowa and South Carolina. He won every debate he participated in. After securing the nomination, he opened up a large lead on the incumbent president and never looked back. His final victory over Trump was close in the sense that the Electoral College made it seem close. But it was a modern landslide. Biden won more votes than anyone who has ever run for president and won the highest percentage of the popular vote since 2004 (and the second highest since 1988).

He beat Donald Trump like a drum. Then, he beat back Trump’s attempts to overturn the election—both legal and illegal. And finally, after Trump attempted a coup, Biden lowered the temperature for the entire nation by refusing to engage directly with Trump and welcoming those Republicans who were still committed to democracy.

That all seems inevitable from the vantage point of 2024. It wasn’t. Joe Biden, the vain old warhorse, became something bigger than himself. At the greatest moment of peril since Reconstruction, he became the man America needed.

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Biden’s administration was not perfect, but was largely successful. 

He passed several significant pieces of bipartisan legislation. He fixed the COVID vaccine rollout (which Trump botched) and drove a stake through the heart of the pandemic. He achieved the kind of soft landing on inflation that economists dream about. His handling of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the single most effective management of a foreign crisis since the end of the Cold War. 

But Wikipedia doesn’t care about your CHIPS Act, or your Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan, or your Inflation Reduction Act. It doesn’t care about NATO expansion.

It cares about the big stuff.

And the other big thing is what Biden did today.

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Since June 27, it has been clear that Joe Biden could not continue as his party’s presidential nominee. The debate revealed that he was physically compromised. That he no longer possessed the ability to wage a vigorous campaign against an ongoing authoritarian attempt.

The only question was when Biden would step aside.

And the fact that this was the only question is a testament to Biden’s character.

Because giving up the chance to be president is not something which is often done by the kind of man who becomes president.

Biden became the man America needed at a dark moment in our history. 

Then, when America needed someone else, Biden became the man who was willing to step away. 

I’m not sure which of these transformations was more extraordinary.

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Presidents tend to be larger than life: Reagan, Clinton, Obama, Trump. Biden was never more than life-sized. Maybe it was the almost accidental nature of his presidency. Maybe it was the large and painful personal losses fate had imposed on him. Maybe it was because he was already an old man when he ascended to the nation’s highest office.

But Biden was never bigger than his office.

I suspect that is precisely why he became a great president.