Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 21/strong>
by Ashfaque Swapan
Today, Donald J Trump takes over the White House. If his recent antics are any guide, it is quite likely there’ll hardly be a dull moment. With his proposal to include Canada as the 51st state of the US and capture the Panama Canal and Greenland, Trump is already in the eye of a media storm.
Before the Trump media frenzy completely sucks up the oxygen, let’s take stock of the reputation of his predecessor.
I still remember the joy of supporters that greeted the election of President Joe Biden four years ago. It wasn’t just his supporters who welcomed a return to normalcy, civility, and quite frankly, a degree of sanity to the White House.
Many people heaved a sigh of relief. No more wildly provocative tweets at 3 am to rile up Trump’s enemies. Farewell to the parade of dubious cabinet appointees, a surprising number of whom had to quit under a cloud. No more outrageous gossip coming out of disgruntled former associates which turned the White House into tabloid territory.
Finally, we had a proper president to do justice to the gravitas of arguably the most powerful office in the world.
What a difference a four-year term makes. As Biden left office, Americans didn’t exactly burst into tears.
According to a CNN Poll, he left office with a 36 percent approval rating. It’s a huge climbdown from his 60 percent approval rating at the beginning of his term.
“Americans broadly view Biden’s four years in office more as a failure than as a success,” CNN reports.
Yet his supporters claim—with some justice—that Biden’s achievements are considerable. He steered the nation through the Covid crisis and left the country with an economy in a relatively robust state, which is an envy for the rest of the world.
“In his first two years in office, Biden passed a major bill to rescue the economy from COVID, a bipartisan law to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, the first gun-safety law in decades, the largest climate investment in history, a law to lower the price of prescription drugs, as well as bills to help veterans and spur the semiconductor industry,” writes Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to President Barack Obama.
Then why are Americans so unhappy with Biden?
There are multiple reasons, including Biden’s critical flaws.
Biden’s predicament must be considered in the context of the brutal political landscape in the Western world. Massive post-pandemic disaffection has left incumbents buffeted by populist outrage. UK Conservatives have been unceremoniously kicked out of power; Canada’s Justin Trudeau has quit; Germany’s Olaf Scholz is likely on his way out, and France’s Emmanuel Macron is teetering.
In the US, inflation led to a sharp rise in grocery and gas prices that hit voters’ pocketbooks.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that US media, like its population, is increasingly polarised. For avid watchers of right-wing Fox News, their view of any leader from the Democratic Party is likely to be jaundiced. But it is also true that Biden’s own shortcomings provided the critical impetus to his downfall.
The US president’s bully pulpit is an enormously powerful tool; yet Biden hardly used it to make his case. In fact, he engaged in fewer press conferences and media interviews than the previous seven presidents, going all the way back to Reagan. Trump, in comparison to his predecessor, had twice as many interactions with the press.
There is no denying the dreadful fact that towards the end of his presidency, he was often too senile, and an unduly deferential media was complicit in maintaining the laughable fiction that Biden was fully functional. Long before his disastrous debate performance with Trump, there were alarming signs of his senility on TV including a propensity to go on tangents or offer a phantom handshake, among other embarrassing quirks.
Biden would have done himself and his party a huge favour by declaring himself a one-term president from the get-go. Instead, in a fit of extraordinarily selfish hubris, Biden chose to remain until his party elites had to force him to leave. His recent claim that he could have won the election is mind-boggling. Biden also tarnished his own legacy—in my view irrevocably—when he pardoned his son Hunter Biden. Even more egregious was a blanket indemnity for Hunter—a terrible moral descent for a man who once epitomised the rule of law against the much more wayward Trump.
History offers some telling clues about Biden’s moral frailty. Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign crashed and burned following accusations that he had plagiarised a speech of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and exaggerated his academic record.
Beyond the US, Biden’s reputation will be permanently stained for his complicity in Israel’s unconscionable genocide of Palestinians. He may claim credit for the recent ceasefire breakthrough between Hamas and Israel. But the fact remains that the ceasefire deal was ready in May; why did it get signed now? Reports suggest that Trump, waiting in the wings, was ready to tell Israel who’s the boss. News reports suggest Trump envoy Steven Witcoff met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and twisted his arm. For all his huffing and puffing, Biden was too timid to take on Netanyahu, and much of his reported anger was performative.
A deeper look at Biden’s long-time record reveals a streak of warmongering tendencies. As a US senator from Delaware, he was gung-ho for years on a massive US attack on Iraq. When UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s principled stand undermined his phony argument for destroying Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Biden attacked Ritter viciously.
For most of the world, excluding the delusional bubble in the US and its mostly European allies of the “rules-based order,” America’s blind support for Ukraine and attacks on Russian President Vladimir Putin reek of sanctimonious hypocrisy when one considers its coolness to the vicious attacks of Saudi Arabia and its allies on Yemen and Israel’s terrible slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon.
Even in his farewell speech, Biden’s warning against the rise of an oligarchy in the US, while true, carries little moral weight.
“The very richest Americans are among the biggest winners from President Joe Biden’s time in office, despite his farewell address warning of an ‘oligarchy’ and a ‘tech industrial complex’ that threaten U.S. democracy,” Bloomberg reports.
“The 100 wealthiest Americans got more than $1.5 trillion richer over the last four years, with tech tycoons including Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg leading the way… The top 0.1% gained more than $6 trillion.”
The New York Times offers a devastating appraisal of Biden’s legacy. “President Biden ran for the White House promising to be a transitional figure, then once he got there began thinking of himself as a transformational one. But after a tumultuous four years in office, it turns out he was really neither,” Peter Baker writes in The New York Times.
“Instead, Mr. Biden will end up in the history books as an interregnum between two terms of Donald Trump, a break in the middle of a chaotic period of change, for good or ill. Mr. Biden had hoped to make Mr. Trump an asterisk in the American story, soon to be forgotten. Now he will be the one trying to make his case for posterity.”
Author is a writer and editor based in Atlanta, US/Views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
