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Your guide to what the 2024 US elections mean for Washington and the world
If the essence of the Greek tragedy is that the hero is destroyed by his flaws, Joe Biden receives star fame. He defeated Donald Trump, took on Russia, enacted more reforms than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and bequeathed a robust economy. That made Biden a hero to the American left and beyond. However, most of your achievements will now be erased. His legacy is the return of Trump. After Biden, the deluge. To a large extent, he himself is to blame.
The flaw of the Greek tragic hero is arrogance. Last week, Biden saying he could have won the 2024 election if he had stayed in the race. This was despite the fact that only 27 percent of Americans Last June he thought he had the cognitive ability to be president again. It is more likely that Trump would have won a much bigger victory. Whatever blame Kamala Harris deserves, her vote was within 1.5 percentage points of Trump’s.
Much remains to be reported about the conspiracy of silence surrounding Biden’s waning capabilities. Although he was shielded from press conferences and other spontaneous events, it was an open secret in Washington that his mind was on the decline. Biden’s internal cabinet, made up of family members and former collaborators, should take some of the blame. It was also a media failure. The rare journalist who reported the situation risked loss of access and ostracism on liberal social media.
But the responsibility falls on Biden. Had she kept her promise to be a one-term “bridge” to the post-Trump era, the Democratic Party would have had time to find a stronger candidate than Harris, someone who could have distanced herself from what was unpopular in the economy. Biden. Instead, an isolated Biden was isolated from public sentiment. Without a doubt, the biggest swing toward Harris in November came from voters who paid more attention to the news. Meanwhile, Trump swept the low-information vote by overwhelming margins, regardless of race, income and gender. All right-thinking Americans are with you, one supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate who lost twice in the 1950s. Yes, but I need a majority, he joked.
Nobody said politics was fair. Biden helped ensure that the post-Covid American rebound was stronger than that of any other major economy. But a nostalgic country associated Trump with the pre-Covid era. People blamed Biden for inflation, and his stimulus helped fuel it. But voters didn’t give him credit for the rest. A clear majority of Americans surveyed by Gallup this week said the United States had lost ground in six areas during Biden’s term. It was about the economy, federal debt, immigration, income inequality, America’s standing in the world, and crime.
In only one area did a majority say progress was made during Biden’s presidency: “the situation of gay, lesbian and transgender people.” No data could better capture the Biden administration’s narrative and leadership weakness. Until he retired in July, Biden continued to insist on the threat Trump posed to democracy, even though his team had known for months that democracy was not among voters’ top five concerns.
But it is the nobility of the flawed hero that gives Biden a Greek ending. Virtue and arrogance were present in his personal tragedies. When Biden was vice president, his net worth was estimated at about half a million dollars. After nearly half a century in public life, that was barely a rounding error. No informed Americans thought Biden was corrupt. But he turned a blind eye to his son, Hunter, who sought to monetize the family name even as he was slipping into addiction. Biden paid a high price for that indulgence. Like Othello, Biden loved not wisely but too well.
Ukrainians will remember Biden warmly. The same cannot be said for the Palestinians. Amid the rubble of the worst civilian death toll in years, the Gaza Strip is littered with US munitions supplied by Biden. He believes he was acting nobly to prevent even greater casualties and stop a war in the Middle East. By suppressing Vladimir Putin’s military resources in Ukraine, Biden may also have contributed to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But much of the global south sees Biden as a man who failed to live up to the values he promised. That Trump is seen as a different version of Biden in much of the world – not a radical departure – may be the harshest verdict of all.
Biden promised four years ago to be “the ally of light, not darkness.” He meant it. As Biden bids farewell to the nation on Wednesday night, only he will know what it feels like to turn the stage over to Trump.