Begging Your Pardon: Joe Biden's Fall From Grace

“This is America’s day. This is democracy’s day. A day of history and hope. Of renewal and resolve.” 

While the immediate recipients of Joe Biden’s inauguration speech were a lonely field of 200,000 American flags representing those absent due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the president stood tall: for those who cast their ballots for him amidst a tumultuous election campaign, Biden represented a return to normalcy and principle after a dizzying four years under Donald Trump. Could Biden have predicted how soon he would fall from grace? Fast forward to the present. President Biden is a mere shell of the political figure who inspired the largest election turnout in over a century. The Guardian even characterized his downfall as a blend of some of Shakespeare’s greatest hits: a sprinkling of plotting from Julius Caesar, a healthy dash of denials of fate from King Lear, and a touch of a suspension of reality from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Biden will leave the White House as one of the most unpopular presidents in modern U.S. history: according to FiveThirtyEight, his approval ratings are a miserable 37%.  What went wrong?

Let’s start with Biden’s 2020 primary campaign: He promoted himself as “a bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leaders.  Given the concerns about his age, Biden fashioned himself as a long-standing pillar of stability and political virtue passing the torch to a new cohort of politicians that embodied a hope for a new, better America. Indeed, Politico reported that a prominent campaign advisor believed that Biden would be a “good transition figure” and that if elected, “won’t be running for re-election.”

Therefore, when Biden bested Trump in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, he had an incredibly rare and coveted opportunity: to mold his legacy into that of a modern-day Cincinnatus. A skilled statesman and military leader, Cincinnatus secured himself a position among the most respected leaders of all time due to his selfless nature and devotion to the Roman Republic, guiding the Republic through crisis before voluntarily relinquishing his power to humbly return to his farm. History has witnessed the emergence of the reflections of those who modeled themselves as Cincinnatus-like figures, with the most notable variation of this theme being George Washington, who set a crucial precedent after stepping down after just one term in office. Yet Biden would spurn the chance to place his name in that illustrious pantheon of heroes: he formally announced his re-election bid in April 2023. Critics quickly noticed  warning signs like Biden’s age—if re-elected, he would be 82 on inauguration day. While Biden dismissed doubts of his physical and emotional fitness by releasing various medical exams, an increasing confusion of facts in speeches and verbal stumbles on stage finally peaked on June 27, 2024, when millions of viewers witnessed his political career come to a painfully abrupt end on live television.  That June 2024 debate was meant to be Biden against Trump, but with blunder after blunder, it seemed to be Biden destroying his own candidacy instead. While that debacle would end up being what would force Biden to finally see the writing on the wall and formally withdraw from the Presidential race, it came far too late: Democrats could not call a new convention, let alone let candidates compete to replace him. Biden isn’t fully to blame, though.  Democrats realized too late that a Biden re-election campaign would only be a liability.  Instead, Democrats had to stick with Vice President Kamala Harris, whose struggle to distance herself from the Biden administration hindered her already short campaign. While the Democratic Party itself is partially at blame, as they failed to thoroughly reassess Biden’s candidacy in advance of the primary season, Biden still cannot be subtracted from the equation of his failure entirely: he allowed for his own personal greed—likely fueled by desire to beat Trump once again—to supersede logic, and it would be this suspension from reality that would destroy not only his political identity, but leave his party to pick up the pieces of a disastrous election. 

Now in the final stretch of his presidency, and is set to leave the Oval Office in disgrace, the portrait of a tragic hero thwarted by the  gravitational appeal of power. The final nail in the coffin. A broken promise that took on the form of a presidential pardon. On December 1, Biden announced a full, unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, who faced sentencing for two federal cases: illegal gun ownership and a tax case involving tax evasion. Hunter has remained a constant thorn in his father’s reputation, and the president’s decision to pardon his son was immediately met with bipartisan backlash. Yet defenders of Biden will point out that controversial presidential pardons are nothing new: Richard Nixon was able to escape the legal repercussions of Watergate thanks to a pardon from Gerald Ford, and Charles Kushner found himself rescued by his son’s father in-law, Donald Trump. Rather, what makes Biden’s pardoning of Hunter so hard to swallow is that it involved him going back on his word: the president had previously sworn not to pardon his son out of respect for the authority of the justice system. Thus, Biden’s final hurrah as president ironically involved the same political corruption that Trump threatened to institutionalize and Biden promised to save America from.  

Biden was presented with a golden opportunity to be a Cincinnatus, but emerged from his time in office not as a selfless defender of American democracy, but as a broken individual who Democratic strategist James Carville has titled as “the most tragic figure in modern American politics”: and rightfully so. As Cincinnatus may form one bookend of history as a heroic model of virtue from knowing when to leave, Biden will likely go down in history as the other bookend of a tragically cautionary tale of how a desperation to hold onto power can not only result in decisively losing it, but losing one’s own dignity in the process.