America cannot afford to sweep Biden’s blunders under the carpet

Democrats and much of the US media should take a moment to apologise to Robert Hur. The special counsel appointed to look into Joe Biden’s misplaced classified documents was pilloried in March 2024 for having observed what everyone knew to be true: that the US president was “an elderly man with a poor memory”. Depicting the leak of Hur’s comments as a frontal attack on his 2024 candidacy, Biden promptly gave an address in which he mixed up the name of the presidents of Egypt and Mexico. In retrospect, that minor squall seems almost Monty Pythonesque. At the time, Hur’s leaked conclusion was treated as malign propaganda. 

We should also apologise to Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes, the Wall Street Journal reporters, who had the temerity to report that “behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping”. The two could have added that the same deterioration was visible through open doors on the rare occasions that Biden’s staff allowed him out in public. Yet the pair had their professional integrity dragged through the mud on social media, the press and on TV. 

Biden’s praetorian guard, or “the Politburo”, as authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson point out that White House staff called them in their new book, Original Sin, exacted a steep toll on anyone who had the nerve to point out that the emperor was naked. On several occasions I wrote columns gently pointing out that Biden’s age was a political liability, such as here in February of last year and here in late 2022. The truth was plain for months, even years, before Biden’s legendary screw up in his first debate with Donald Trump on June 27 last year.

For months before that ghastly moment, crushing majorities of the US public, including more than half of Democrats, said he was too old to serve a second term. Tapper and Thompson, and the authors of two similar books, which are collectively reviewed here by my former boss and colleague, Lionel Barber are now being attacked as tools of Trump for rehashing that 2024 controversy. But their critics repeat the same mistake today that they made at the time: this is why Trump is now president. If Democrats want to start winning again, they had better understand their culpability in Trump’s 2024 victory. Enforcing a code of omerta is not a good way of showcasing your passion for democracy. 

It is made worse by the fact that Biden has disclosed that he is being treated for an aggressive prostate cancer that could prove to be terminal. Nobody likes to criticise anyone who is suffering in the twilight of his life, still less one who is fundamentally decent and who did many good things when he was president. But the future of the US republic is too important to sweep his blunder under the carpet. The fact that Biden two weeks ago felt the need to go on TV and insist that he would have won last November had he not dropped out, underlines the point. The fate of US democracy was captive to an elderly man’s vanities — the same man who had promised in 2020 that he would be a “bridge” to the next generation. As David Plouffe, the Democratic campaign operative, told Tapper and Thompson: “He totally fucked us”. I believe all of the above journalists have done a service by reporting in detail on how exactly Biden did that. 

I’m turning this week to my traditional Swampian sparring partner, Rana Foroohar. Rana, if Biden had stepped down with ample time for others to compete in an open primary, would Trump now be president? I guess that’s impossible to answer but your best stab would be interesting.

Recommended reading

• My column this week, Maga’s widening split: Bannon vs the populists. “What Trump’s Republicans want enacted is the most anti-blue collar budget in memory,” I write. “Call it Hunger Games 2025. It is an odd way of repaying their voters.” 

• Now that Elon Musk has sort of left town, Peggy Hollinger’s piece on whether his Starlink satellite company has won the space race is important reading. Amazon’s Blue Origin will take a year or two to get fully online. In the meantime, Musk is making hay. The Republican budget, incidentally, included $25bn down payment on Trump’s “Golden Dome” of which Musk is expected to be chief beneficiary. 

• The Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook has an intriguing and counter-intuitive essay in Foreign Policy on why Trump is getting the Middle East right. I am still unconvinced but agree with Cook that any successful US strategy in the region must begin with repudiating what went before, as Trump has done. 

• Talking of the CFR, I had a great Zbig book launch at its New York headquarters last week in conversation with David Ignatius, which you can watch here. I also loved this panel with Jane Harman and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s oldest son, Ian, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last Monday. Since then, I’ve hit the New York Times bestseller’s list, although only at number 15. I want people to read this book!

Rana Foroohar replies

Ed, it’s a great pleasure to be back in the Swamp with you. First, I must issue a mea culpa. I was one of the many Democrats who didn’t believe Biden was too old to run. I had the blinders on for a couple of reasons. First, I just loved the man’s policies and his team. I thought — and still believe — that he was taking the Democratic party back where it needed to be, towards working people and their needs rather than a kind of “abundance” liberalism that looks too much like a kinder, gentler supply side economics to me. Second, my best sources in the White House told me he was fine, again and again. This goes to the point you make above. Democrats have to start being honest with each other, and the public.

So, on to your question. I think it’s more or less impossible to answer, in part because primary seasons are about bake-offs, and during bake-offs we get to see the warts and all sides of potential candidates in ways that we don’t beforehand. Things come out about them, good and bad. We see how they act under extreme pressure, and whether they are able to rise to the occasion or not. These things are often impossible to predict. But given that, and with a caveat for any dark horse candidates that might have emerged, I don’t see anyone in the field that I think could have beaten Trump. And that’s not because there aren’t good people out there, but because Democrats didn’t — and haven’t — decided what they want to be when they grow up.

As I wrote in this column a few weeks back, the Democrats can’t beat Trump if they don’t know what they stand for. Are they populists or neoliberals? Will FDR or Clinton be their North Star? While the “abundance” crowd says it’s regulation that’s the problem, voters seem to be turning out for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at rallies, which argues for maintaining the Bidenesque focus on concentrated power. Until the party decides which way it will tack, I don’t think it can unify in a way that will make victory possible.