Joe Biden Will Go Down as a Failed President
History will regard him as the man who lost America’s liberal democracy to an authoritarian
Joe Biden wrested the Oval Office from Donald Trump, the closest thing that the country had ever seen to an authoritarian. So his main task was to give his party its best shot at preventing Trump from becoming his successor and, if he did, then erecting as many roadblocks in his way to stop him (or any rogue president tempted to emulate Trump) from abusing his office’s awesome powers.
Biden failed on every count. To be sure, he restored some liberal norms and values that Trump gutted, resisting the tit-for-tat temptation. Still, history may well point to him as the man who lost American liberal democracy. Through acts of omission—and commission—he is leaving the country defenseless against Trump’s authoritarian depredations.
The congealing political wisdom for why Democrats lost the election is that Biden’s policies were out of touch with the median American voter. His border policies were too weak, social policies too woke, and economic policies, especially on trade, indifferent to the needs of working-class voters. In short, Democrats have become the party of the progressive, globalist elites who don’t care about “real” Americans, as per this median-voter thesis. If the party is to reverse its electoral fortunes, it needs to inject a good dose of economic and/or social populism, the thinking goes.
All of this is debatable: Biden’s border policies didn’t match Trump’s Zero Tolerance border cruelty—and he demonstrated some genuine signs of enlightened thinking to ensure more orderly flows—but he was no slouch when it came to keeping immigrants or foreign goods out. He lamentably continued many of Trump’s tariffs against China. As for wokeness, on at least one of its core issues, defunding the police, Biden refused to oblige, handing over $200 million in additional funding to local law enforcement to hire more cops.
But what is clear is that although Democrats tried to pit this election as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism, Biden never acted as if those were the stakes. If he had, he would have honored his original pledge not to seek a second term. Even as he touched 80 and his approval rating dipped to 39% (just a few points higher than George W. Bush’s after the Iraq War debacle and before Republicans spectacularly lost to Barack Obama), he declared he’d run again. This was an act of supreme unseriousness. Given that signs of his decline were painfully obvious by then, it undercut the notion that Trump was uniquely unfit for office (although there is no question that a cognitively impaired Biden would have been less dangerous than an egomaniac with a record of vandalizing the country to stay in power).
The most serious damage this decision did was that it prevented Democrats from holding a primary to field test the candidate best suited to communicating the stakes of the elections to voters. Kamala Harris was a decent candidate and, given the short time she had to mount a campaign, she put up a respectable showing, losing to Trump by less than 1.5 points and preventing him from reaching the 50% majority vote threshold at a time when incumbents all over the world were facing headwinds due to post-Covid inflation.
But the truth is, Harris could simply not be a serious emissary for the “saving liberal democracy” cause because her boss had done precious little to advance it during his term.
Trump’s first term was a stress test that exposed the cracks in the American system that everybody knew he was going to exploit if reelected. Indeed, he has been practically blaring his plans to politicize executive agencies by firing civil servants and replacing them with loyalists who’d facilitate his plans to deploy the administrative state against his political enemies and cover up his self-dealing and corruption—to say nothing of using the military against protesters and conduct mass deportations.
Given that it had been clear that the GOP, undeterred by the Jan. 6 insurrection, was very likely going to make Trump its nominee, Biden should have used his bully pulpit day in and day out to elevate the salience of “democracy strengthening“—his words—and then doggedly worked with Congress to build bulwarks against executive abuse. If he was looking for a legislative blueprint, he could have consulted Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith’s and New York University’s Bob Bauer’s 2020 After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. The bipartisan duo (Goldsmith worked in the Bush administration and Bauer in Obama’s) offered a comprehensive but realistic agenda for systemic reforms to rebuild the guardrails against abuses of presidential powers. Their hope was that just as President Nixon’s Watergate scandal served as a national wake-up call that led to serious efforts to ensure greater executive accountability, something similar would happen after Trump’s far, far more serious abuses. For example, post-Nixon, Congress passed—and President Jimmy Carter signed—the Inspector General Act that created nonpartisan, independent watchdogs within various federal agencies to keep an eye on corruption, cronyism, and political abuses in their ministries. (Trump of course trashed all of that, firing inspectors general who dared to expose his incompetence and corruption.)
But Biden did not champion any such reform effort. Worse, he abused his executive authority while actively thwarting congressional initiatives to rein it in and restore the wildly out-of-whack balance of power between the two branches of government.
He issued an executive memorandum to use the Defense Production Act, a 1950 Korean War-era law, to divert taxpayer dollars for solar and other clean-energy domestic manufacturers in the name of “energy independence,” after Congress rejected his request for funding as part of the 2022 Build Back Better bill. And then, a year later, he used his executive authority to create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps, a green jobs training program to recruit 20,000 young adults to build trails, plant trees, and install solar panels, after Congress refused.
If you think this is just ho-hum presidential norm breaking, here are two Biden actions that touched Trumpian territory. He used the pandemic as a pretext to circumvent Congress’ power of the purse and hand totally unrelated emergency loan forgiveness to college students. In this, he borrowed—rather than repudiated—Trump’s outrageous—and unprecedented—move to divert defense funds to build the Great Wall of Trump by declaring a border emergency. Worse, Trump’s $10 billion price tag paled in comparison to Biden’s $60 billion one, a gap that Trump will no doubt strive to close in his next term.
But the cherry on the cake was Biden’s “full and unconditional pardon” of his son, Hunter Biden, without going through any review and vetting by the Department of Justice. The president’s rationale is that Trump has openly stated his intention to abuse his law enforcement powers to destroy his son—not a paranoid fear given that right-wing news channels and influencers have been baying for the blood of the “Biden crime family” since Biden set foot in the White House. Still, it is an abuse of clemency powers—which are meant not for self-protection but to serve the public interest, as Protect Democracy’s Amanda Carpenter has argued.
This was deeply problematic in and of itself. But in the wake of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling handing a president sweeping pardon powers—subject neither to congressional oversight nor judicial review—the Hunter pardon will severely undermine perhaps the only check left on Trump’s abuse of pardon powers: public outrage. This is not a theoretical worry. In his first term, Trump invented a new category of “henchmen pardons“ that rewarded criminality on his behalf. For example, he pardoned his campaign adviser, Roger Stone, who was convicted by a jury for, among other things, witness tampering in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian election interference investigation before he could serve a single day of his 40-month sentence. Yet Biden’s self-serving move will make it much easier for the right-wing media ecosystem to whatabout and sow public cynicism when—not if—Trump extends an open invitation for lawbreaking for his personal or political benefit.
But it gets worse. From the beginning to the very last minute of its term, not only did the Biden administration do precious little to build guardrails against executive power, it actively thwarted congressional efforts to do so.
Consider just three of its actions:
In 2022, the Biden administration opposed including Section 516 in the National Defense Authorization Act that was a direct response to the abusive Trump-era deployments of the National Guard in Washington, D.C. to suppress the George Floyd protests. Trump exploited a gaping loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act that bars deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement and not only deployed the D.C. National Guard that he controls in the city, against its mayor’s wishes, but also troops from a dozen or so friendly red states. According to Joseph Nunn and Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center, this was the first time that National Guard troops from one jurisdiction had been deployed in another without its consent and without the troops first being put under federal control. Section 516 would have proscribed such inter-state deployments unless a jurisdiction agreed but the Biden administration, remarkably, stripped it from the final bill.
Last spring, it launched a fierce campaign to kill bipartisan reforms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702, a 9/11-era provision that allows warrantless surveillance of Americans. The provision has to be renewed by Congress every two years and it gives federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies the authority to gather electronic communication of Americans corresponding with “suspicious” foreigners without having to show probable cause. The FBI under both Republican and Democratic presidents has routinely—and illicitly—sifted through Section 702 information to implicate Americans in criminal probes that have nothing to do with national security. Last time, the Trump administration snooped on Black Lives Matter protestors using Section 702-acquired information. But this time, Trump is coming into office with an explicit retribution agenda that Kash Patel, his pick to head the FBI, has shown every intention of pursuing aggressively. Basically, by successfully opposing Section 702 reforms, the Biden administration has given Trump and Patel a handy tool to dig up dirt on dissidents, opponents, and anyone it wants to harass or destroy.
This December, after Trump was elected, the Biden administration handed him a parting gift by lifting not a figure to push a bipartisan effort in both the House and the Senate to enact reforms of a president’s emergency powers. A president has the authority to unilaterally declare an emergency and acquire vast powers to ignore constitutionally protected rights. But thanks to a 1983 Supreme Court ruling, Congress has very little authority to veto such declarations. Virtually all presidents of both parties have abused this authority to do an end run around Congress. But with Trump there is the added danger that he’ll use them to dismantle democracy itself. After all, points out Goitein, last time Trump’s allies urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress resistance to his remaining in office. This time, as Thor Benson notes in Wired, Trump could go full authoritarian and use these powers to censor or shut down the internet in certain areas, freeze bank accounts, restrict transportation, and more. Both chambers were working on bills that would have automatically sunset a declaration of emergency after 30 days—instead of letting it linger for decades as is currently the case—unless Congress reauthorized it for a year (at the end of which it would have to be renewed again) and impose other constraints regarding how a president used these powers. These reforms had momentum and, had Biden shown some leadership, they might well have reached the finish line. But he chose to sit it out.
Some reforms to fireproof the executive did manage to get through despite the administration’s behind-the-scenes opposition. (In The UnPopulist’s “Fireproofing the Presidency” series, we have been developing an agenda for reforms and will continue to do so.) One was a provision in an omnibus spending bill that required more transparency in the spending of congressionally appropriated funds—a provision inspired by Trump’s effort to withhold authorized aid to Ukraine until it dished out dirt on none other than the Biden family itself.
But why has the Biden administration been so blasé, even hostile, to efforts to reining in executive power given the potential for Trump’s mischief?
At first, at least, it wanted maximal authority for itself to advance its policy priorities and deliver quick results—contain the pandemic, secure the border (it had to be prodded through lawsuits to end the Trump-era Title 42 executive order that led to 4.2 million expulsions of migrants in the first two years in the name of fighting Covid), and put money in the pockets of college students. Its thinking evidently was that if it used executive power to get things done, voters would reward it in 2024—and keep Trump out of office. In other words, it thought it could abuse executive power to stop an abusive executive.
The other reason is reflexive turf-protection and hanging on to the power of the office no matter how it was amassed and how much it departs from the balance-of-power that the Constitution envisioned. “The Biden administration did not see the hardening of institutions as a political priority and let the normal bureaucratic mentality expand executive authority by default,” laments Soren Dayton, Niskanen Center’s Director of Governance, who has closely followed the administration’s foot-dragging for the past four years in frustration.
In other words, Biden remained stuck in an old mindset of governing in which enacting his policy priorities rather than addressing the new threats to America’s liberal democracy was prized. Hence, he is leaving the country deeply vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover. He warned that Trump was an existential danger, but he never took his own warning seriously and so couldn’t convince the voters to do so either.
Every country experiencing democratic backsliding can testify that their authoritarian leader was far more determined and dangerous in his or her second term. Biden had an opportunity to help America break that pattern and put some solid guardrails around the office of the executive. Unlike other countries facing similar threats, he would have been aided in his effort by America’s strong liberal democratic institutions built over 250 years, not an asset any other country in the world has. Alas, he squandered it.
The country might pay the price for it, but he will too when history judges him.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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I think two things are being missed in the discourse surrounding this piece—and, more broadly, in the preliminary discourse surrounding Biden's presidential legacy.
First, the assessment of a presidential tenure has to be evaluatively tethered to the exigencies of the moment. In absolute terms, Biden's presidency contains many highlights. But when we consider his four years in relation to the authoritarian pall that Trump and his movement have cast over society, a pall that has only grown since he first appeared on the scene and that now hovers more threateningly above our politics than it ever has before, Biden's electoral and governing missteps that Shikha pointed out are incredibly damning. The country didn't need Obama's third term—the country needed Biden to insist on an electoral succession plan calibrated for maximum effectiveness against a resurgent Trumpian movement and it needed authoritarian proofing. It got neither.
There are many presidencies we look back on fondly while also recognizing that if, say, we were to replace Abraham Lincoln's tenure in which he presided over the Civil War with any of them, those same presidencies would be catastrophically inadequate in meeting the moment. We had four years in office since Trump's emergence and we needed the one leading us during those four years to do more to thwart Trump's *reemergence*. Biden staying in the electoral matchup long after he should have stepped aside made it much harder to keep Trump from regaining office, and Biden's actions *in office* did not do enough to thwart a future Trump presidency should he regain it. You can argue that this isn't the only metric by which we should judge Biden's time in office, but arguing that we shouldn't evaluatively factor in these missteps which have now led to us having Trump again is tribal nonsense. The bottom line is that it is precisely *because* Trump is an unprecedented threat to American democracy that we must view Biden's presidency as at least in some respects a failure.
Second, there is nothing in Shikha's argument that requires laying most of the blame for Trump's second term at Biden's doorstep. In the Great Hierarchy of Blame, it's obvious that GOP officeholders, right-wing media (including major personalities and influencers), and many other factors were more responsible for Trump's durability. But the point here is that Biden ought to receive some of the blame as well. We don't know what would've happened if Democrats had run a proper "let's find our next leader" process. But here's what I can guarantee you: It would've certainly gone better than handing the baton over to the VP with a couple months to go before Election Day. And I can't tell you definitively that Biden's efforts to kill rather than embrace bipartisan efforts at surveilance reform would've resulted in Trump finding himself truly constrained in office. But here's what I can guarantee you: It certainly would have helped. But of course none of this means Biden is principally to blame for Trump's reemergence atop our politics.
There probably isn't an outlet out there that on a per-piece basis has more consistently called out Trump and his movement than we have. Readers who are taking this article to be downplaying the sins of the MAGA movement are simply not operating in good faith. We're frustrated with Biden's tenure precisely because we think the moment called for a stronger plan of action against the threat that Trump poses.
Yes, history will not be kind to Biden. He ran as a centrist, and was elected with a razor-thin margin, yet still decided to act like the second coming of FDR.
You do a far better job than I could listing his failures, but I disagree with the assessment of the Hunter pardon. I don't think it's justified, but I likely would've done the same for my child in his position. I disagree that it will embolden the Orange One. He already abused the power to a much greater degree in his first term. The right-wing media is blind to its own hypocrisy and completely immune to irony.