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Berny Belvedere's avatar

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.

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Jose's avatar

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.

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