It is the fate of most presidents to watch the inauguration of their replacements with rueful thoughts: in the words of King Lear, “They told me I was everything. ’Tis a lie.” As Joe Biden prepares to pass the torch to Donald Trump, I find myself reflecting on Biden’s own hand in this humbling ordeal. In those whirlwind weeks of blame and recrimination after his disastrous June debate, Biden was often compared to Lear: an aged sovereign with no clear successor, not entirely sound in mind, undone by a crisis born of vanity, vengeance, and fickle nature. Like Lear, Biden had been insulated from criticism, preferring loyalty to blunt counsel, collusion to collaboration. Like all tragic heroes, he suffered from certainty, monomania, an unwillingness to yield. Shakespeare’s tragedies, write Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt, “are always tragedies about the violence of self-justification, the defending of an intractable position. What we see in tragedy is the worst-case scenario of the need to be right: life as a protracted tantrum.”
When Biden’s tantrum exhausted itself, it was too late. Advisers, allies, and media sycophants had schemed to conceal his debilitation; the charade worked just long enough to preclude a primary and imperil the prospects of any substitute. In the end, it wasn’t infirmity that doomed the final months of Biden’s presidency but his delusional revolt against it, in which he expected the entire Democratic Party to conspire. This, I think, will define his legacy: the rejection of vulnerability. If one looks for it, the compulsion to flee from weakness, disavow that which is fragile, and compensate with bluster and strength is everywhere in his record. What he could not abide in himself he also turned against in the world. Biden was the anti-frailty president.
It’s easy to forget that things did not start this way. During the 2020 campaign, in the depths of the pandemic, Biden wore his own vulnerability and tragic personal history — the loss of his first wife and daughter to a car accident and of his elder son to cancer — with pride; these were potential virtues. A leader who had borne such pain, and endured, would be suitable for this time of grief. Even his diminished state (he was the oldest person to take the oath) could be a potent symbol, a condition enabling special understanding and sympathy for a timorous nation in need of healing and grace. For a time, he played this role with elegance. In a February 2021 speech memorializing the more than 500,000 Americans who had died from COVID-19, Biden spoke to the mourners: “I know all too well — I know what it’s like to not be there when it happens. I know what it’s like when you are there, holding their hands … That black hole in your chest, you feel like you’re being sucked into it. The survivor’s remorse. The anger.” Pundits praised the speech for its empathy and authentic sorrow.
Certain aspects of the Build Back Better agenda reflected this gentle, reparative impulse in policy terms: concern for the sick, the worst off, for poor families and children. As Andrew Yamakawa Elrod brilliantly documented in Phenomenal World, Biden’s economic team aimed, at first, to revise the terms of business in the care economy; the White House would solve the problems of inequality and wage stagnation through corporate taxation, heavy investments in public education, and price caps on elder and child care. Unsurprisingly, conservatives and business interests (preferring poverty wages for service workers) mobilized to thwart this agenda. Unable to navigate razor-thin margins in the Senate, most of BBB was scrapped. The pandemic was declared over; the disabled were left to fend for themselves. And Bidenomics emerged as something quite different: a more muscular (and masculine) politics of nationalist assertion, premised on reshoring manufacturing, tax incentives for semiconductors and clean energy, and belligerence with China. Tenderness fell out of favor.
It is no coincidence that Biden’s signature economic breakthroughs — the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act — passed only after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To overcome conservative opposition, the White House embraced a military justification for public expenditure, under the aegis of a new Cold War consensus. If Bidenomics had briefly aspired to link economic growth to caring for the needy, its principal goal instead became, as national security adviser Jake Sullivan put it, the building of “a strong, resilient, and leading-edge techno-industrial base.” From vulnerability to strength, from care work to war work.
Ultimately, it was the White House’s steadfast support, material and otherwise, for Israel’s war in Gaza that turned Biden’s erstwhile reputation as “mourner-in-chief” into a cruel joke. After the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, during which Israelis were brutally reacquainted with their own exposure to pitiless violence, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government went to war against the very notion of vulnerability; nothing was unpermitted in the pursuit of Israeli safety and sovereignty over the land. As of early January, the IDF has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, and a significant percentage of the deaths verified by the U.N. are women and children; as many as 1.9 million Gazans have been displaced, 90 percent of the total population. At least 3,100 children under the age of 5 have perished, and 46,300 pregnant women suffer from “crisis levels” of hunger. UNICEF estimates that more than 95 percent of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed. One need not agree with Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, or the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied territories that Israel is committing a genocide to abhor these facts. But their accumulation paints a damning picture, bloody and deliberate.
As the horrors mounted, the Biden administration stood by, repeating obscene lies to justify the unjustifiable and providing a record $17.9 billion in aid to the Israeli military. Reports of Joe’s behind-the-scenes frustration with Bibi insult our intelligence; the Israelis have flagrantly trespassed every “red line” issued by the White House without consequence. As Gazans starve, USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau have both confirmed that Israel is deliberately obstructing humanitarian assistance — a war crime. But Biden has not changed course. He does not mourn — he abides. Gaza summons an inhuman coarseness in Biden’s defenders, urging them to deny fragility in its starkest form, the susceptibility of the body to maiming, fire, and death. (For the fiercest propagandists, even children are denied their status as fragile: They are not children but human shields.)
In the end, the hope that Biden’s personal frailty and traumas would lead him to a special respect for our entangled needs, for the suffering of children and their mothers, has proved naïve, ridiculous, bitterly ironic. This should have been expected. It is not power but a premonition of feebleness that ignites Lear’s fateful wrath. “It is their despair, their helplessness,” write Phillips and Greenblatt of the tragic heroes, “that has called up in them the faux potency of an irredeemable murderous rage.”
Biden’s rejection of his own feebleness — and his insistence on again running for president — likely handed the White House to Trump, a man who regards human weakness with contempt. (He seems to fear and despise it with a vehemence he otherwise reserves for germs.)
Now, Trump is poised to use the machinery of state to carry out his cruel whims, to deport millions of immigrants, and to deprive the poor and sick of their puny entitlements, the historically disenfranchised of their protections. The greatest bulwark against such organized cruelty is always our awareness that we are, in fact, interconnected, that we have obligations to one another, that we and our neighbors are fragile too, subject at any time to affliction. If Trump’s selfish agenda succeeds without incident, backlash, or revolt, he will have been helped in this endeavor by his predecessor, who was ostensibly devoted to the less fortunate but in his final years modeled coarseness and feared fragility, discouraged our sympathetic impulses, and encouraged us in our frantic flight from dependence.
