The Man Who Brought Us HereHow Joe Biden's pride, insularity, and stubbornness led us into this nightmare.
By April of last year, the health of the president had clearly declined. As with many older men in their eighties, this didn’t happen in a slow, predictable glide-path down — but in swift, turbulent declines. Suddenly he took a while to get out of his limo, and then would emerge “with a blank look in his face,” according to the new campaign book, Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. By early summer, Biden was suddenly freezing up in public, staring motionless into the air. At a fundraiser in Los Angeles, Obama had to jump in to answer some questions, and then had to guide Biden off the stage by hand. We had already seen Joe wander weirdly off the set of MSNBC and during a Medal of Honor ceremony. His memory lapses mounted. Everyone around him saw this. Everyone close to him had seen it for over a year by then. Everyone in his campaign knew that upwards of 86 percent of Americans thought he was too old to serve another term. And no one did anything about it. Sometimes human folly is just human folly. Sometimes, even at the pinnacle of the world, you find flawed people struggling with familiar human problems, like how to tell a beloved but fast-aging man that he needs to leave the stage before he falls off it. Just because she was First Lady did not prevent Jill Biden from putting family before country; and just because he was president didn’t mean that Biden reacted to his own decline with denial, anger, pig-headedness, and arrogance. Do we learn anything new in this book and another one, Uncharted, by Chris Whipple out next week? Not really. We know, in fact, that everything I guessed happened did actually happen. Among the unsurprising confirmations: Obama was so aloof he didn’t even watch the fateful June debate live; he and Pelosi then wanted an open primary and did all they could to get one. (“He goes. She goes” was their mantra.) Hillary Clinton defended Biden — not because she knew his health was fine, but because her health had once been questioned by the press too. Biden’s closest advisers were his wife and, yes, his son Hunter, and they routinely put their clan’s interests well before the country’s. His inner circle — Mike Donilon especially — were so blindly loyal and informationally siloed they couldn’t absorb what was staring them in the face. The Democrats, even as late as July, could have found a fresh candidate capable of taking on what they said was a vital moment for democracy’s survival. We might have avoided our current abyss:
Why didn’t they? That is a question that will reverberate through history. Wokeness was a factor. The only reason the embarrassingly mid Harris was made veep in the first place was to fill a slot Biden had already marked for a woman, and, in the wake of the Floyd murder, a black woman seemed the only option. Everyone, particularly Pelosi and Obama, knew Harris was a disaster about to happen, and her vice-presidency had the lowest approval ratings in history. Obama told friends directly that he thought she couldn’t win. The night after the epic debate, Pelosi gritted her teeth: “Oh my God. It’s going to be her.” So yes, identity before merit was a principle the Dems clung to even at the expense of marching off an electoral cliff. “If you want to break the Democratic coalition, try to skip over the first African-American vice president,” Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin argued at one point. “I watched the black-white stuff start on Thursday night [after the debate],” said another lawmaker. Donna Brazile assembled a team of black women operatives who called themselves “the colored girls” to ensure Harris became the nominee. Jim Clyburn was also a critical supporter: “I’m going all in with Kamala. I don’t want to look back and y’all ain’t there,” he told the DNC. The open primary therefore never happened. Harris became the nominee for one core reason in the end. Biden, who had previously used the awfulness of Kamala as a way to dissuade anyone from pushing him out, decided to endorse her after she pleaded with him the day he decided to quit. One source “close to both men” explained: “It was a fuck-you to Obama’s plan. At that moment, you have very few things you control, and that’s one thing he had control over, and he chose to stick it to Obama.” So much for putting the survival of democracy first. And yes, they lied. Jill Biden was one of the worst offenders. She insisted in January 2024, “I see his vigor, I see his energy, I see his passion every single day. I say his age is an asset.” Before the June debate, Joe had been drained by grueling international travel, was catching a cold and couldn’t last more than 45 minutes in the practice debates. But the First Lady went out and told the world: “The president’s feeling great. He’s ready. We’re going to win this thing.” The woman who had covered up her husband’s decline for the previous two years now set expectations that were, of course, utterly ruinous. Her own former press secretary said:
What were they thinking? Their very actions were rooted in the understanding that Joe Biden couldn’t function as president any longer; and yet they kept insisting he could govern for four more years! This is the much-respected Ron Klain, spinning desperately to conceal his responsibility for Trump 2.0:
But Klain was fully behind the president nonetheless. As the campaign reeled after the June debate, it took another month of wasted time to move forward, as Biden sequestered himself with his closest trio of Bruce Reed, Mike Donilon, and Steve Ricchetti, who kept the bubble sealed, tight, and pissed. Even at the time, many worried that Biden was in a cocoon, unaware of his own dismal polling. From Axios at the time:
But Donilon didn’t. In fact, he still believes Biden should have stayed in the race and would have won. He vented in February:
That is the kind of blind loyalty that can kill a presidency. But this time, it killed a lot more than that: a chance to keep Trump from power. By his words, Joe Biden told us that was the most important thing. By his actions, Biden told us that his own vanity was more important. By their actions, Donilon, Reed, Klain, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and Dr Jill told us the same. The Democratic Party has a strange habit of never holding the architects of electoral failures accountable. That should end after this. But in the end, the story of 2024 is painfully, excruciatingly human. Biden’s prickly pride and long-nurtured insecurity, the insularity of his too-loyal circle, and the entitlement that comes from decades of public life at the top all led to collective tragedy. We are now living in the wake of this man’s fallibility and stubbornness. It’s a story we all know well in our private capacities: the tale of trying to get grandpa to give up his car keys before he drives into a ditch and hurts someone. Well, welcome to the ditch. And the casualties are mounting. (Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a spirited debate with Douglas Murray over deportations and Israel; dissents over the Nick Denton pod with many replies from Nick; reader dissents over my latest Trump piece; 15 notable quotes from the insane week in news, including three Yglesias Awards; 21 pieces on Substack on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break from Matt and Trey; a fecund view from Hawaii; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!) From a newcomer to the Dish:
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Back On The Dishcast: Douglas Murray
Douglas is a writer and commentator. He’s an associate editor at The Spectator and a columnist for both the New York Post and The Sun, as well as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His books include The Madness of Crowds and The War on the West, which we discussed on the Dishcast three years ago. His new book is On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. We had a lively, sometimes contentious session — first on Trump, then on Israel’s tactics in Gaza. This episode and a forthcoming one with Francis Collins were challenges. How to push back against someone who is your guest? I never wanted the Dishcast to be an interrogation, an Andrew Neil-style interview. But I also wanted it to air debate, so I try to play devil’s advocate when appropriate. I’m sure you’ll let me know how I’m doing after this one. Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Palestinians “endlessly rejecting peace,” and debating the Khalil case. That link also takes you to a bunch of commentary on Nick Denton’s appraisal of China’s dominance, along with many responses from Nick. Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Claire Lehmann on the success of Quillette, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science and Covid, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee on Covid’s political fallout, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. Dissent Of The WeekA reader thinks my rhetoric was too heated in my column on Trump’s “two perfect months”:
In my defense, I used the f-word twice in the column — and both were qualified. I described those who hold due process in contempt as “wannabe fascists.” And I said that posing in front of a jail packed with near-naked prisoners was “fascistic”. I agree the term can confuse as much as enlighten. But grabbing people off the streets with no due process and exulting in others’ misery definitely have f-vibes. As always, please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And follow more Dish debate in my Notes feed. In The ‘StacksThis is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the tariff madness, how the Dems might prevail, and shrooms for anorexics. Some examples:
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The Man Who Brought Us Here
April 04, 2025
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