Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency is coming to an end, and according to reports, White House staffers describe a somber mood at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with Biden spending his final weeks in office reflecting on what could have been and probably wondering what other monsters he can pardon.
While Biden has recently expressed regret over dropping out and says he could have won, according to the Wall Street Journal, that belief “isn’t widely shared in the White House or among the Democratic establishment, where the more common view is that the party would have suffered a much larger electoral defeat and lost even more congressional seats had Biden remained the nominee.”
The report also reveals that “White House aides, many who’ve been on job searches since early November, described the work environment in recent weeks with words like ‘draining’ and ‘depressing.’"
Entrepreneur and Democratic donor Joe Kiani, a close friend of Biden, told the Journal that “if he ran, he really thought he was going to win.”
Kiani added, “By not running, he was worried Trump would win. He just didn’t want to win at any cost.”
According to the report, Biden’s confidence in his ability to defeat Donald Trump isn’t intended as a critique of Kamala Harris’s campaign but stems from his belief that, having beaten Trump once, he could do it again. Biden’s fantasy is only eclipsed by those of Harris’s allies, who think Biden’s failure to drop out sooner cost her the election.
Harris’s close aides are careful not to directly blame her loss on Biden’s delay in dropping out of the race over the summer, but privately say that a few more weeks on the campaign trail could have made a difference in the outcome.
That’s a tough sell given the lopsided outcome. Trump didn’t just win the Electoral College — he won every battleground state and carried the popular vote by over two million votes.
As Biden prepares to leave office, he’s focusing on cementing his legacy with plans for a presidential library in Delaware. How controversial death sentence commutations for child rapists and murders fit into that equation, I have no idea, but according to the report, Biden has plenty of regrets, including his decision to appoint Merrick Garland as attorney general. Biden believes that Garland didn’t target Trump more aggressively, thinking that if he had, he could have stopped Trump’s return to the White House with more aggressive prosecutions
Curiously, no one on the left expressed outrage over Biden’s blatant desire to have done more to weaponize the justice system against his political opponent.
Despite the gloom, Biden insists on maintaining a united front. He’s expressed admiration for Harris’s campaign efforts and continues to work closely with her. The White House maintains that both Biden and Harris remain focused on delivering results for American families, yada, yada, yada. I’ll wait for the tell-all books to come out to get the real story of how Joe and Kamala hate each other.
For all the talk of legacy, Biden’s final chapter reads more like a cautionary tale than a triumphant conclusion. His decades-long career in politics is ending not with a bang, but with a long, drawn-out whimper — leaving behind a party divided and depressed.
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