Let Joe go

Yesterday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to revoke legal protections for 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants, in what immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick calls the “largest mass-illegalization event in U.S. history.” In Gaza, Israeli leaders are openly vowing to seize the entire territory, expel its Palestinian population, and reduce their surviving homes to rubble—“total destruction [with] no precedent globally,” finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said—while paving the way for Trump’s promised U.S. annexation. Trump has just returned from a Middle East tour, amid a personal corruption spree unmatched in U.S. political history. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, a brain-dead 30-year-old woman remains on life support against her family’s wishes until her fetus can possibly be carried to term—months from now—because doctors fear prosecution under a Georgia law enabled by the Trump Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Which of course means the most pressing story in American politics is … exactly how enfeebled our last president was before being forced out of the race last year.

I’m sure future historians¹ will be interested in fleshing out the details. But words can scarcely express how little this story matters right now. Biden is not the president anymore. He will never be president again. And, even more crucially, the Democratic party and the country at large already litigated this last year, and collectively determined that Biden should not be president again. Part of the way we know this is that the immediate response to his quitting from the Democratic base was an unprecedented surge of enthusiasm, as measured by donations and support for his former running mate when she replaced him at the top of the ticket. That said vice president squandered much of that enthusiasm was likely not an incidental factor in her defeat, and one that I’ll touch on in a second. But it’s also beside the point. Biden is politically done. He was done. This is a non-issue.

So why are we talking about it? The most proximate answer is that Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have a book to sell. That book, Original Sin² , officially launches today (fun fact: all U.S. books are released on Tuesdays, for reasons). I’m sure there are some juicy tidbits in it. But if the part they selected as a splashy pre-publication excerpt is any indication, those won’t matter either — seeing as the excerpt consists entirely of a thing the entire world learned about last year in George Clooney’s New York Times guest essay. You know, the one that helped push Biden out of the race.

But if authorial will were all it took to make a book a national obsession, the world would be a very different place. (And I’d be living in a much larger house.) The real reason we’re talking about this is that it is a story that appears to speak truth to power but actually challenges nothing. Everyone reading, writing, and talking about it can think of themselves as the hero. If they’re a Democratic figure — like strategist David Plouffe or perennial has-been Beto O’Rourke — they can throw off any responsibility and pin all the blame for last year’s loss on a perhaps terminally ill octogenarian. If they’re non-right-wing media (say, Jake Tapper), they can once again try to signal that they are not toadies of the Democratic Party — a fact that is at once true and that no one who has not yet been persuaded of will ever believe — while at the same time arguing that their obsession with Biden’s age and mental acuity was right all along. (Remember the pre-debate freakout over the White House visits by the “Parkinson’s expert”?) Everyone else can use the opportunity to bash the Democratic Party, that big ineffectual tent whose candidates tens of millions feel obligated to cast votes for but that no one really likes.

The biggest heroes of the story are of course the clear-eyed and fundamentally honest American Public, who Knew It All Along™, and can be relied on to click on endless content that might as well be headlined “BREAKING: Your Priors Were Right.” Never mind that both things cannot be true at once: Either Biden’s mental state was so obviously disqualifying that tens of millions of people with no expertise or first-hand knowledge could diagnose him by watching video clips, or there was a vast sinister cover-up that kept everyone but a select few in the dark. You can’t have it both ways, though many will certainly try.

The truth, as I wrote about at the time, was that: 1) Biden was obviously both old and diminishing; 2) still gave clear signs that he was capable of doing the job, at least for the moment; and 3) voters seemed not to really care either way. Salacious, ableist fun as it may be to talk about Biden’s aides secretly “discussing requiring a wheelchair”³ , far more important in keeping his campaign going were his still-forceful public performances, especially his “vigorous” last State of the Union address, which ended after 10 p.m. on a January night.

Yet, an ABC News poll taken the next month showed that 73% of Democrats thought he was too old to serve another full term (62% of all voters said the same about Trump). And further yet. even after his infamous debate in July there was little movement in the polls. That seems pretty simple to analyze: Tens of millions of Americans were willing to vote for a man they weren’t certain would survive another four years because they understood there was a whole administration and line of succession, and preferred transitioning to a President Harris to letting a criminal authoritarian back into the White House. Then, given a chance to vote for Kamala Harris directly, they more enthusiastically did — only to be outvoted, slimly but significantly, by people in the grips of other narratives.

Would it have been better for Biden to declare himself a one-term president right at the start, or maybe after the midterms, and allow space to hold a full primary? Maybe, though there would have been costs to that too, both in terms of his administration and the ensuing election. And anyone even remotely associated with the governing party would have had an uphill battle in the face of global inflation and a concomitantly worldwide anti-incumbency wave. Far more damaging to Biden than his age or sleeping habits was the fact that he was generally unpopular, a trend cemented by inflation and other factors largely out of his control, but that began with a media shellacking over one of the best things he did as president — ending a 19-year war in Afghanistan — a shellacking in which one Jacob Paul Tapper played a significant role⁴ .

Focusing on a supposed cover-up of a simultaneously obvious, and often aesthetic, thing is finally a convenient way to ignore the more substantive issues. Like, why didn’t Harris take any opportunity to signal a change from or even nominally distance herself from her erstwhile running mate’s record on funding and arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza — a policy that may have been responsible for keeping crucial margins of previous Democratic voters at home? What if, instead of faking accountability over a marginal story that “everyone knew about anyway,” we engaged in a reappraisal not of one man but decades of American policies and tried to figure out how they, to use Plouffe’s phrase, “totally fucked us.” Because, just maybe, the reason we got a fascist leader has less to do with a lack of transparency over a former president’s gait, and more to do with some far more deeply rooted original sins.

1  Assuming there are any.

2  Not to be confused with Eve L. Ewing’s Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, Lydia Michaels’ Original Sin: The Order of Vampires, Book 1, or Hadriaan Beverland's De peccato originali (On Original Sin, 1679): an annotated edition and translation.

3  Which by the way he still doesn’t seem to be using now that he’s out of office.

4  Tapper was also one of the two moderators at that presidential debate, during which he allowed Trump to lie profligately about immigration and abortion rights, among other things. Nor have I ever heard him talk about how incoherent Trump — who is now the same age that Biden was at this point in his term — was during that or any other appearance. But maybe that’s how you get to keep playing Zelig.