This column has been updated.
The denouement of Joe Biden is unbearably sad.
The Irishman who could spend 45 minutes answering one question lost his gift of gab. The father who saw two of his children die and two spin into addiction wilted under the ongoing stress, especially when Hunter Biden — “my only living son,” as Joe called him — got tangled in the legal system.
The gregarious pol, who loved chatting up lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, ended up barricaded in his Rehoboth, Del., house with Covid, furious at everyone, proclaiming his oldest friends disloyal naysayers. He was fuming at nearly everyone except Jill, Hunter and the cordon sanitaire of aides who had fueled his delusions that he could be re-elected despite his feeble and often incoherent state at 81.
And, saddest of all, the man known for his decency, empathy, humility and patriotic spirit was poisoned by power, losing the ability to see that, in clinging to his office, he was hurting the party and country he had served for over half a century. And hurting himself, ensuring a shellacking in the history books.
It is the oldest story in tragedy: hubris.
If presidents get reduced to their essence, Joe Biden’s is a chip on his shoulder.
He did not want to hear from former President Barack Obama that he should pass the torch to someone younger, so Obama tried to work obliquely through others to ease him out. Biden saw Obama as the one who pushed him aside in 2015 for Hillary Clinton, a fellow member of the elite world of Ivy Leaguers, a world Biden always felt was sniffy toward him.
Obama gave Biden a consolation prize in 2017, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, when Joe wanted a different piece of metal: Excalibur. Biden’s chip grew larger.
By the end, when he was bubble-wrapped in 2024, he trusted only his family and his closest aides. And they protected him with a damaging chimera. Sugarcoated interpretations of polls that were not reflected elsewhere. Extreme efforts to redesign the presidency to adapt to his ever more fragile state. Trashing Robert Hur for telling the truth. Refusing to do the cognitive testing that might have established a diagnosis.
“The public should be informed of the whole truth. Not selective truth,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, an internist and cardiologist at George Washington University Hospital who has been a White House medical consultant for the last four administrations, told Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson for their compelling new book about Biden’s Shakespearean fall, “Original Sin.”
“Selective truth” sounds disturbingly like “alternative facts,” as Kellyanne Conway called Donald Trump’s modus vivendi. Tapper and Thompson show how Biden and his inner circle created an alternate universe that they tried to sell to the media and the public — the sort of corrosive mirage of unreality that Trump excels at building.
It was painful and infuriating to watch, and it’s painful and infuriating to read about. The nadir, of course, was Biden’s cascade of caesurae at the debate. It was not, as his advisers insisted, merely a bad night. It was a stunning display of a steep mental decline.
Witnesses behind the scenes told me they were dismayed from the start, when Biden showed up less than a half-hour before the debate started. He didn’t want to do a walk-through and test the equipment. He already seemed out of it, even though his large staff contingent seemed — to some CNN folks — oddly sanguine.
It was not just Joe and Jill who wanted to hang on to power, with all the perks and trips and, for Jill, glamorous Vogue covers. It was also their advisers, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini. The “palace guard,” as Chuck Schumer derisively dubbed top Biden advisers, slid from sycophancy to solipsism.
The more Biden was out of it, the more his hours and responsibilities were curtailed, the more of a vacuum there was at the top, the more power the advisers had. They treated his alarming deterioration like a political vulnerability, something to be concealed, not a matter of concern to all Americans, something we had a right to know.
It took the Democrats far too long to acknowledge and push back against what Americans could see with their own eyes. Democratic pooh-bahs and lawmakers were silent when they should have been screaming — as the Republicans are now with Trump’s egregious assaults on the Constitution, his cringey grifting, his crazed revenge moves against anyone who has crossed him, and his loony Truth Social screeds attacking Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift.
The Bidens and their allies still try to prove Biden is all there. He has done interviews on “The View” with Jill, and the BBC on his own, acting as though what happened was not a shocking tableau of duplicity.
“President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged,” Tapper and Thompson write. “The elites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama — they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race.” The polls said he could have beaten Trump, Biden felt, and his team had always doubted Kamala Harris’s abilities.
But the polls Biden kept counting on never existed — except in Bidenworld’s gauzy alternate universe.
