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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
If the essence of Greek tragedy is the hero’s undoing, Joe Biden gets star billing. He beat Donald Trump, stood up to Russia, made more reforms than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and delivered a strong economy. That made Biden a hero to the American left and beyond. But most of his achievements will now be erased. The legacy is Trump’s comeback. Flood after Biden. He is mostly responsible for himself.
The flaw of the Greek tragic hero is hubris. Biden last week he said. He could have won the 2024 election. This was despite the fact Only 27 percent of Americans Last June, he thought he had the intellectual ability to become president again. It means that Trump would have won a bigger victory. Kamala Harris deserves all the blame, her vote came within 1.5 percentage points of Trump.
Little has yet been reported about the conspiracy of silence surrounding Biden’s declining potential. Although it was kept from press releases and other unrecorded events, his mental decline was an open secret in Washington. Biden’s inner-family cabinet and longtime aides must take some of the blame. There was also a media failure. The rare journalist who blows the whistle risks losing access and being ostracized on liberal social media.
But the buck stops with Biden. Had he redeemed his vow to be a one-time “bridge” to the post-Trump era, the Democratic Party would have had time to find a stronger candidate than Harris — he could have distanced himself from what he didn’t like about Biden’s economy. Instead, an independent Biden is cut off from public sentiment. Certainly, the biggest swing to Harris in November came from voters who paid close attention to the news. Trump, on the other hand, swept the low-profile vote by margins regardless of race, income and gender. All right-thinking Americans are with you, one supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the twice-lost Democratic candidate of the 1950s. Yes, but I need a majority, he shouted.
Nobody said that politics is fair. Biden has helped ensure that America’s post-Covid recovery is stronger than any major economy. But the nostalgic nation associated Trump with the pre-Covid era. People blamed Biden for inflation — and his stimulus helped make it worse. But voters gave him no credit for the rest. A majority of Americans polled by Gallup this week said the U.S. has lost ground in six areas under Biden. These include the economy, the federal debt, immigration, income inequality, America’s standing in the world, and crime.
In only one area did most people see improvement during Biden’s presidency — “the status of gay, lesbian and transgender people,” he said. No data can better capture the narrative and leadership weakness of the Biden administration. As late as July, Biden continued to double down on Trump’s threat to democracy, even though his team had known for months that democracy wasn’t among voters’ top five issues.
But it’s the flawed heroic aristocracy that gives Biden his Greek ending. Virtue and hubris were both in personal tragedies. When Biden was vice president, his fortune was estimated at About half a million dollars. Nearly half a century later in public life, that was a less complicated mistake. No informed American thinks Biden is corrupt. But even in his addiction, he turns a blind eye to his son Hunter, who wants to cash in on the family name. Biden paid a heavy price for that laxity. Like Othello, Biden loved well, not wisely.
Ukrainians remember Biden fondly. The same cannot be said for the Palestinians. In the wake of the worst civilian deaths in years, the Gaza Strip has been bombarded by US ammunition delivered by Biden. He believes he is taking positive steps to prevent higher wages and end Middle East war. Biden contributed to the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria by packing Vladimir Putin’s military assets in Ukraine. But much of the global south sees Biden as someone who has failed to uphold the values he promised. That Trump is seen in the world as a different version of Biden — not as a radical departure — may be the harshest judgment of all.
Four years ago, Biden promised to be “an ally of light, not darkness.” He meant it. Only he knows how it feels to hand over the stage to Trump during Biden’s farewell address to the crowd on Wednesday night.
