Inside story of Biden's undoing: 'Infighting, frustration and an insular inner circle'

Last Thursday, on the rostrum of the Washington National Cathedral, Joe Biden delivered a eulogy for former President Jimmy Carter, while three other former presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—as well as a president both past and future, Donald Trump, watched on. All of the presidents present had won the approval of the American people for a second term, something that eluded Biden. As Biden, who will be leaving office next week, paid tribute to Carter, a fellow one-term president, it was difficult not to make other comparisons.

“Many people thought he was from a bygone era, but in fact, he saw the distant future,” Biden said of Carter. He went on to cite Carter's achievements in advancing civil rights, working for peace and nuclear nonproliferation, and protecting the environment. Earlier in the week, however, Biden was also defending his own political legacy and spelling out how he hopes history will judge him.

“I hope history will say that I came in with a plan to restore the economy and rebuild America’s world leadership,” he said in a television interview. “I hope history will record that I did it with honesty and integrity; I said what I meant.” Whether that will happen is a matter of intense debate, but Biden is leaving the White House with approval ratings near the lowest point of his presidency. According to the latest Gallup poll, only 39% of people have a positive view of him, down from 57% when he first took office.

Next week, the man he defeated in 2020 will return to power, a dispiriting end to what has been a troubled presidency. Biden did achieve some successes—he skillfully guided complex investment and infrastructure legislation through Congress despite narrow majorities; he strengthened and expanded NATO; and he appointed a large and diverse slate of judges to the federal courts—but at least for now, these have been overshadowed by other factors. His current place in history is as a Democratic interregnum between two Trump presidencies, more a brief episode than a turning point.

“He wanted his legacy to be that he saved us from Trump,” said Susan Estrich, a writer and Democratic strategist. “But sadly for him, his legacy is Trump again. He’s the bridge from the first Trump to the second Trump.” It didn’t have to be this way. Biden and his team were buffeted by events—some within their control, others not. However, many of the most damaging developments were entirely predictable—indeed, they were predicted—but the president and his administration seemed caught flat-footed. For this, they have paid a heavy price.

From the chaos in Kabul to early "missteps," Biden’s first stumble as president occurred half a world away, during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. The withdrawal had been negotiated during the final months of the Trump administration, but Biden backed the decision—despite warnings from some of his military advisors. Those dire predictions proved accurate, and Kabul descended into panic and turmoil. By the end of that month, Biden’s Gallup approval rating had fallen below 50% for the first time—a level he never reached again.

On the domestic front, the president’s situation was no better. By the summer, U.S. inflation had exceeded 5% for the first time in 30 years. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she believed the surge in inflation was “transitory.” Biden called it “temporary.” Others outside the administration, notably Obama’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, disagreed. When inflation peaked a year later, hitting 9.1% in June 2022, Yellen and Biden conceded they had miscalculated. However, Americans have not forgotten or forgiven. Although monthly inflation figures had fallen to below 3% by the summer of 2024, unemployment remained low, and the economy grew steadily, outperforming other industrialized nations around the world, voters remained pessimistic about the economy.

Other problems followed a similar pattern: The Biden administration was slow to respond to a surge in undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in the wake of the pandemic. And the disruptive effect of Republican-backed plans to relocate migrants to Democratic-run northern cities on government services far from the border also seemed to catch the administration by surprise. Shortages of COVID tests and baby formula, a dramatic spike in the price of eggs, the end of Roe v. Wade abortion protections, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza—for every seemingly unexpected crisis the Biden administration dealt with, two new ones seemed to emerge. Indeed, the challenges were formidable—the sort that have felled incumbent leaders in democracies around the world.

But for Biden and the Democrats, who hoped to prove themselves a capable and effective counterweight not just to Trump, but to autocratic regimes around the globe, the stakes were high. In all of these cases, the administration’s response was sometimes conspicuously out of step. In a television interview in November 2021, when asked if the U.S. should increase oil production to lower gasoline prices, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm laughed. “That is hilarious,” she said. “Would that I had a magic wand.” Biden—once considered a gifted communicator and orator—seemed increasingly unable to connect with the American people. Signs of his advancing age also began to show.

“Watching Biden speak, I’m like, Oh my God, it’s a completely different person,” a senior White House official who served early in the Biden administration said anonymously. “Maybe it’s just because you’re there every day, so you don’t notice.” A report by Special Counsel Robert Hur, who was tasked with investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents, described the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” triggering a round of hand-wringing among Democrats. Biden’s interactions with the press were limited, and his public appearances were heavily scripted. His gaffes and missteps became fodder for Republican attacks. But Biden persevered, determined to seek and win a second term.

Throughout his presidency, Biden surrounded himself with seasoned veterans of government. His Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, had been one of his top foreign policy advisors since his days in the Senate. Merrick Garland, a distinguished appeals court judge and Barack Obama’s failed 2016 Supreme Court nominee, was appointed Attorney General. Yellen, his choice for Treasury Secretary, had previously served as chair of the Federal Reserve. Inside the White House, Biden chose Ron Klain, who had worked in Democratic presidential administrations for decades, to serve as his chief of staff. Another Biden veteran, Mike Donilon, served as a senior advisor.

The team was particularly successful in managing the narrow majorities in the House and Senate, securing early legislative victories even in the face of unified Republican opposition and the reluctance of centrists in his own party. Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” was passed just two months into his presidency, including nearly $2 trillion in new government spending. It expanded health care subsidies and provided funding for the distribution of COVID vaccines and a payment program that cut child poverty in half, to 5%. Later that year, Democrats and some Republicans joined together to pass an infrastructure investment bill that included $1 trillion in new spending on transportation, clean energy, water, broadband, and other construction projects.

Other bills followed, marking a legislative agenda that few first-term presidents in modern history have been able to match—but that came with what some critics see as a fatal flaw. Brent Cebul, an associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that Biden’s efforts were too focused on policy shifts that would take years to translate into economic benefits for ordinary American workers. “I think the time horizons of these large pieces of legislation were deeply out of sync with the exigencies of a presidential election,” he said. Biden could have done a better job of finding ways to deliver tangible benefits to voters more quickly—a point that Biden himself seemed to acknowledge in a recent newspaper interview.

His team also seemed out of its depth when it came to measuring success not by the passage of laws, but by the daily war of public opinion with an increasingly hardened political opposition. A senior Biden administration official said the White House team was more decisive early in the president’s term. “When things start to get tough, and you lose that sense of accomplishment, it can give way to infighting and frustration,” they admitted, adding that their sense was that the circle around Biden became more insular as the pressure mounted. After a two-year respite, his political opponents launched investigations, held hearings (on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Biden family’s business dealings, and more), and officially opened a presidential impeachment inquiry in September 2023. Meanwhile, Biden’s public approval ratings hovered in the low 40s.

Cebul argues that Biden’s presidency should be seen in two parts. The first was more accomplished. The second was less focused. “Biden’s belief that the U.S. was doing well on the macroeconomy led him and his advisors to take their eye off the ball at a time when many Americans were still deeply hurting.” On April 25, 2023, Biden officially announced his candidacy for president in a campaign video, warning that “extremists” aligned with Trump were threatening America. Over the next several months, there would be more warnings about the threat that Trump posed to American democracy. He would tout his economic plan—embracing the label “Bidenomics”—and point to the fact that inflation was falling while the economy was still growing.

I accompanied Biden to Chicago in June 2023, where he held a reception for wealthy donors and gave a speech on the economy at a historic post office in the city center. “Bidenomics is about the future,” he said. “Bidenomics is just another way of saying: Restore the American Dream.” Cebul argued that this was a misstep. “He then spent much of the spring and early summer essentially talking about how he was the most successful economic president in modern history, which was so out of sync,” he said. “Not only was the message out of sync, but he was also a poor messenger.” In Chicago, as in many of his speeches, Biden’s delivery was sometimes halting. His words were sometimes garbled, his syntax confused.

Throughout it all, however, Biden was telling aides that he believed he was the best person to defeat Trump—that he had done it once, and he would do it again. Whenever anyone questioned Biden’s capacity, these aides pushed back forcefully. “I’m not a young guy, that’s no secret,” Biden said in a campaign ad. “But here’s the deal: I know how to get things done for the American people.” In the fall, Biden faced another crisis—after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, he quickly warned Israel not to overreact or overreach in its response to the bloodshed. As with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the president turned his attention to world affairs. But unlike Ukraine, where Biden assembled a united Western alliance against the invasion, America’s continued support for Israel alienated some of Biden’s domestic base of support.

At the same time, Biden was dealing with the growing legal problems of his son, Hunter—convicted on gun charges in June, and, perhaps more troubling for the president, indicted for tax violations related to overseas business deals. The family discord and the painful public exposure were, at the very least, a distraction for the president and a cause for low morale. He eventually made the decision to pardon his son after the November election, a decision that drew condemnation from many, including some allies. Ultimately, Biden’s presidential campaign—and his presidency—came completely undone in late June, in a debate with Trump in Atlanta. His confused and at times incomprehensible performance dealt a fatal blow to his campaign, seeming to confirm Republican attacks on him—and Democratic anxieties about his advancing age.

But ultimately, after Trump survived a failed assassination attempt and held a boisterous and unified national party convention in mid-July, Biden withdrew from the race. Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Biden’s hand-picked successor, ensuring that the final electoral judgment on Biden’s half-century political career would be one of rejection and failure. What might Biden’s legacy have been if he had simply stepped aside—to use his words, “passed the torch”—rather than seeking a second term? No campaign videos. No fumbled campaign messages or Trump debate disaster. Instead, a spirited contest among Democratic hopefuls, while Biden looked on from above. “We should have had a primary,” Ms. Estrich argued. “His successor should have had time to prove themselves.”

In the end, Biden’s age and Trump’s enduring appeal were fires that his administration could never extinguish, and that ultimately consumed his presidency. A week from now, Trump will be sworn into office, and will likely set about dismantling many of the accomplishments Biden achieved over the past four years. The efficiency with which he does so will largely determine Biden’s lasting legacy. A few weeks ago, I asked Attorney General Garland how he thought history would judge Biden and his administration. “I’ll leave that to the historians,” he replied. In the end, that is all that Biden has left.