Monster of 2024: Joe Biden

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When was the 2024 presidential election really lost? 

Maybe you’d argue (though I would not) that it was the rubber-stamp nominating process for Vice President Kamala Harris. You could point, on a symbolic level, to Trump’s fist pump after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. For a time, it seemed like the clearest answer to this was the first debate, when President Joe Biden melted down on stage. But I think if you want to pinpoint when things went irreversibly downhill, you have to go back further—to the aftermath of the midterms two years ago, when a then-80-year-old Biden moved ahead with his plan to run for a second term.

Biden had always insisted that he was never planning on being a one-term president. Still, he tried to allay concerns about his age that dogged him even in 2020 by referring to himself as a generational “bridge,” and behind the scenes, aides offered context for his public denials. “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years, but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen, then I’ll run for reelection,’” an aide told Politico in 2019. “But he’s not going to publicly make a one-term pledge.” After a strong showing in the midterms against a predicted red wave, any notion of a smooth transition to the next in line—or a competitive primary—went out the window. Democrats shuffled around their primary calendar to warn off challengers. And that was that. Biden was dead set on running, he argued, because the stakes were too high and he was the best candidate for the job. 

That was, in hindsight, sort of the opposite of the case. Biden only got more and more unpopular, and it was hard to separate the general public anxiety about his advancing age from the general national malaise that was bringing him down. The line from the Democrats was that there was something ageist and unfair about all of this—if you can do the job, you can do the job. That was a bit cynical: Biden’s own aides reportedly thought he could do his job best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and internal rumblings about his stamina dated back to the early months of the administration. The disastrous debate finally put an end to the facade, even if the complaints that this was all a vast media conspiracy persisted in some corners.

It would perhaps be more forgivable if it were just denial. But Biden, who positioned himself as the defender of the nation’s “soul,” continued to act as though only he could win the election, when in reality, he was tanking the Democratic brand so severely that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to stage an intervention.

By staying long past his expiration date, Biden did more than ease Trump’s path to victory; he was the apotheosis of an entire gerontocracy that brought us to this point. (He came back to win the nomination in 2020 only after the party closed ranks to stop the even-older Bernie Sanders.) As Semafor’s Dave Weigel recently observed, you could tell the recent history of the party through the people who didn’t quit when they should have. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death threatened to blow up the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, after she declined to retire when Democrats could still replace her, likely cemented several decades of right-wing dominance on the Supreme Court. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s refusal to quit hampered Democrats on the judiciary committee. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is 80; Schumer is a sprightly 74. Nancy Pelosi, 84, who led the House Democratic Caucus for nearly two decades, demonstrated her unique gifts when she adeptly nudged Biden out of the race—but she was still out there after the election, working behind the scenes to block New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from defeating Virginia’s Gerry Connolly (74) for ranking member of the oversight committee.

Every piece about Biden since the election has also included a few sentences like the ones that follow. His record, domestically, was pretty good, especially when you consider the sorts of people the rest of America sent to work with him. I can rattle off the policies that everyone of my general persuasion always does—his belief in industrial policy, his efforts to link climate change adaptation to a growing green economy, his embrace of labor unions. Biden’s team dramatically reshaped the government’s approach to corporate monopolies. His management of the post-Covid global economic crisis ultimately left the United States in a far better place than it might have otherwise. But it is hard to convince people things are getting better when the messenger himself kept looking worse and worse. The Biden reelection bid was, above all, uncomfortable; he was a walking reminder of our own mortality.

When it took the form of a halting gait or an on-camera freeze-up, that weakness could be as humanizing as it was politically damaging. There has always been an emotional heaviness about the man. When that weight took the form of foreign policy, it produced a historic moral abdication. Biden’s legacy will be more than a year of virtually unchecked Israeli carnage as the so-called “rules-based international order” he championed dissolved into nothing. There was seemingly no line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not cross. Not the clear “red line” on Rafah. Not Netanyahu’s invocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a defense of his flattening of Gaza. Not thousands of dead kids. Not a clearly stated desire to bulldoze the United States government’s official preference for a two-state solution. Not the attacks on journalists and aid workers or even the death of American citizens. Biden seemed like the only person in the whole situation who didn’t realize that Netanyahu, a right-winger from Philadelphia, was just dog-walking him to get to a president he likes better. 

“To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs,” senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote on X earlier this year, during a press conference on foreign policy in which the president referred to Harris as “Vice President Trump.” “He’s just that fucking good.”

Well, sometimes even honorary PhDs need a refresher course. The last photo I saw of Biden before I started writing this was of the president leaving a bookstore in Nantucket, clutching a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It felt like a haunting epitaph for an entire era of liberalism—stopping in to do some Black Friday shopping while staying at David Rubenstein’s estate and walking away with a book that the author himself said Biden should have checked out years ago. Biden stuck around past the point that he could deliver for the people who needed him to. And now the world is stuck with the consequences.