The Lamest Duck

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, December 09, 2024

 

To understand how consequential the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria is, you can read some of the many learned geopolitical analyses floating around today.

 

Or you can save yourself time and marvel at this: The president of the United States was pulled out of mothballs and dusted off to comment on it.

 

It takes a lot to warrant a public appearance by Joe Biden nowadays, but the sudden world-changing collapse of Russian and Iranian influence in the Middle East was just enough to clear the bar, it appears.

 

The end of Assad came 24 hours or so after France welcomed dignitaries to celebrate the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, restored to glory after being damaged in a fire in 2019. First lady Jill Biden was there and was seen chatting pleasantly in the front row with the president—the incoming president, that is. Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, was America’s guest of honor, two seats away from Jill. And he took advantage of his time in Paris to conduct some important face-to-face diplomacy.

 

It didn’t seem inappropriate either. It feels like he’s been president since November 5, no?

 

That’s not all Biden’s fault. With the House in Republican hands, there’s nothing Democrats can do to move what’s left of their agenda at the eleventh hour. Trump has also moved quickly on nominations, stealing the presidential spotlight. And the White House is conducting modest business abroad in its final weeks in power, pushing another small aid package out the door to Ukraine and quietly contacting Syria’s new rulers to feel them out about containing ISIS. Lame ducks are inevitably pretty lame.

 

But Biden’s lameness is unlike that of any president in my lifetime, and members of his party seem to agree. “There is no leadership coming from the White House,” one Democratic source complained to Politico. “There is a total vacuum. … In conversations that I’m having, [lawmakers] don’t even mention the president. It’s kind of sad.” One former aide called Biden “cavalier and selfish” for the way he’s approached his last days in office.

 

The least he could do is use his bully pulpit to try to drum up opposition to Trump’s worst Cabinet nominees, progressive activists told the Wall Street Journal. “Most voters don’t know Kash Patel or even who Matt Gaetz or Tulsi Gabbard are,” said one. “But many more Americans would know, if President Biden spoke about them. … The only way to win the war of attention is by going to the voters and explaining things to them, which President Biden has consistently avoided doing.”

 

A spokesman for the left-wing group Justice Democrats pronounced the president “one of the lamest of lame ducks we’ve seen with a Democratic administration. A massive missed opportunity.”

 

I’d say he’s the lamest duck in almost 100 years, since Herbert Hoover, but you could talk me into believing he’s without precedent in American history. Other presidents have shared one or some of his individual liabilities, but I don’t think any president has shared all of them. And at least one liability is unique to Joe Biden himself.

 

Unique lameness.

 

All discussions of Biden’s political weakness begin with discussions of his physical weakness.

 

A president on his way out of office is always politically enfeebled but typically still regarded as capable of doing the job. Not Joe. Watching the news out of Damascus this weekend with family members, one turned to me and asked who’s running the country right now—and they didn’t mean Syria. “Uh, Tony Blinken, maybe?” I offered. (Kamala Harris had been licking her wounds on vacation in Hawaii until recently.) Biden is, well, Biden.

 

Americans haven’t thought him fit for the job since his debate with Trump this summer, if not earlier. The last time a president left office with his ability to perform the basic functions of the office in doubt was 1921, when Woodrow Wilson exited after being debilitated by a stroke. And Wilson’s condition was a secret closely guarded by his wife and deputies; never before has a lame duck inspired as much skepticism about his basic fitness among the general public as Joe Biden has.

 

Under those circumstances, even his influence as a messenger for his party is diminished. No wonder we don’t see much of him.

 

Biden also has the distinction of being the first president in more than 50 years not to run for a second term due to the likelihood that he’d be defeated. That’s also related to his age and health, of course: What ultimately drove him from the race was his debate performance, where the extent of his cognitive decline was laid bare. But his job approval had collapsed even before that thanks to inflation and his dereliction of duty in enforcing the border. Trump took the lead over him in national polling in September 2023 and never looked back.

 

The last president to bow out of a reelection campaign because of insurmountable unpopularity was Lyndon Johnson in 1968. But LBJ wasn’t as lame a duck as Biden for the simple reason that he continued to preside over a hot war in Vietnam until leaving office. Likewise for George W. Bush, who left office widely disliked but remained consequential to the bitter end due to nation-building in Iraq and the 2008 financial crisis. In that sense, Biden’s lameness is a luxury: There’s no crisis facing the country right now so dire that we have little choice but to pay attention to the president’s daily activities. Joe Biden can be safely ignored.

 

So he’s part Woodrow Wilson and part LBJ. But the hamhandedness with which he abandoned his reelection campaign has no precedent. That’s pure Joe.

 

Never before had an unpopular incumbent waylaid his own party by undertaking to run again, sidelining formidable potential nominees in the process, and then been driven from the race a few months before Election Day by his own shocking incompetence on a national stage. The timing of his debate disaster thrust his vice president, no great political talent herself, onto the national stage with barely 90 days to somehow introduce herself to voters, make them comfortable with the idea of being governed by her, and separate herself from his record on inflation and immigration.

 

It was too heavy a lift. He, more than she, is to blame for the resulting defeat. “All he’s done in the last year has hurt the party every step of the way,” a former Biden aide groaned to Politico, nodding toward the president’s relentless selfishness in first seeking a second term and then not wising up to the foolishness of that decision sooner. To this day, reportedly, he bears Democrats a grudge for not wanting to go down with the Biden ship: His deputies told Politico that his low profile since Election Day is partly due to “his own lingering personal belief that he doesn’t owe much more to a party that unceremoniously pushed him aside.”

 

In context, the disgraceful pardon he granted his son last week feels like an extended middle finger to Democrats. It’s one thing for the president to functionally abdicate his office prior to January 20; it’s another for him to suddenly pop up again amid his quiescence to abuse his power for a corrupt purpose. The least he could have done for Democrats is not deprive them of the moral high ground in criticizing the pardons Trump will soon grant to his own political cronies when he returns to office. Instead, he’s screwed them again. When was the last time an exiting president was this alienated from his own party? Nixon?

 

But the nature of Biden’s lameness goes even further than that, all the way back to Hoover.

 

Paradigm shift.

 

If a retiring president is fortunate, he’ll get to hand power to a successor from his own party. That doesn’t happen often, though, most recently in 1988.

 

Typically he ends up handing power to a successor from the other party. And that’s okay: Since World War II, Republicans and Democrats have broadly agreed on the virtues of the Pax Americana and the superiority of Western liberalism writ large. One side could make way for the other knowing that America would still look more or less like America after the changeover.

 

This time is different. Not since Herbert Hoover was swamped by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in 1932, I think, has the country experienced a paradigm shift in governance as jolting as the one it’s about to experience with Trump 2.0. Decades of general bipartisan consensus on liberalism, free trade, and containment of rival powers are about to be usurped by postliberalism, protectionism, and isolationism.

 

“Wasn’t that true after Trump’s first victory in 2016?” you might ask. Not really. Much of the world regarded that as a fluke, less as evidence of Americans’ appetite for Trumpism than of their disdain for Hillary Clinton. And Barack Obama, by dint of his charisma and his historical stature as the first black president, remained a compelling political figure during his lame-duck period. He wasn’t as forgettable as Biden is.

 

Trump’s reelection last month finished off the illusion that his first victory was a fluke and made Biden-style neoliberalism instantly seem passe. With the left hemorrhaging working-class voters, the politics of the next Democratic leader are certain to be meaningfully different from the elite consensus that’s dominated the party since young Sen. Joe Biden first came to Washington—although whether they’ll be more left-wing or more centrist remains a mystery. Unlike most presidents, in other words, Biden isn’t just retiring; he might be the end of his political species.

 

Ducks don’t get lamer than that.

 

Trump’s brand of patronage politics compounds the lameness. Because he’s vain, vindictive, and keen to use presidential power to reward allies and punish enemies, entities ranging from corporate America to foreign heads of state have every reason to rush to prove their allegiance to him. When Jeff Bezos slobbers over how “very optimistic” he is about Trump 2.0; when the publisher of the Los Angeles Times adds a Trump apologist to the editorial board; when the president of France uses the occasion of Notre Dame’s reopening to make Trump his special guest, they’re all acknowledging the political reality that Donald Trump’s feelings and U.S. policy are now basically indistinguishable.

 

Under those circumstances, of course the wider world will be quick to elbow Joe Biden aside and treat Trump as the de facto president. The sooner you can ingratiate yourself to the returning king, the better your chances will be of earning a favor from the government he’ll soon own.

 

And the better your chances will be of not experiencing his “retribution,” needless to say.

 

One of the few notable public appearances Biden has made since Election Day was when he welcomed Trump back to the Oval Office in November for a photo op. I was surprised by how chummy they seemed, reportedly spending two hours together and posing for pics with Jill Biden. The current president made a good enough impression on the incoming president to have earned a friendly “Happy Thanksgiving” phone call from him, in fact.

 

I wonder if Joe Biden’s unlikely warmth toward a guy who tried to deny him his rightful victory in 2020 wasn’t partly motivated by wanting a little insurance for the Biden family against harassment by Trump’s Justice Department. Hunter Biden is now off the hook for offenses he might have committed between 2014 and December 1 of this year, but—Hunter being Hunter—the odds of him landing in criminal trouble again at some point before Trump leaves office in 2029 are high.

 

“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” Maybe Joe Biden, like most of the rest of the world, now prefers to have Trump as a friend. And being a friend starts with getting out of his way and not using the lame-duck period to do things that’ll complicate his presidency.

 

Too little, too late.

 

Even if Biden is willing to risk his successor’s wrath in his final seven weeks in power, what do liberals want him to do, realistically, to try to thwart Trump’s authoritarian ambitions?

 

Or, let me rephrase: What can he do to try to thwart them that won’t end up hurting Democrats more than it hurts Trump?

 

Biden could pardon everyone and their mother as a precaution against harassment by Kash Patel’s FBI. But that’ll make the recipients of the pardons appear guilty of something, which Trump would find useful in convincing Americans that he was right all along about “deep state” corruption. If Pam Bondi’s DOJ puts Liz Cheney on trial next year and she’s acquitted, that’s an embarrassment for Trump. (And potentially a very expensive victory for Cheney.) But if they can’t put her on trial because Biden has pardoned her, Trump can crow that she would have been found guilty if the rotten “uniparty” establishment hadn’t protected her from criminal accountability. He’d get all the political benefits of impugning Cheney without having to do any of the work.

 

Biden could do what the progressives who spoke to the Wall Street Journal want—by coming out hard against Trump’s Cabinet nominees, beginning with Patel himself. But who would care? When the “joyful” vibes of her first two months as a candidate didn’t propel Kamala Harris to a durable lead in national polling, she spent the final month of her campaign calling Trump a “fascist,” playing clips of his most hair-raising soundbites at her rallies, and stumping with Liz Cheney about the authoritarian threat. It didn’t matter. Voters didn’t believe Trump’s administration would abuse federal power or, per their apparent indifference to January 6, they didn’t care.

 

Having Joe Biden, the least relevant man in politics, issue one last warning would feel like an exercise in laughable futility. Americans won’t worry about whether there’s a wolf worth crying about until it shows up, and maybe not even then.

 

Biden could, finally, call on Congress to pass certain long overdue restraints on presidential power. But the reason they’re long overdue, of course, is because Democrats didn’t prioritize that when they gained total control of the government in 2021 and 2022. They could have “Trump-proofed” the executive branch; instead, they cared more about Build Back Better. Now it’s too late, as the servile House Republican majority won’t dare try to limit Trump’s autocratic options on the eve of him returning to office.

 

Biden’s historically lame lame-duck status isn’t a failure of presidential will to pursue numerous appealing options, it’s a function of circumstance after he squandered every ounce of political capital he enjoyed upon assuming office in 2021. To a degree matched only by George W. Bush this century, he’ll leave office with no real constituency on any side of American politics. And like Bush, he’ll have only himself to blame.