Biden Gave Us Trump

Joe Biden had shown signs of cognitive decline even when he was running for president back in 2020. For four years it only got worse.

That’s the unsurprising conclusion in a new book set to come out next week. In “Original Sin,” journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson interviewed some 200 people, most of whom refused to allow their names to be used. According to reviews, they paint a picture of an inner circle that either actively covered up Biden’s failings or simply refused to acknowledge them.

But in the end I don’t think it mattered. Trump would have been president again anyway because Biden opened the door for him in 2020 and kept it open for four full years.

The notion that the Democrats would have benefited from a competitive primary in 2024, had Biden not run for a second term or had dropped out much earlier, doesn’t stand up. It just isn’t plausible that this Democratic Party would have failed to nominate a Black woman who was clearly next in line. A primary would have only created divisions within the party. And, even more significantly, it would have required Vice President Kamala Harris to move to her left to appease party activists.

As it turned out, Biden’s stubbornness almost certainly benefited Harris. She got the nomination she would have received anyway, but she did it without having to spend a dime, without having to bring the party back together at the convention and without having to move to her left. Instead, Democrats swiftly coalesced behind her, money flowed in and she worked hard to present herself as a centrist, middle class candidate. I think she ran a great campaign.

The problem for Harris wasn’t in anything she or Biden did in 2024. The problems were in her past and in Biden’s record over four years.

Harris was never a good choice for Vice President. If Biden felt the need to elevate a Black woman, then Susan Rice would have been a far better pick. Democrats were going to win California in any event, but in order to be a successful California Democrat, Harris had had to be far to the left of where most of the country was. She didn’t make things any better by trying to capture the party’s activist wing in her own 2020 presidential campaign. Once that stuff was on the record, she couldn’t outrun it, no matter how hard she tried to redefine herself as a more mainstream leader.

And Biden himself did not govern as the centrist, transitional leader he had promised to be in his 2020 campaign. Voters were looking for a steady hand after four years of Trump chaos. They wanted normal and Biden gave them an aggressive activist agenda. He spent too much money, contributing to the inflation that became his biggest liability. He didn’t control the southern border until it was too late. And he embraced every unpopular hard-left social movement he could find.

So, Biden is, in fact, responsible for four more years of Trump’s chaos — only this time it’s much worse. But it’s not because he hung on too long in 2024. It’s because of his decisions in 2020 and over the next four years.