Joe Biden has left office, but we are now living with the consequences of Biden's presidency, and it's important in this moment to look back over the last four years and try to understand what exactly happened to get us to this point. Was Biden's presidency doomed from the start? Which of the many competing narratives about it is true? Was it an America-wrecking catastrophe, as President Donald Trump says, or an underrated golden age, as Biden's defenders would have it?

We are joined for this assessment by the world's leading Bidenologist, Branko Marcetic, who is the author of the 2020 book Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden and has written a two-part assessment of the Biden presidency for Jacobin, Part I on domestic policy and Part II on foreign policy. Branko recounts the political history of the last four years, explaining how it all went wrong and we ended up back at another Donald Trump presidency.

Branko Marcetic

Saying I'm the world's foremost expert on Joe Biden is kind of like being the world's foremost expert in zeppelins or something.

Nathan J. Robinson

I realized, as I said it, it was a little bit of a backhanded compliment, unfortunately.

Marcetic

Yes, relevant for four years. And no longer.

Robinson 

Well, I wanted to bring you on because I think your Biden expertise will not be drawn upon much longer as this man fades into history. I think a lot of people would probably prefer to move on and forget Joe Biden. Now, I would say, he’s something of an embarrassment at the end of the day. I think a lot of people, even in the Democratic Party who were real partisans of Biden, ended up finding him to be a massive embarrassment. But on the left, we have to assess and understand the past four years because they are going to contain crucial lessons for dealing with the next four years. Unless we understand what we have just gone through—what it was, why it happened, who he was—I think we will be ill served for trying to avoid anything like what just happened from happening again. So, let me ask you, looking back at the Biden presidency, is there a central lesson that comes out of the last four years? 

MarCetic

One very obvious point is that you cannot run a populist presidency with a) the figurehead being someone who's not a populist and someone who is incapable of communicating with the public or even appearing in public, and b) you can't run a populist presidency, or even really a populist movement, if that movement is entirely dependent on not just corporate funding but an entire support network of oligarchic power, which is what Biden was trying to do. And in the end, his presidency collapsed on that contradiction.

What happened? The part of his agenda that Wall Street and big business wanted to pass, which was the infrastructure bill, went through, but the bit that they didn't like, which were some tax increases and a bunch of expansions to the U.S. safety net—free college and that kind of thing—all died. And it's an entirely predictable outcome, if you think about the way that the U.S. political system works. It worked because the two most shameless corporate marionettes in the Democratic Caucus, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, were being funded by these groups that liked one of those bills and didn't like the other and used them as a way to split Biden's agenda. And the infrastructure bill was not nothing, but the promise of Biden's presidency was not, “I'm going to throw a bunch of money at big business and build a bunch of bridges.”

Robinson

What you've just said there, though, is something that would have been said by a defender of Joe Biden, who would say that Joe Biden had a massively ambitious agenda, and he came in knowing what the country needed to do. He proposed it, surprising everybody, and had the ambition of being better than Barack Obama, learning the lessons of the Obama years, and he was thwarted by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate. And how can you blame a man who tried to deliver, and ultimately didn't have the power to deliver? He ran up against the reality that we do live in a country where there is a legislature, and unless the legislature passes the legislation, there's no legislation, no matter what the president as the chief executive wishes would happen otherwise. How would you respond to the person who characterizes Biden that way?

Marcetic 

I'm really glad you asked that. You are right. That is the kind of excuse that a lot of people in the media and people who are generally favorable to the Democratic Party give to kind of paper over the mistakes that Biden made. For me, the crux of when his presidency collapsed—the contradiction between his populist aims and the actual powers behind his presidency is fundamental—a lot of it also has to do with a personal decision that Biden made, that, unfortunately, was the most Joe Biden decision that he could have possibly made. It was his decision—I think in April 2021, at the height of his approval rating, when he had just passed the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and saved the economy and pumped all this money into ailing state and municipal governments—to do the exact opposite of the approach that had just worked.

With the ARP—the stimulus—what he had done was a very un-Joe Biden thing, and he said, I don't care about bipartisanship, I don't care about the deficit, I'm going to pass this massive spending bill through reconciliation, and it's going to be done on a party line vote—a strict party line vote—because that's the way it has to be. And we have such narrow majorities that basically you have to get every single Democrat on board. And reportedly, he told people after this, he said to historians who visited, you know what, I have to go big and fast. The only way we're going to do this is to go bigger and faster than even what I just did. And then what he decided to do was not do that.

What he decided to do was to convince the American public that bipartisanship could still work, that Washington could still work, that the Democrats and Republicans could come together and make a deal and serve the American people. So what he did was this massive spending package that was going to be the centerpiece of his presidency. It was going to have the infrastructure stuff: the trillion dollars or so to rebuild roads and bridges and airports and everything. And then it was going to be tied to what came to be known as Build Back Better, the massive social safety net expansion: free college, Medicare expansion, universal pre-K—all the stuff that people probably remember from 2021. And the reason that these things had to go together is because people like Sinema and Manchin wanted the infrastructure part because that's what their donors wanted, and it's also what they wanted to deliver to their constituents back home. Pretty much every politician in West Virginia was very, very excited about the infrastructure package. The only way to get them to vote for the Build Back Better stuff was to tie it to the infrastructure stuff. Because if they voted down one, they lost the other.

And at this time, Biden had a lot of momentum. He was a popular president, so it would not have looked good for these people to be the only holdouts, kind of attacking Biden. Instead, Biden did them a favor by splitting this up. And so now they could say—which is what they did—we're going to support the infrastructure stuff, but we're going to try and do everything we can to block and stymie the other stuff. And the additional thing that happened was that he tried to get Republican buy-in on the infrastructure portion of it—which is the exact mistake that Obama had made in his term and something that they said they weren’t going to repeat—and it resulted in just endless months of negotiations between Biden and Republicans where they were whittling down the package, and this went on and on.

Meanwhile, all the momentum of his presidency went away. Inflation started going up. You have the Afghanistan withdrawal. Biden has nothing positive to show. It's just endless talk, talk, talk behind the scenes. And so in the end, when that safety net portion didn't get passed, Biden basically had pissed away about—jeez, I don't know—seven months of the most important and crucial part of his presidency, very much the opposite of what you're seeing now from Trump, where they understand that the first two years is the part where you go the hardest. That is the most fundamental, core part of any president's time in office.

Robinson 

You used the phrase “a very un-Joe Biden thing to do”. Now, people who have not studied as you have the entire life history of Senator, and then Vice President, and then President Joe Biden might not understand what it means to be a more or less Joe Biden-ish thing. I want to understand because I find Joe Biden something of a paradox. I think you were probably, even having written so much about him, somewhat surprised by some parts of his presidency. To what extent is Joe Biden ideological? Is he committed to a particular political ideology? How do you fathom what this man is thinking? You've just described what you see as a kind of central mistake of his presidency. But is that just a mistake that he made or is it tied to a way of being?

Marcetic 

Look, Joe Biden is not a principled man. Having looked at his career and life extensively, I can say that. And it's not a pejorative. I'm not saying that because I don't like him, and so now I'm taking a shot at him. He really is not. He's an incredibly unprincipled person and politician who will say and do anything to keep himself in power and has [done that] throughout his career. Biden sacrificed civil rights gains of Black and brown communities with the "tough on crime" and War on Drugs stuff, and he led the charge in the Iraq War and so many other things to keep his political career going over the years. But the one thing that he really seems to have a genuine belief in is the idea that the U.S. two party system—the duopoly, where two parties have an unseemly control over the political system of the United States—is a sacrosanct, vital thing for the country. It must be preserved. I'm sure that there's a level of political theatricality to it, but that seems to be really something he genuinely believes in. Look, as I just described, he literally sacrificed his entire presidency on the altar of bipartisanship. 

Robinson 

I would argue that he has one more principle, which is that the relationship between the United States and Israel must not, under any circumstances, be compromised. He was also willing to sacrifice for that principle. But I want to put foreign policy to the side for a second and just continue a little bit on the domestic front. He did end up with some of the lowest approval ratings ever on record, as I understand it. One explanation is just, setting aside the questions of politics, what we found out, and what everyone kind of knew, which is that Joe Biden is not too old because you can be old and be Bernie Sanders—you could be very lively—but Joe Biden just wasn't capable of being the president. You mentioned that he couldn't appear in public. They had to hide him. No matter what your policies are, no matter what your decisions are—Jonathan Chait is at the Atlantic now, and he wrote a big thing saying, we delivered the populist presidency, and the left didn't like it. I'm like, well, in any presidency, no matter what the policies are, if the president seems half dead, it's not going to be popular. Americans want to be led by a person who seems fully alive. That seems to be a hugely important thing. Before we get to anything else, a live president is a precondition. 

Marcetic

Yes, there was a Wall Street Journal report from just before Trump took office that revealed a few more tidbits, basically about this immense cover up that was perpetrated by Biden's family members, his advisors, and I think a lot of people in the Democratic Party and surrounding [cottage] industries. As early as 2021, there was some episode where a national security official wanted to have a meeting with Biden, or they had a meeting scheduled, and then this official was told, “today is not really a good day for him,” as in, he's not really functioning well today, and we’ll push it back for tomorrow. So as early as 2021 there were apparently days where the president of the United States was not fit enough to hold a meeting. This is a person who, mind you, beyond the insane complexities of legislating and running a permanent campaign, as every president has to do these days, in the middle of the night might get woken up and told there's potentially a nuclear war starting: here's all the information about what's happening, and we need you to decide whether to launch the nukes or what to do. And for them to push the meeting back a day because he wasn't able to do a meeting, that is insane.

This is a bigger thing than Joe Biden. This is a product and a problem of the Democratic Party and, I would say, the wider culture that has been fostered not just within party's top echelons but also within the entire Democratic base. If we think of them as the average older liberal who maybe watches MSNBC and CNN religiously or reads New York Times and so on and so forth. There's been a really toxic culture that the Democratic Party created during the Trump era, which blew up in their face with Biden, where basically no dissent or criticism of the Democratic establishment, but particularly the Democratic leader, could be broached. So that it made it impossible. People had to do all this whispering and hush tones and kind of winking and implying about his condition, whatever that condition may be. And in the end, no one even really launched a real primary effort. And when they did, the party all maneuvered to make it impossible, even if it was a failed primary challenge, for it to be in any way a challenge to Biden by canceling debates, by moving the primary schedule around in a nonsensical way. That particular thing you're asking about, it's so much bigger than Biden. This is a Democratic Party failure, which also, to be honest, you could probably call Joe Biden himself a Democratic Party failure.

Robinson

I just wonder [about] the counterfactual. What if you had a politician who had Obama's level of charisma and energy and the same set of specific decisions that occurred over the course of the Biden presidency, even the stuff that made Biden unpopular—things like inflation, the bungling of the Afghanistan pull out, the decisions that doomed Build Back Better—and that someone was able to explain to the public what antitrust was, so that the victories there could actually be understood? One of the things that progressives praise about Biden is the FTC, the NLRB, and canceling student debt. But if you don't have a president who's making those things obvious to people, they're not going to mean much. Preventing two corporations from merging, it's like, well, how are people going to know? How are people going to notice that? It's occurring in a courtroom. There's an item in the Wall Street Journal about it. Where is that going to impact anyone?

MarCetic

Yes. Biden was a disastrous president, but it's also true that the way he's sitting now, and his approval rating, it's probably—not probably—it's definitely way too harsh. He was terrible. Was he that terrible? The economy is not great. The economy isn't in a crisis. He did keep the economy from spiraling out of control and really collapsing. But unfortunately, he presided over and made decisions that just kind of led to the gradual, steady, further deterioration of the American standard of living. So, he's bad, but he's not terrible.

But I think the fact that people feel that way is a reflection of what you're saying, which is that, yes, I think people will forgive a leader during a trying time if they get the sense he or she is really putting effort into working for them—that person's out there sweating and laboring and doing everything they can. And Biden was never in public. He would do some stage-managed press conferences and public appearances occasionally. They’d put him on TikTok and TV. They thought they could continue to do the stuff that worked during the 2020 COVID campaign.

Robinson

They could keep doing it in the basement.

Marcetic

Yes, basically, and just keep it going through the presidency and then maybe even through the second election campaign, even though COVID wasn't [...] this massively disruptive thing. And it's an incredibly arrogant thing to think. But yes, he ultimately wasn't in the public eye. He wasn't able to explain his case. He couldn't even do the Super Bowl interview, my god.

Robinson

Well, it's interesting [...] what people will forgive. I just did a big article on FDR for Current Affairs, and one of the undernoted things about FDR's presidency is that for a long time, the New Deal didn't really work. They didn't go very big on it, and they tried lots and lots of different things, and some of them were good and put some people to work. They brought the jobless rate down a bit, but I think it's widely understood now that it wasn't until World War Two that America actually recovered fully from the Great Depression. So, there was this long period of time when it just wasn't really working. The depression was continuing, but FDR was popular because he was able to convey to Americans a sense that the president was doing what he could to try to help you. And he slapp[ed] the presidential signature on things, so people could see things being built. They could understand things were moving, and the rhetoric was forward-looking. The fireside chats every week were saying, this is what we've done, this is where we're at, please bear with us. That, as you say, makes it easier for the public to hang on, even when things aren't going terribly well. But just the bare fact that Biden and, obviously, Kamala Harris, were not effective communicators. [It was] this whole administration. 

Marcetic

Yes, it’s incredible when you think about the fact that—I've said this to people many times now—the Democratic Party worked its way into a situation where they ended up with a president who couldn't speak or appear in public because he clearly has some kind of health condition that they are hiding, and then they ended up with his replacement also not being able to speak or appear in public for completely different reasons. Harris is not a good politician and is palpably uncomfortable in any situation where she has to talk off the cuff. How is it these two people ended up there?

To [figure that out], you have to go back to the 2020 primary. And the reason that we're in this situation is that the Democratic Party's biggest priority over the Trump years was not stopping Trump. It was stopping the mirror insurgency in its own party to Trump's: the Bernie Sanders movement. They did that. And great for them, terrible for the rest of us, but great for them. They managed to do that. They picked a guy who they were openly commenting, as he was running in 2019, had clearly “lost the step,” to use a very conservative euphemism. Everyone could see that Biden was not the man that he was. Something had happened to him. People openly commented about the fact that they didn't have any real faith in him as a politician, anyway. You know who could still fuck it up? Joe Biden.

Robinson

They only got behind him when Biden was the only way to beat Bernie Sanders. But it was quite notable that Obama did not encourage his vice president to run. He didn't support him until there was really no alternative.

Marcetic

He moved heaven and earth to put a guy into the Democratic nomination who a) everyone could see was infirm and quite possibly unhealthy, and b) someone who, according to reports, had spent a year or more privately just running down and saying how little faith he had in him, how he thought he was not a good politician, that he was ineffective and incompetent. And that was because they wanted to stop the movement. Think about that. Just think about what that actually means. And like I said, that has been bad for all of us that want to see some kind of counterforce to a rising, very dangerous, right-wing movement, as well as some improvements to people's living standards in this country and basic economic security. But it's also bad for them. They put themselves into a corner where they were stuck with this guy, and then they were stuck with the baffling choice he made for a running mate who no one had confidence in, either.

Robinson

Right. [...] What do you make of the argument that is often made—I think Matthew Yglesias has made this argument—which is that the 2024 election is explained by one thing, which is that this is a bad climate globally for incumbents. People are pissed about inflation, which has happened in a lot of places, and they've thrown out incumbents around the world. You don't really need to understand anything about American politics, about Joe Biden—nothing specific about the U.S. case. It’s just an anti-incumbency moment.

Marcetic

Why even run a campaign? Why do anything? It’s just, we were going to lose no matter what, there's no point in trying. You know who doesn't have that attitude? Donald Trump, who has serially defied the odds, maybe because he's actually serious about winning. Putting that aside, it’s ridiculous. Yes, there has been an anti-incumbent mood because every incumbent government around the world has presided over a massive surge in the cost of living. Does that mean that every single government got thrown out? No. The ones that didn't do enough to actually help their people got thrown out.

Maybe it would be worth it for American pundits, with all of their education and all of their worldliness, to look across the border for once, somewhere else, and not in Canada. Look at Mexico, where you have a populist, left, progressive—whatever you want to say—government. You had a populist president in AMLO, who did not do most of the things that he wanted to do. He faced, obviously, obstruction in his legislature and many other things, but he made measurable gains in reducing poverty in Mexico. He made measurable gains in lifting the minimum wage, for instance, and was constantly out in public doing the kind of thing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could not do. And in Mexico, you can only run for one term. His successor and his party were just reelected. They elected a woman president.

So, by contrast, Joe Biden presided over a sure drop in poverty in that first year. Once the child tax credit was gone, poverty rose. Pretty much every possible negative statistic you can think of—hunger, homelessness, evictions—went up, and he never raised the minimum wage, the most basic, easy, populist thing you could possibly do. He had the chance, and it's not that he was blocked. He decided we're not going to do this, and they didn't.

Robinson

And then they have the audacity to say, the problem here is that the American people are being hoodwinked by the vibes that the media is cultivating. The media is just reporting very negatively. We're not succeeding in communicating how good people have it; if they only understood how much better their lives actually are. And clearly, they're being misled, which, of course, is in itself not a winning message.

Marcetic

It’s like, don't you guys realize how great everything is? Just shut up and be grateful.

Robinson

You don't understand how good Joe Biden is at being president.

Marcetic 

"I know you're complaining about how you just lost your healthcare, your rent's been raised, and you don't know how you're going to afford it—that all sounds tough, but have you considered the CHIPS Act?" That entire discourse that you're describing, not only is it, I think, a big part of the reason why they lost, but it's such a reflection of just how disconnected not just Democratic politicians and the party structure are but the entire media ecosystem is from just ordinary daily life. I remembered hearing this for years, and I’d go to a grocery store, buy four items and pay $20 and think to myself, this is not great. This is not really an ideal living situation. This seemed to be completely lost on people who populate a lot of the major legacy media posts in this country.

Robinson

Yes, I remember saying on Twitter something like, Democrats have fixed on the strategy of gaslighting people by saying, actually you're doing better than you think, that our experiences are not valid. And then one of these partisans came back and said, what are you talking about? They showed a chart of capital investment in industry over time. And they were like, there's never been more investment in manufacturing in the last 10 years. And I was like, okay, well, literally a couple of blocks from my office, there's a mile long strip of tents that people live in under the highway. So, what you can do is take that chart and go show it to every person living under the highway and explain to them that actually they're doing great. Because look at this [chart]. 

Marcetic  

Maybe people don't know this. Evictions, since 2023 at least, have been, in many cities around the country, above pre-pandemic levels. So, there's been a massive spike in evictions. Actually, it would have started from 2022. You would just see reports of whole families being thrown out in the street. And so just imagine a guy in a suit with some charts going, but have you seen the Dow Jones? Which, by the way, Biden did. Biden criticized Trump during the 2020 campaign using a very good populist line about, this guy keeps talking about the stock market. Well, guess what? That doesn't really matter to people who are struggling. Biden ended his presidency by doing the exact same thing, and he was constantly talking about how great the stock market is doing—doing the exact thing that he criticized Trump for doing. It's funny. I saw a video just before this of Brian—and I forgot his name. He was called for making up stories about being in a war zone and a helicopter.

Robinson

Brian Williams.

Marcetic

Brian Williams, MSNBC anchor. There was a clip in from the Seth Meyers show, and he's making this exact point: the Democrats are so out of touch, and they're saying everything's fine, and meanwhile, people are paying all this money for their groceries, and all this “this is expensive, this is expensive.” And I'm like, yes, that's true. I guess I'm glad that you are saying this now that it's too late, I suppose. But where was this before? Where was this in any of the years before this? Sorry, maybe I didn't watch the Brian Williams show religiously, but my sense of watching a lot of MSNBC is it was a lot of that exact message, “Everything's fine. Don't you people realize how great Joe Biden's doing?”

Robinson 

Where was this before? is a question I asked a lot of the time. Joe Biden left office with this big speech about oligarchy, the consolidation of oligarchy. It’s like, oh yes, on my last day in office—that’s like Eisenhower on the way out, going, by the way, we've just built a military industrial complex. Terrible idea. The consequences of this will be awful. They'll be with us for decades.

Marcetic 

That was amazing because, honestly, that last week or two felt like Biden had just realized that he had 20 days to do something. 

Robinson

They tried to make the Equal Rights Amendment pass. They’re like, by the way, equal rights for women.

Marcetic 

Is this actually legal? I didn't talk about it before, but it totally is. Anyway. I’m off, but keep that in mind. It’s like he sent a memo on January 1. He looked around, was like, oh shit, I don't have that much time. And he just sent a memo to his staff and everyone below, being like, find me a legacy. And then his poor staff had to scramble around being like, ah, jeez, Equal Rights Amendment?

Robinson 

—is the law now? Maybe if people believe it, then it’s true, right?

Marcetic  

Yes, the oligarchy thing is a really good example because clearly, it's Biden's training. He's sitting in the ashes of not just his presidency, but his entire legacy as a politician. The one thing at the very least that Biden could always hang his hat on was, “I stopped Trump. I'm the guy who beat Trump.” And here he was, having delivered the White House to a much more emboldened, radicalized version of Trump. And so he didn't even have that, and you could just see him in that speech straining for some kind of profound message, some kind of thing that people—historians—could draw on to let them go, you see, he was very prescient.

Of course, the idea that the U.S. is an oligarchy has been made for many years, way before Biden finally realized that at the last possible second. And by the way, that fact, the increasingly oligarchic nature of the U.S. political system, which is a very bad thing for anyone—whatever party you are, whatever your ideological leaning—that's the reason Joe Biden was president. His entire campaign was [about how] he had the most billionaire donors. He had tons of money coming in from healthcare executives because he was seen as a bulwark to stopping a Medicare for All system under Bernie Sanders. He famously told a room full of hedge fund managers and other Wall Street people that nothing would fundamentally change. Biden's entire presidency and his career were made possible by the oligarchy that he scrambled to condemn at the end of his presidency, when he didn't have anything else to stand on. 

Robinson 

A bunch of executive orders, and can we cancel some more student debt? There were tons of stuff that was just like, okay, you understand that what you're supposed to do is when you get into office—as you said, what Trump understands—you do things and then people feel the effects of it, and then you're popular. If you're going to do things that you think are good for people, but if you're doing things on the last day of your presidency, and they're good, the credit will go to the guy who's succeeding you on whose watch the effects will finally be felt.

Marcetic

Right. Well, this is the difference between Democrats and Republicans—honestly, you could make this case for pretty much all Liberal and Conservative parties across the world, certainly in New Zealand. The Republicans and the Trump people are serious about using their power, and they're serious about getting their political goals over the line. Democrats are serious, or at least focused on, not so much about getting any sort of political goal over the line but on getting reelected.

So, what Biden did—unlike Trump, who is just ramming through everything he possibly can now, while the moment is there—the Biden people decided they would parcel out these various things over the course of his four years, so he would have something that he could dangle to people later on and say, look, I did this one thing. And the cynical read of the student loan cancellation failure— even though people's loans have been canceled for sure, but it's been massively constrained and did not go nearly as far as it was meant to—is that they chose a deliberately flawed legal rationale to do it when they had a much better one, a much safer one. But they chose the flawed one precisely because it would get blocked.

Robinson 

Well, he was always very anti-student debt cancellation when he talked about it before he became president.

Marcetic

Yes. And then how it ended up was that when he got struck down by the courts, and they had to go back and redo it, and they had to get public comment, the timeline was such that to do it again, he could only do it in 2025. So basically, whether it was by design or not, the way it ended up was, we chose a very obviously flawed legal rationale, which is using the pandemic to cancel student loans. A pandemic that Biden, I think, like a month or two later, went on 60 Minutes and was like, it's over. There's no pandemic. So, they chose that rationale. It got blocked, and then the only way for student loan cancellation to happen now was to get Biden reelected. Whether you read that cynically or not, I think it's a pretty massive failure.

Robinson

So far, we have dwelled on the domestic, but I think we need to pivot as we come to the end of our conversation because this is not a minor—this is, in fact, a major—thing. The Vietnam War really colors every assessment of Lyndon Johnson's presidency and really made it so that it's very hard to even praise his domestic achievements. And Lyndon Johnson had more domestic achievements, certainly, than Joe Biden. But this catastrophic war now, the way you put it, is a global trail of destruction. And really, for anyone who sees what has been done to Gaza with Joe Biden's full approval, essentially, and support, it can be even hard to start weighing the domestic policies because you just think, well, what is any of that weighed against tens of thousands of people massacred? So, the global trail of destruction, tell us about it.

Marcetic

Boy, where do you start? I was shocked at how just world historically disastrous Joe Biden's foreign policy was. I wasn't expecting amazing things, but I did not think it would be this bad. It's bad on multiple levels. It's bad on all the levels you've talked about, in terms of the amount of carnage and chaos it’s caused, but also, if we just take away those kinds of moral concerns, it's bad in its own terms. The point of Biden's foreign policy was that he was going to restore the U.S. to a place of world leadership after Trump had kind of dinged the U.S.’s reputation, and do it while setting up the U.S. for competition, and possible confrontation, with a rising China that was looking to kind of supplant the United States, not just the most powerful country in the world, but as the global leader. Biden made every decision he could possibly make to undermine that goal and to actually just hand China win after win after win. If it had been Trump that did all this stuff, it actually, ironically, would not have been as damaging to that goal as it was for Biden. But Biden was sold to the public and to the world as the guy who is the most experienced establishment foreign policy guy in the country. He's been there for 40 years. He's been involved in everything. He knows what he's doing. This is the best person for the job. He has a team of experts who have the highest educational qualifications. They’re experienced. These are the adults in the room. These aren't the chaotic Trump people. 

Robinson

Blinken and Sullivan and those kinds of people. 

Marcetic

Exactly. This is the best and brightest. This is what was told to the world, and what followed was just complete chaos. As one example, but a very big example, the Ukraine war. Once the invasion started—which, by the way, the Biden administration could have possibly prevented if they had negotiated or responded to the Russian negotiating bid, but a State Department official himself admitted that they did not do that. They rejected that.

And so anyway, once the invasion started, there was actually a peace deal. It was not yet finalized, from the sounds of it, and there were still negotiations. There was still hardball being played, but it was bearing fruit. Ukrainian officials themselves that were part of those negotiations said this. This is corroborated by numerous reports—people can go and look my piece up and follow the links. Biden and the U.K. Government and other NATO governments deliberately discouraged that agreement to prolong the war in the hope that they would weaken Russia. And I think there's evidence to show that they believed that if Ukraine could deal enough damage to Russia, they could basically carry out regime change and get rid of Putin. A disastrous miscalculation that much of the world stands aghast at. The consensus position for the past two years among Europe and the United States, that the war should go on and on and on and on, is not shared by the majority of the world's people and the majority of the world's governments who have been watching this and going, this is insanely irresponsible, why is this being just allowed to go on? 

Robinson

And importantly, it needs to be understood that all of this policy was coated with the rhetoric of, we just want to help the Ukrainians defend themselves and give them what they want. But there was a moment at the end of 2022—there was an internal Biden administration discussion about whether this was the best moment because that was when Ukraine was doing very well, unexpectedly well, at holding back the Russian invasion. And General Milley and others were arguing, this is the moment to get the Ukrainians the best possible deal. And others in the Biden administration said, no, our job is to just push the Ukrainians to fight no matter what. And they did.

Ultimately, the result is that the U.S. choice here has really, really hurt Ukraine. They're the people who have ended up suffering. So the whole pretense of we're just doing this for Ukraine—and this is what's kind of frustrating about the right-wing critique of Biden's Ukraine policy. They say, they're sending all this money to Ukraine—look at all your money is being handed to Ukrainians. Why are they helping Ukrainians? They're not helping Ukrainians. They're helping the U.S. arms industry, and they may be weakening Russia, but they're certainly not waking up every day thinking, how can we help Ukrainians?

Marcetic

Yes, absolutely. And the fallout from that war has far-reaching global consequences that have undermined this Washington elite pretense to leadership in the world. For one, the resulting inflation, which, by the way, was a huge contributor to the cost of living in the United States that ultimately unraveled Biden's presidency. But the massive surge in prices around the world destabilized governments. It led to rising hunger in the Global South. It led to food riots and riots over gas. That's beyond the alarm that many world leaders expressed at seeing the conflict numerous times, I think at least three times, come within a shadow of potentially going in a nuclear direction. Ultimately, part of that cost-of-living surge that it created now has basically destabilized all the governments of the U.S.’s allies in NATO, and actually now has basically been giving a leg up to far-right parties around Europe to potentially get into government. And they have gone into government. In Sweden, in the Netherlands, and possibly in France, quite possibly in Germany, very soon.

So, Biden at the end of his presidency is saying, I've strengthened NATO. Biden's actually weakened his allies. Germany, maybe the U.S.’s most important ally in Europe, has been in a recession as a result of this war and has undergone a process of partial deindustrialization. So that's the Ukraine war. By its own terms, the Ukraine war did not really enhance the U.S. standing. It did briefly, but by prolonging it, it actually undermined that. If Ukraine falls, it looks like a major defeat for the United States and makes the United States look far weaker because it wasn't able to produce the elements—it wasn't able to produce the artillery—that Ukraine needed. Okay, so that's Ukraine.

Beyond that, Gaza. If Ukraine was the first shot at that, Gaza has completely obliterated it. All the rhetoric that Biden used about autocracy versus democracy and standing for human rights and for the global rules-based order and blah, blah, blah, all of that has been exposed in the most horrific stomach-churning public fashion to be completely hollow and just lies. That has also handed China a massive win. Because now, as the U.S. tries to pivot towards Asia and challenge China's growing pursuit of hegemony over there, suddenly, all these countries that it was relying on to try and counterbalance China are going, hold on, actually maybe we don't want to throw our chips in with the United States. Particularly, with some of the Muslim majority countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. They go, if this is what we get with a liberal democratic president of the United States, this genocide of a mostly Muslim Arab population, then maybe we should look to closer relations with China.

Robinson

Yes. He has obviously made the U.S. completely repugnant to a lot of people. I wrote an article for Foreign Policy a couple of months ago about the lie of the “ceasefire negotiations” that the Biden administration was supposedly conducting around Gaza for a long time. And this speaks to your point about how Biden's foreign policy had failed on its own terms. One of the craziest things that's happened is that by the Biden administration saying for well over a year, oh yes, we lament the war in Gaza; we're doing everything possible to negotiate an agreement between Israel and Hamas, but it's just very difficult—the parties are very far apart; oh, maybe they're moving together; oh no, they're not; there'll be a ceasefire next week; oh no, there's not a ceasefire next week. It's going on and on.

Meanwhile, Gaza is just being reduced to absolute rubble. In fact, the best estimate from medical professionals is that well over 100,000 people are, in fact, dead in Gaza. This just goes on and on. And then we had a couple of weeks ago, finally, a ceasefire in Gaza. And how did it happen? Well, it happened because Trump's negotiator got involved, and because Donald Trump actually understands public image and understands that you don't want to have an indefinite commitment to a horrendous war taking up everyone's attention. [...] I don't know if this is your understanding, but my understanding of the negotiation was that Trump's guy was the ingredient that actually got a deal. Now, whether this is going to last or whether Netanyahu is just going to violate it the moment he thinks it's opportune, we don't know. [Editor's note: Israel, declaring the ceasefire over, resumed strikes in March.]

In that context, looking back over what the Biden administration did, and then realizing that it was true that at any point they could have ended this carnage just with a little additional pressure on Israel, really leads you to the conclusion then that you were on principle committed to letting Israel obliterate Gaza and to giving them all the weapons they need to do that completely unconditionally. That was your view. Your view was not that you wanted to end the suffering. Your view was that you refused to end the suffering.

And we know now that Blinken was lying to Congress and was fabricating what was going on. Because under U.S. law, they wouldn't have been allowed to provide weapons to a human rights violator. The officials in the State Department were saying, I'm sorry, but Israel qualifies, and we have to cut off aid under the law. And so, the Biden administration was then fabricating what was happening, casting doubt on Palestinian death statistics, all kinds of stuff, so that they wouldn't have to end the war. Sorry, that's a rant, but it makes me very angry because a lot of people are dead. 

Marcetic 

Yes. Arab officials, I think, told The Times of Israel it was the most pressure that had been put on Netanyahu in the last year and a half, with Trump's envoy going over there and telling him this has to stop. The question for me is—and who knows if we'll ever find this out, especially in that last year and a half when Gaza took over everything—who was running U.S. foreign policy? Was Biden really in charge? We've all seen that clip of him in the plane with a very concerned looking Antony Blinken behind him as Biden slowly and very quietly answers questions from reporters. We've heard the reports about how his advisors were keeping bad news from him or selectively giving him information. Many of these reports about the way that career State Department officials were overruled and basically Israel's crimes were covered up so that the money could keep going. It all seems to end with Tony Blinken. It's Blinken stepping in every single time and overruling lower level officials. So, my question is, who was actually running foreign policy?

You mentioned the thing about Biden's relationship to Israel. What's interesting about Biden's relationship to Israel [is that] there are two things that are true. One is that Biden gave Israel, and then has historically given Israel, more than anyone, and gone further than even some of the most right-wing hawks in doing so. And certainly, in this war, he went far further than Trump in indulging its murderous frenzy, including after the election was finished. The other thing that's true is that when Joe Biden ran for the Senate in 1972, a campaign volunteer quit his campaign because Biden, behind the scenes, said, I need you to write me a position paper in the Middle East. My personal view is that Israel should give back the occupied territories, and Jerusalem should be an international city. But that view is political suicide, and I need to get donors, so write me a position that I can take, and whatever position I take in this campaign will be the one I take for the rest of my life.

But sure enough, other documents from Biden's early career show that, number one, he actually voted against Israel aid for a few years, but he also told local pro-Israel groups he was willing to bend on that principle. At some point in the late '70s, he became a hyper pro-Israel hawk to the right of Reagan, and he's been there ever since. So, is what happened that Biden, after starting out taking a cynical, disingenuous position for political reasons, came to really believe what he adopted? Was Biden cynical to the very end, believing that he was saving his legacy in some way by keeping the arms flowing? Or was it that he was being kept in the dark by his closest advisors, who had their own particular thing that they wanted to do? And it sounds like, from all the reporting, his advisors since 2021 have been the ones who have been largely running the show. I don't know. Maybe we won't ever find out, but that is the stuff that, as Biden now recedes into memory, I still want to think about.

Robinson  

I began by asking you for lessons from the Biden presidency, and we could return to that for one last question. To me, as I look over the Biden years and as we now go into, shit, here's Donald Trump again—what do we do? The few takeaways from Biden are, first, you need real leadership. You need to actually be able to explain to people what you're doing. You need to be in touch with the people. You need to deliver for people in meaningful ways that they actually notice, not just tell them that, according to this chart, we've delivered for you. And maybe you shouldn't participate in genocidal atrocities because a lot of people are repulsed by that, especially the progressives who you actually need to have some enthusiasm for you. And of course, this is also a lesson for Kamala Harris, as she probably should have distanced herself a little bit from neoconservatives that everyone despises and atrocities that are, as you say, stomach churning. That's my takeaway. What's yours?

Marcetic  

One thing we might add—we didn't really cover this, but if you are a populist president, and to be honest, even if you're just a leader of any kind, if the guy before you hands you a massive welfare state expansion, that means a bunch of people have all this government support they didn't have before that is actually really popular, and it turns out, is propping them up during a time of rising costs. Maybe fight to keep it. Maybe don't actively work to get rid of it or just sit there as it goes away. Since somebody already expended the political capital to make that happen, do the same thing that you do with every single massive expansion of the surveillance state. It gets done and it just sort of stays a permanent part of the governmental landscape. That's an easy lesson. That's one that Biden didn't take. And the massive rollback of the COVID welfare state, I think, explains a lot of people's unhappiness with the Biden years.

Number two, don't put bipartisanship and making deals over the actual delivery of benefits to the people who voted you in. That's a simple one. Make sure you're actually doing something to make people's money appear in their pockets. I think these are all pretty clear examples. I think also, something for Democratic voters to think about and for the Democratic Party to think about as it picks up the pieces is: in the last 10 years, there's only been one campaign that actually beat Donald Trump as a far-right populist. It wasn't the Hillary Clinton one, it wasn't the Kamala Harris one. It was the one where Biden—actually the smartest things he's done in his career—made common cause with the left, as represented by the Bernie Sanders movement, brought them into the fold and took on by no means all but a substantial amount of their policy priorities and actually ran a still pretty half-assed populist campaign, but compared to Clinton and Harris, actually a pretty populist campaign, the bold platform that actually excited people. Maybe that should be a lesson.

Robinson  

It’s to be appreciated that Hillary drove the Bernie people away and acted like she didn't need them and could treat them with contempt, whereas Biden sat down with Bernie and said, help me craft my policies.

Marcetic  

For all the many criticisms I have with a man, you have to give him credit for that.

Robinson  

He is a successful, or was, for a long period of time, a very successful political operator, until he became completely delusional and thought, and still thinks, that he would have beaten Trump, which is just amazing. 

Marcetic

Thinks he would have beaten Trump but also isn't sure if he would have served out the term upon beating him.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.