Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dive deep into Joe Biden's legacy as he prepares to leave office after serving as a Senator, Vice President, and Presidenct of the United States. From the historic infrastructure bill he passed in 2021 to presiding over Clarence Thomas's supreme court confirmation, Jared and Nick analyze exactly what will be remembered as his political career comes to a close.
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I'm here with my good friend and co-host, Nick Halsman.
Nick, how are we doing?
How's Los Angeles?
Los Angeles is okay.
Luckily today, thankfully today, the fires are, you know, not spreading as far as they were fast as they did before.
So things seem to be getting better.
The wind had died down, but it will kick up again later on today, tonight, and that's the big worry.
So we're, you know, we're hanging in there.
Well, we'll be thinking about you and our listeners in the Southern California area.
A reminder, go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast, support the show, keep us editorially independent and growing, and also gain access to the Weekender Edition on Fridays.
Nick, we have been talking for a while now that prior to Trump's inauguration, which will take place next Monday on January 20th, That we were going to do a retrospective on the Biden presidency in order to talk about the wins, the losses, and ultimately the legacy.
How history will view Biden and how history should view Biden.
So before we get into the actual presidency, going through the ups and the downs.
What are your thoughts now that we are officially one week out?
We've got confirmation hearings going.
It already feels like things are in place for Trump, that he's going to hit the ground running very, very quickly.
They've got plans that are going to be carried out.
How are you feeling now in the last week of the Biden presidency?
Not great, Bob.
Really, his legacy, no matter what the numbers are and how you crunch all those things, will ultimately be of a...
I'm not sure we can call it, like, a failed presidency, but they're going to throw it on the same funeral pyre as they would Carter's presidency.
And we had a whole, you know, four-part episode about that where we discussed, like, you know, all the amazing things he actually did as president, which kind of get brushed aside and ignored over time.
And the same thing's going to happen here, and I think part of it is in this time frame, you realize how important leadership is, right?
And so the cult of personality that Trump has created has afforded him an ability to convince people of certain things, whether that's the reality or not.
Biden does not have that.
And that is a big reason.
And part of it is his age and his ability to communicate.
He doesn't have that.
And if there ever was, maybe that's always been a need to be able to be a Pied Piper.
But in this day and age, it's even more important because you have to be able to rise above the cult that's going on on the right.
And Biden could not do that.
And as a result, his, you know, had to bow out.
Yeah, there's a lot to go over in this.
We're going to start back in 2021, January 20th, nearly four years ago now, back when Biden was inaugurated as the president.
In that speech, he said, quote, we have much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain.
A reminder, I think everybody kind of remembers this, but man, time is strange.
This was in the middle of the COVID epidemic.
This was two weeks to the day after the attempted coup of January 6th.
Biden had run for the presidency, promising to restore America.
And I would argue, Nick, that likely he won because of the pandemic.
I think now, looking at what has happened over the past few years, there was a failure within the Biden presidency, which we'll go over why that happened and hopefully learn some lessons from it.
But I think there is a very real possibility that if it hadn't have been for COVID, that Donald Trump very likely could have been reelected in the 2020 election.
And we now have to look through the Biden presidency through that lens that he was likely elected, very likely, because of what happened with the COVID epidemic.
I almost want to think that it's because of the timing of the epidemic as well, whereas if it hit eight months earlier than it did, and then things started to shake out like it did then, then Trump wins anyway.
Even despite COVID, right?
Because obviously the anger over the mismanagement early on was still palpable come November when we voted in 2020. But at some point, right, you know, after enough time went by and like people recovered and different variants became less lethal, you know, everybody started saying, oh, there was nothing.
It was the flu.
It was less than the flu.
Like, you know, everyone forgets all that stuff.
Masks don't work.
And so that is another interesting fear.
Like the timing ends up being kind of perfect for Biden to be able to...
To take advantage of that.
And also, let's not forget, it allowed him to, you know, quote unquote, campaign from the basement.
Yeah, and I was looking through pictures the other day, Nick.
I was looking back to my ill-fated trip to Iowa back in 2020, and I will never forget getting back from a Biden rally that was absolutely abysmal and talking to you.
And of course, this was like about 24 to 48 hours before I came down with some sort of an illness that I didn't know what it was, and it hit me like a hammer to the face, and I thought I was going to die in a hotel bathroom.
There was no energy there.
There was no juice there whatsoever.
He was not able to campaign effectively.
Not only were people bored but they walked away from that rally in Iowa feeling as if there was no chance whatsoever that Biden was going to get the nomination much less become elected president.
And when he is elected, Nick, he is elected with the promise that he's going to restore America.
He's going to repair the damage that Donald Trump had done.
And he came in, and it seems now like it's another lifetime.
He not only was promising to save America...
But he was also telling anyone who would listen that he planned on being a transformational president.
He wanted to be a Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And on top of that, told everybody that he was planning on ending neoliberalism, the neoliberal consensus, which has brought us to this point and has created all these crises.
I want to remind everybody, Joe Biden was instrumental in his 52 years in Washington, D.C., in constructing.
But when he came in, he felt at his back that he had the momentum.
And he had the trajectory that he could literally change how America worked and how it went moving forward.
You know, he pushed the American Rescue Plan, the jobs plan, the families plan.
We'll talk about how those things got scuttled and how he dealt with those things.
But he came in incredibly confident in his ability to change the way that America worked and the fact that he was not able to do that.
And we're going to have to look back on this time period, despite the successes that he had and the many losses and defeats that he had.
We're going to have to look back on this time period and think about who Joe Biden was when he came into the presidency, what it was he promised, and inevitably what it is that he is leaving the office with, which is a worsening of the crises that he promised to solve when he came into office.
You know, we don't spend so much time on this, but it also makes me wonder if we're finally going to learn and not have someone like Obama swoop in and just decide who the nominee is and control that part of it because of the angst and the fear of not having an old white guy.
As a nominee, basically, I think is what the calculation was.
Well, a leftist, democratic-socialist nominee who was an outsider within the party.
They went ahead and closed ranks and pushed Biden as the nominee in order to do so.
And he came in thinking of himself as a transformational president.
Right.
And which doomed this election in 2024 and potentially dooms the country for a lot longer, I would argue, than it did.
because, you know, I mean, again, you could have that argument whether or not Bernie would have been able to beat Trump in 2020.
Right.
I think it's, there's a lot of argument from on both sides.
I know, certainly, I didn't think he'd be able to do it.
I think, you know, if the country wasn't ready to elect a woman president, then they weren't really ready to elect a, you know, socialist in theory.
Right.
Or is that, is that a step too far?
I don't know, man.
I, I have to say that, you know, Trump in 2016 was sort of like...
You know, you could say it was a middle finger towards the institution.
It was a lot of people being not just misogynistic and illiberal, but wanting to tear things down.
In 2024, Trump was more or less elected as an illiberal president, right?
An actual authoritarian and has gained power and purchase promising, you know, open authoritarian corruption.
I don't know.
I think people have lost faith in liberal democracy and capitalism.
I mean, one of the reasons Trump has won is that he has lied on behalf of the wealth and the oligarchical classes that he's going to fix capitalism and make it fair.
I don't know.
I truly don't know what would have happened if we would have ended up with a Trump-Sanders 2020 election or a 2016 election.
But I do know that when Biden came into office, he was more or less promising to move to the left and was ultimately...
He failed in that regard.
And we'll talk about what he did successfully because, quite frankly, he is probably the most successful Democratic, you know, capital letter D, Democratic president since Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society program.
But that being said, what he promised was so far beyond what he was able to achieve, and there's a variety of reasons for that.
Well, I think it kind of boils down to the fact that no matter how much the government ultimately helps specific people in this country, it won't matter, right?
Like, it doesn't matter if all these infrastructure bills are passed and the communities are revived because of what Biden did.
Voters who voted for Trump would never either give Biden that credit or would accept the fact that that's who did it for them and would not shift their vote.
I think that's another thing that we're discovering, right?
And again, would a better orator have been able to shift that?
I don't know at this point.
The way you've seen people outright reject what the reality is and not vote in their best interest anyways, I wonder if we got into that special part of democracy on the timeline where that's not the way you're going to get votes anymore.
Well, Biden's oration is definitely a problem.
I mean, the man hasn't been able to speak for the vast majority of his half-century in power, right?
That has never been his particular talent.
But Nick, it is a larger issue in all of this.
It's not just the communications problem.
Which, by the way, Biden...
Never really took credit for the things that he got done.
He was very much a managerial president.
He promised to be a transformational president.
And in that regard, you have to be a major figure in personality.
But I remember you and I talking, and this was probably back in 21 or 22, and this was when Joe Manchin was really asserting himself.
He saw an opportunity to become the de facto president of the United States of America because of the slim advantage in the Senate.
And as a result, the Build Back Better plan, it got cut up into pieces.
Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on behalf of the wealth class, on behalf of corporations, and on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, more or less gutted this thing and allowed some of it to go forward, which is what business wanted.
They needed an injection of capital into the system to keep capitalism going.
They went ahead and pushed some infrastructure plans that were way overdue.
Biden never really took credit for it.
He was more or less a quiet manager.
And, you know, as an institutionalist, he was in the Senate for a very long time.
And when you were in the Senate for that long, you grandstand, but you tend to kind of do it through a collaborative process.
It's more of a team effort.
Joe Manchin took complete advantage of that.
And more or less what happened, as I've talked about in the past, Biden didn't use the bully pulpit whatsoever.
He used Democratic solidarity, would not go after other Democrats.
And on top of that, Nick, from the very beginning, Biden and his team and his administration were engaged in petty feuds with our media constantly.
They had no desire to talk to people, and more or less, they allowed those feuds to sort of allow coverage of his presidency to go south.
And we know now, like...
The fact is that the way that his presidency was covered has had not just detrimental effects in terms of the Democratic ability to get elected in 2024, but in the direction of the country.
And he failed in all those regards.
And if you're going to defeat Trump, if you're going to defeat those forces that you were just talking about, you have to be able to communicate it, you have to have an effective message, and you have to push back on mis- and disinformation.
And Biden simply could not do that and seemed at times unwilling to do it.
I have a statement for you.
Tell me if you think it's true or false.
You're only as good as a president as the direct political advisors that you have around you.
And let me tell you something, Nick.
He did not have a good group of advisors around him.
And as we have talked about with the 2024 election, those advisors leapt off of him like a bunch of fleas and jumped onto the Harris-Waltz campaign and absolutely submarined it in a way that now, looking back on it, it's absolutely fatal.
And what you just said is correct.
He did not have a good team around him.
him.
He was not able to use that team or his communications in any way, shape or form to push his agenda and or fight back against the people who were impediments, including fellow Democrats who were working on behalf of corporations and the wealth class.
It's possible that those same advisors in his inner circle would throw up their hands and be like, this is the best we possibly could have done with this candidate.
Oh, absolutely.
That's what they're saying.
Yes.
So, yeah.
And I might give them the benefit of the doubt and maybe even say that's true.
So how did we get there?
And did you not know this before, you know, they handpicked him and shoved everybody else out of the way to make him the president?
They all knew this.
So this is sort of where we can find simpatico with the right where, you know, they've been hiding his condition, yadda yadda.
It's like...
Whatever the condition is, being a bad politician is part of that.
And we know this, and we've known this for a long time.
And so that was why this weigh station that I was willing to get on board with ultimately doomed everybody because, again, regardless of the success he had, which there was plenty of things that any president would take on their resume.
There was no way of shifting the public sentiment, and that's really part of it.
It's kind of like if you're a basketball coach, right?
Either the players are not listening to you and going against you, or you didn't tell them what to do properly, and they didn't do it either.
Both explanations are bad.
You know, as a leader, as a coach.
And that's sort of what was happening, I think, here.
Well, and, you know, that metaphor does a lot of work, but it misses one thing, which is Joe Biden was not the future of the Democratic Party.
He was more or less a decision that was made by Barack Obama and his circle to go ahead and stem the democratic socialist momentum of Bernie Sanders.
They saw that as an outside threat that was there in 2016 and then again in 2020. They needed to head that off, so they found the guy that was there that they thought they could consolidate around.
There was no future of the party.
And what happens, Nick?
There is an internal schism within the Democratic Party about who's going to lead going into the future.
Which more or less delayed the fight that we're watching now, which is corporate neoliberal and even neoconservative Democrats are now fighting and scurrying to have the direction in the future of the party.
Meanwhile, you have some populists around the Democratic Party who are trying to wrestle that stuff back.
So what ends up happening, Nick, is that there are some victories.
And I don't want to underplay them because these are significant victories.
The stuff that he got done with COVID relief, the stuff he got done with infrastructure, the stuff he got done with alternative energy and sustainable energy, incredible stuff, honestly.
On top of that, I'm going to go ahead and take something that he's been criticized for.
This is the man who ended the Afghanistan war, and it did not work well.
And let me tell you something.
It was a debacle ending it.
But this was a decision that other presidents, including Barack Obama, kicked the can on.
They didn't want anything to do with it because it was going to be ugly.
On top of that, he was the first president to stand on a picket line with a labor union.
He screwed labor unions over left and right, but he was able to at least say labor unions are important.
On top of that, and this is something that nobody's really talking about all that much, Nick, I think...
One of the quiet successes of this presidency that no one really wants to wrestle with, this is probably the most anti-trust president that we have had since FDR, if not...
Teddy Roosevelt.
He actually held a very firm line in an era of deregulation and mergers and acquisitions.
He went after all of the tech oligarchical corporations.
He didn't win all of the fights that he picked, and that's part of the reason why they pushed back, why they went over with Trump.
But the fact that he held the line on that and attempted to do it, I think is one of the things he deserves credit for.
So we have to go ahead and give him his flowers where he deserves them.
But the other stuff that we're talking about ultimately undermined that and has now left us in a position where a lot of those achievements are now going to be rolled back or simply destroyed or erased.
I agree.
Don't forget, he lowered prescription drug costs for seniors.
One that could not get done for all those years.
You know, if we really want to get down to the fact that he couldn't communicate all those things properly, and he couldn't convince people that the economy was going well with the normal markers of unemployment, which is another thing, you know, unemployment was record lows.
And then, you know, they tried to insist that inflation had gone down before the election.
That was probably their whole thing.
We're going to do this and manipulate some of these things to make the inflation go down so they feel good about it.
But you don't just overnight feel good about high inflation.
It does take a long time.
They didn't either understand that, couldn't solve that earlier, or ultimately, and there were apparently a lot of Biden-Trump voters this time.
I think there might have been, am I correct?
There might be like a million or two.
There's a good amount of them, yes.
And by the way, they weren't just Trump-Biden voter.
I mean, Trump-Biden-Trump voters.
A lot of them were Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump voters.
Yeah.
And then on top of that, it might be 8-10 million who didn't vote, who just sat out from 2024, from 2020. You know, those are the people that he can't reach, and they might not be reachable.
I mean, I think that's the other problem here.
And so the legacy ultimately ends up, you know, stopping at the fact that he was, you know, the only candidate I can think of maybe since, I guess, LBJ two drops out, right, you know, in the middle of this whole thing, but that he did it so late.
You know, and really didn't give Harris a fighting chance, in theory.
So, there's a couple of things that happen in this, and Nick, one of the things that we've been talking about...
As we've sort of documented what's happened in this country, is how the presidency of the United States of America is a fluid, malleable thing.
We're currently in a time period where they are largely powerless as this entire system, particularly capitalism and neoliberalism, moves America to certain points.
There are places where, as the president, you can change things.
But you, as a person, are also affected by who you are as a person.
And Joe Biden's entire character, and Nick, it's a weird thing, and give me a second on this because it's strange and it's a little weird, but it is true.
So, for instance, you have a story for yourself about who you are, right?
Like, you go through life and you do your things and you have your own version of who you are.
I do as well.
Right?
That affects how I work and what I do and how I present myself.
Joe Biden's story of himself is very much this sort of tragic, almost Job-like figure, of course.
You know, he lost a large portion of his family immediately after being elected back in the 1970s.
You know, he lost his son.
He has another son who has these addiction issues, all these other kinds of things.
Joe Biden's presidency, at the times where he could have done something and used that bully pulpit that we're talking about, he was much more of sort of a grieving executive.
Right.
So, for instance, not just the fact that he didn't drop out, which I think he like we're even seeing interviews now where he says that he thinks he would have won the election in 2024, which is bullshit.
He wouldn't have won.
He was never actually given the polls that showed that he had no chance of beating Trump at that point.
But on top of that, Nick, he was the executive who watched voting rights get absolutely gutted.
Following the 2020 election, as the Republican legislatures in so-called red states were going after people, voting protections, voting rights.
He was the president when Roe v.
Wade was overturned, and all he could do was give speeches about how he thought they went too far and they didn't do enough, and he'd say, oh, we'll fix this.
He gave no plans whatsoever.
He didn't talk about what needed to happen with the Supreme Court.
He didn't push any actual significant reform.
On top of that, Nick, he has...
Turned his back on trans and gay supporters.
The stuff that he's been signing over the past few months has been pretty disappointing.
On top of that, he was like, you know what?
Maybe we do have a major immigration problem.
So what did he do with the Democratic Party?
He moved them further to the right on immigration and changed the entire environment and rhetorical playground when it came to dealing with Trump.
On top of that, Nick, one of the largest and most damning parts of his legacy is going to be enabling the genocide in Gaza.
And basically the entire time handing over God knows how many weapons and billions of dollars and saying, I can't do anything about this.
Well, you're the president of the United States of America.
You're supposed to be the most powerful man in the world.
So what is it?
Like, what is it that's holding you back?
Are you a subject to the forces of the moment, or are you going to make the forces of the moment subject to your will?
And like many other Democrats, including Barack Obama and before him, Bill Clinton, what did Joe Biden do?
He allowed the forces of the moment to go ahead and go in the direction they were going because he's an institutionalist.
He did not want to put his thumb on the scale when he needed to put his thumb on the scale.
And that's not just communication.
That's not just getting older.
That is a side effect of who he sees himself as and how he sees the role of government and an individual within government, which is one of the reasons, just to tie this thing in a full circle, Nick, one of the reasons why he was chosen by the Democratic Party to be the nominee in 2020, which is the definition of shooting yourself in the foot.
I could not have said that any better.
And if you took half a step back and looked at a little bit more of the plan versus what we're going to do next week, this is in 2020 for the election, you would have realized that this is going to lead to a real problem here.
Because A, you would have realized, this is all the time, that even if Trump loses in 2020, which he did, he expanded his base significantly after a presidency that was a disaster without any other way of describing it.
As more people lost faith in the system.
Yes.
And so that faith, you don't get it back, right?
You don't get back that faith for that person, for the rest of their voting tenure, probably.
Unless something majorly changes.
Yes.
And that could be the Pied Piper thing that we're talking about.
Somebody can galvanize that a little bit, but the problem is it's way too easy to do that using negativity, anger, disgust, fear, and lying.
And that's another problem.
When you're trying to be aspirational, I suppose Obama is that once-in-a-lifetime guy that comes around, but we went from maybe even thinking in Chicago during the convention, wow, there's kind of a deep roster here, and there's some young people coming up.
We really like them.
And I don't know if you feel that way now.
I don't think I do.
No, I think the Democratic Party has just rolled over and showed the GOP their belly.
I mean, like, there's barely anybody right now who is, like, a deep, deep voice of opposition.
And, you know, I said back in Chicago, I was actually thinking about that, Nick.
I was thinking about sitting at your dad's table recording after you came back from the convention.
And I was worried about it even then.
I saw a party that was doing a better job at messaging, but they weren't really communicating to people, like...
Yeah, inflation, you know, we'll get it under control or it's under control and things are actually better than you think they are.
There was no deep empathy there.
Basically, the Democratic Party, and this is like Biden and it's like all of these other Democrats who have held power for so long, they're managers.
They're like, well, you don't really have all the facts.
You're feeling something that isn't real, so you need to listen to us, right?
And even the best managers at times can do that.
You know, they sort of get disconnected from the different groups of people.
I would say this.
Obama was a different candidate because he was an almost complete outsider.
He was in his first term as a senator, right?
And you may even remember this, Nick.
He was being chastised for not waiting his turn.
Right?
Like, it was Hillary's election, and why did he get the nomination and have a mandate?
It's because he was an outsider who was coming in after shit went to pot, and he promised that he was going to fix it.
You can't go in and get a guy who was in the Senate for nearly 50 years, almost, and say, well, now he's going to change everything.
He did everything within the system that he could do.
And in that way, he maximized his potential.
That's the weird thing about this presidency, is based on who he is and his experience and his status as an institutionalist, he did as much as he could, and then he crashed into the waves of Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, the wealth class, the oligarchical class, and a stolen Supreme Court.
And everything that happens after that is the worsening of the conditions that he couldn't fix in the first place unless he was somebody that he wasn't actually that person.
So now the question is, who comes along?
There are outsiders, there are potential people who could come in.
We very well might have a candidate in the Democratic Party in 2028 that you and I don't even have on our radar right now.
But I would sit here and bet dollars to donuts.
It can't be someone who's been in Congress for half a century.
That is impossible when you're looking at an absolutely paralyzing consensus that needs to be destroyed.
Oh, I agree.
And, you know, the Harris campaign, It has to be included when we're talking about legacy to some degree with Biden, I think.
And if you saw the footage at Jimmy Carter's funeral, it adds to the lore that there was a huge rift between Harris and Biden.
And I think that's true, right?
You probably heard in the background a little bit of that, right?
And so as a result, it was almost like they didn't want to tout all of the things that we were talking about that were great accomplishments for Biden because they were so worried about associating with them because of this rift and of which you still saw they really wouldn't even like grieve each other when they sat within an aisle of each other or row of each other. it was almost like they didn't want to tout all Well, can I say something about that real fast, Nick?
Because what you just brought up is really important.
Think about, and man, there's so many personalities in all this stuff.
We talked about on this show multiple times about the feud between Barack Obama and his people and Biden and his people and how they had frictions and that screwed up the campaign and also the transition to Harris as a nominee.
We also talked about Biden's frictions with Kamala Harris before she was the nominee and then the frictions that took place after.
So what essentially happens is that Joe Biden was an island unto himself.
He had been a Democratic mainstay, right?
But he wasn't the leader of the party.
The party didn't look like him.
The party was outside of him.
The party was this sort of neoliberal technocratic group, this sort of like corporate ingratiated group.
So when you look at something like the funeral, and I think this is really important, Nick, you saw Obama and Trump laughing together.
You saw George W. Bush come in and laugh it up with Obama and with Bill Clinton.
You know what people want?
They don't want that.
They don't want somebody who's going to go in there and do that whole Washington, D.C. country club.
They want somebody who's going to come in and disrupt stuff.
That's one of the reasons why Trump has been able to gain support is because he's seen as outside of that thing, which has caused the problem.
Biden is within it and without it at the exact same time.
So what you just brought up, I think, is absolutely important.
And then the most interesting thing about that is that of all the past presidents that were assembled there, Biden is older than all of them.
All of them.
Every single one that was sitting there.
All the ones who had served from years ago, right?
He's the guy who's older than them now.
What does that tell you about that?
That's insane to me.
Again, it continues to contribute to why the legacy is going to be stained, independent of whatever he might have actually done.
I don't know if any of these op-eds or any of these appearances he's going to make afterwards are going to change that.
We need to talk about this.
He goes on there and does an interview with USA Today.
I don't know how successful that was.
No, it was really bad.
Really, really bad.
And Nick, I think this is actually really, really telling.
For instance, you brought up a basketball coach.
If a basketball coach goes out and gives an interview before a game and he says, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, right?
And I'm confident.
They go out and they get absolutely ran off the court.
They get destroyed.
And then the coach does the post-game press conference and they're like, we did everything we wanted to do.
It just wasn't our night.
And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You're kind of delusional.
You know what I mean?
Like, we saw what happened.
We saw the beginning.
We saw the end.
Biden starts out this thing saying he's going to change everything.
America has more or less been saved.
And Nick, you might remember this.
He said, I have a wild feeling the GOP is going to wake up.
Their fever is going to break and they're going to work with me.
Did they work with him?
No, they did not.
Now we find ourselves at the end of the Biden presidency.
We have Trump taking over the federal government on behalf of the tech and oligarchical class.
We have a declining United States of America, which has less influence and is just basically a body that's being used by capitalism.
We have an authoritarian power grab that's not just taking off in the United States, but within Canada, within France, Germany, Great Britain.
On top of that, our media and political class is literally talking about taking over Canada.
On top of that, climate change has gotten worse.
We'll talk about LA in just a minute.
We have re-industrialization, which we talked about needed to happen, but it needed to happen with protections and considerations.
Otherwise, everything was going to go to hell.
Now here we are.
LA's on fire.
The media and political class is capitulating.
The Ukrainian war is an absolute disaster at this point.
God knows what's going to happen.
The shit in Gaza is still going on.
Trump is more popular than ever.
And what is Biden saying in this interview?
I could have won.
I think our legacy is going to be great.
We've made America into a stronger power.
Things are going to get better.
And on top of that, Nick, he's asked, what do you think is going to happen when Trump tries to get rid of everything you've done?
He says, oh, I think he's going to have a...
I think a lot of those members are going to stand up to him in a way you're not expecting.
That's delusional.
That's literally delusional.
It's a guy who just lived through the last four years and does not have an actual grasp on reality of his failures and where America is going, which I think is indicative of exactly who he is and how he's been as a leader.
Oh, really well said.
And I think that, you know, if you say enough things that aren't quite right and the credibility starts to erode, then that's when it leads to you not believing anything the guy says.
Right.
Interestingly, Trump goes the other way, right?
And basically just never says anything that's really true and then, you know, amasses a whole cult around him.
It's kind of crazy.
At least with Biden, like...
He made the attempt.
And so even in this kind of thing, there are things I'm like, that's not exactly right.
That's a little bit off.
And so that becomes a question.
You're already questioning his credibility, and he's already done.
We're not voting for him again.
And I'm still doing this.
But he even finishes, and we're talking about who's around him, who preps him for these things.
Obviously, they're not going to release the audio of this because they don't want you to...
It's tough, Nick.
It's tough to even read the transcript of it.
Right.
And you have to think about when the Inspector General, what's his name, Robert Herr, said, this is a nice old man who just isn't really with it anymore.
We're not going to prosecute this guy.
But you get that feeling.
But he even ends this whole thing when they ask him about his legacy with the quote, and anyway, I don't know if that answered your question.
And it was after a long-winded rambling thing.
You should never answer anyone's question like that, especially when you're trying to make a point, a case for who you are and what your legacy is.
It's like, what's going on here?
And by the way, Nick, what you just brought up is really, really important in terms of the way that he answered, because the rambling that you're talking about, if people haven't seen this, there are multiple interviews that are being done, basically exit interviews with Biden, right?
And even some essays that are coming out that somebody on his staff wrote for him.
The interviews reveal something, Nick.
He doesn't exactly know what's going on.
He's been sheltered from information.
And by the way, the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, they do deserve to be investigated for how they hid Biden's mental acuity.
Do you know when he doesn't show a problem with that, Nick?
It's not when he's talking about his son.
It's not when he's talking about elections.
It's when he's talking about foreign policy.
And when he talks about foreign policy, it's like something comes alive in him.
You know what I mean?
Like, he actually can talk about this stuff and all the alliances and all the movements, all these things.
Two things from that, Nick.
One, you know what's missing from all of his conversations about his legacy?
What is happening to the American individual under Trumpism?
And what's happening to the American individual as things get worse?
What are the fates of the people who are going to lose their rights and are going to be in the crosshairs of authoritarianism?
He doesn't talk about them.
He talks about foreign policy achievements.
And that brings up the second thing I want to say, Nick.
Looking back on Joe Biden as President of the United States of America and his legacy, all I can walk away thinking about is this.
I think Joe Biden If you were to put people in a position to succeed, Joe Biden should have been a secretary of state.
That should have been probably the height of his political career.
Either he died as a senator or at some point or another he was made secretary of state.
Barack Obama choosing him as his vice president, he did it because people didn't trust Barack Obama as a young politician.
He needed to bring in, as you're quite fond of saying, an old white guy.
Right?
And he made Hillary Clinton the Secretary of State.
Well, you could move those people around like in a claw game and make Biden your Secretary of State and make Hillary Clinton your Vice President.
We might be having a different conversation here.
Yeah.
And the fact that Biden was brought in because there was a young black senator who was going to become the president of the United States of America, there's a very real possibility that Joe Biden in the United States of America would have possibly been better served had his ceiling been secretary of state or if he would have stayed in the Senate.
Oh, that is a terrific Earth-B scenario, which I would have much preferred living with.
Oh, he still would have done a bunch of neoconservative war shit, and people would have been hurt, but...
Yeah, but at least, you know, Secretary of State is where you go to pretty much die with your political career, as far as I can tell.
It's kind of a dead end at that point.
Good luck, Blinken.
Yeah, but Blinken, I don't feel bad, but Rubio, thank God we're going to maybe be done with him then, because he'll get to be that and then die.
Excuse me, then his political career will end.
But I'm really glad you brought up foreign policy, because in this op-ed, what was interesting was he couldn't help himself.
Either the people that he's around are not advising him anymore, and he's left to his own devices, because he references Kissinger in this.
And I already apologize that I had that.
That phrase, that word, that name came off my lips.
But he quotes Kissinger, who said just before he died, Kissinger sent this message to Biden saying, not since Napoleon has Europe not looked over its shoulder at Moscow with dread until now.
That's a tough thing to read in 2025, Nick.
Right.
It's like we're going to go through the domino theory again.
This is what we're up to again.
We're looking at the Soviet Union or Russia in the same way as we did when Kissinger was around under Nixon.
It says everything, right?
He cannot get away from where he had been for most of his life in the Senate.
But then he starts to say...
To the reporter, he goes, you know, there's a thing called the Soviet Union, and he's referencing that as if it collapses and China was in disarray.
We had circumstances, is what he said.
And so he's trying to make it seem like it was really, you know, we were winning.
We were able to get the Soviet Union to collapse and this and that.
But what he's also throwing under the bus is everybody that was part of the United States government that didn't take advantage of that void to create a better world that we could have.
And guess who was an instrumental part of the government during that whole time?
Bingo!
Biden!
So he's throwing himself under the bus, and he doesn't even know it.
Doesn't know it whatsoever.
Yeah, and that's the sort of thing that's missing here.
I don't know if you had to be that smart even to kind of read the lines on that one, but it just hit me.
I'm like, gosh.
You know, it was like there was such an opportunity throughout that whole stretch to really do something versus what we ended up doing, which was raping and pillaging, metaphorically, you know, other countries of all their things and then causing more and more disarray on our own intentionally.
So it really, it was hard to believe that he would have gone into that and tried using it as a way to almost explain, well, what else could we have done?
You know, like, that's silly.
Well, as a historian, as someone who's gone through these time periods and these movements, I will say this.
And this was something I was screaming going back, and I didn't know the total thing.
Like, when you and I first started talking, I knew that Donald Trump was a problem.
I knew that authoritarianism was growing.
I didn't have the full picture.
When I finally wrote American Rule and I started piecing together the history, I realized that we were heading towards some sort of a schism.
Either the post-World War II and post-Soviet Union collapse American empire was going to be reformed and going to go in a better direction, or it was going to lead to something like what we're in now.
That's why I've been screaming about this for years.
Historically, Joe Biden is the perfect historical character to be president as that schism occurs.
Because he was a major part for half a century in constructing all of the decisions and all of the frameworks.
The 1970s on order, and my God, he came into government around the time when that post-war prosperity was coming to an end.
He was in Congress as we started to see the movement into neoliberalism, and we've talked about this multiple times.
Joe Biden has been a weather vane his entire career.
He went right along with the right-wing movement of the Democratic Party, along with Clinton and all those movements.
He was one of the major architects of the neoliberal global age.
Everything from the war on terror to now the inability for liberals, and particularly the Democratic Party, to address the problems that they helped create.
So it's not a shock that that guy is going to be the last president before we go into what that something new is.
You know, like, when you're talking narrative-wise or metaphorically, he is the perfect individual to sort of stand as we're moving into the rupture and the next evolution of neoliberal capitalism.
You know, since we're shooting on him already, right, let's pile some more on.
We can argue that the Supreme Court is going to be the most profound effect on this country now going forward for decades, right?
The real power in this country lies in two places, and I'm glad you brought this up, Nick.
I've talked about this.
It's in the states because federalism has been sort of disarmed and had its knees cut out from underneath it until, of course, there's a muscular authoritarian executive on behalf of the wealth class that will be restored.
But the second place is in the Supreme Court, which was stolen.
And corrupted to bring it back to its original minoritarian authoritarian roots.
That's how it got its start in the very beginning.
And what you just said is correct.
Those are the two major power centers.
And we watched under Biden the American presidency basically rendered like powerless in the face of these movements that took place over the entirety of his career.
And there's no question we're going to end up seeing the federal government make decisions over a state and they're going to ignore it.
And what happened in the past?
JFK would send troops to integrate schools because they wouldn't.
That will not happen under Trump.
They're not going to care.
And whatever department that goes rogue and tries to do something right and the states ignore it, Trump will just not enforce it either.
And then going forward, and then...
Nick, that happened in Texas.
We covered it.
Whenever they were doing the barbed wire barrier on the border.
Like, Texas basically threatened open rebellion.
And Biden was just like, well, I'm not really going to say much about this.
I'm not really going to really talk about it very much.
More or less, the JFK and that situation you just brought up, that was an actual moment of executive courage.
JFK and LBJ, for all of their faults in there, had moments of executive courage.
And there was a missing...
Courage with the Biden presidency.
And what you just brought up is exactly right.
That type of a thing, it was not challenged and it was allowed to grow and gain momentum under the Biden presidency.
And then to get back to the other point I made about the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh does not get sworn in as a justice without what Biden did with Clarence Thomas.
And how he enabled that to go through as well.
And so, and because, you know, there needs to be some think pieces written about how there are some similarities to how that all played out.
Now, it actually helped that they had a White House that was burying all the information coming out about Kavanaugh and somehow had enough of the FBI under their control, too, to, like, quash any kind of normal investigation.
But the bottom line is they'd already gone through that with Biden running the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas.
And so, you know, that's another really, really troubling part of his legacy, which we have to include because, you know, we don't just stay his legacy as a president, right?
We're talking about the whole thing from Senator all the way on, right?
Yeah, and there's a thing, Nick, where...
The Democratic Party has been hobbled by this group of neoliberals that have held power now for going on a half century, right?
They're a group of people who laid the foundation for what's happened.
They don't have the ability or the freedom to question what's happening.
So as a result, Joe Biden has no interest in questioning the Supreme Court.
He later on brought out the idea, well, maybe we'll have some ethics reform when it comes to the Supreme Court.
That doesn't do it when the Supreme Court is an ideological body that's been captured by a group.
He sort of kind of winked at the possibility of adding justices.
We'll talk about that.
Maybe we'll have a commission about it.
He didn't do a full-throated thing, in part because of what you just brought up, which is he played a role in creating the modern Supreme Court.
He was in the Senate as all of this went down.
On top of that, they couldn't level an actual critique of neoliberalism because if you start going down those roads, Nick...
They helped do it.
When it came to Afghanistan, it was an act of political courage to get out of Afghanistan.
Why were we there?
Why did we have the war on terror?
Because Joe Biden took the vote to get us there.
And when you start going down the line, then all of a sudden you get to the 2024 election.
Nick, we're sitting here.
The richest man in the world, at least on the books, we're not counting Vladimir Putin for this conversation, has effectively bought the presidency of the United States of America and has unaccountable, unelected power.
And you can't go...
Actually, I don't know if you noticed this.
I want some credit.
I have not said his name.
And I'm trying to not say his name when I don't have to.
But the most powerful man in the world has more or less bought the presidency and has all of this power.
That wasn't on the ballot in November.
The Democratic Party did not talk about that man buying the vice presidential nominee on the ticket and buying the presidency and wielding this, like, historical power.
Why, Nick?
Because they gave him the money to do it!
Because they set up the foundations to make it possible for him to do it, and they were still in bed with all of these tech oligarchs who are now taking control.
They can't levy an actual critique because they're part of the critique.
So all they would have to do is say, we did this, and as a result, and Donald Trump's over here sniping at them, he's like, I wasn't in government.
So the question now...
Is will we learn the lesson, which is you can't get an institutionalist who's been involved in all these major decisions and expect them to change things.
Who's going to rise up and become the alternative who can do that effectively?
Or, counterpoint, you find someone that has no shame.
And wouldn't care about being called a hypocrite or a liar or whatever, which is what the Republicans did, right?
It took them a little while, but they got to where they got to.
But then you'd have to have all the constituency fall in line as well and not care about that.
And again, would I care if a president who's a Democrat gets in the White House who lies as much as Trump does, but restores Roe v.
Wade?
Like, I don't know.
Maybe I don't care, right?
Maybe that's where we're going to get to.
And it's like, and by the way, guess who that person would have been?
Like, Clinton was that guy, right?
Like, he really had some problems, right, personality-wise and the way he lived his life that we were kind of willing to deal with because we perceived him being on the right side of certain things.
You do not get Donald Trump and all of the scandals and the abuses that he has had.
And have that be something in our national politics if you don't have a Bill Clinton who had all of these scandals that were part of his political career and one party was like, well, we're not really going to talk about this.
That doesn't happen.
Right.
Right.
I agree.
So it's a fascinating thing.
I don't know what else to add to the legacy, but it's up and down and probably ultimately will be down when we look at it with enough of a lens.
History, and I'm going to make a prediction here, Nick.
If we have history, if we have a free society where books and textbooks are written, it's not going to be kind to Joe Biden for a while.
He is going to be seen as sort of a figure who more or less folded in the face of all these pressures and all the threats that were coming down the pike.
There will probably be a moment, again, if we have books and history, there will probably be a moment in...
God, depending upon what happens, probably in the 2050s, maybe the 2040s, 2050s, they'll be like, he was actually a better president than he's given credit for, right?
Like, it'll go back over all the infrastructure stuff, the Chips Act, you know, sort of like the investment in those things.
They'll have a moment where they'll talk about it as a better presidency.
But I was going to say at the end of this, I originally was going to be like, Nick, what grade would you give it?
But I realized, as an educator...
If I were to hand out a report card to the Biden presidency, I wouldn't put a grade on it.
I'd put a note, see me after class.
Like, we need to talk about what has happened here because we saw what the potential was, but ultimately, look where this thing fell apart.
This was a presidency that from the moment that it gained traction to get the nomination or was given traction to get the nomination back in 2020. There were so many missteps and so many mistakes that it took any of its actual potential and just messed it up.
So this would be one of those things where you'd be like, hey, what are you doing?
Look at all of these obvious mistakes that you've made and look where it's gotten us and something else needs to happen because it's really hard to even grade this thing based on how bad things actually got.
Right.
I mean, we can give them a six-week progress report.
I suppose, in the middle of a semester.
But let me ask you this, because if we're talking about what we remember, how he goes down in history, like, let's look at Nixon for a second.
And, okay, besides Watergate, which is what everybody remembers him for the most, what would you say is, like, the second most popular thing that everyone remembers him by?
I mean, it depends on who you're talking to.
Some, of course, would say the relations with China, which, by the way, had incredible effects leading to neoliberalism, neoliberal globalism in our current type situation.
You've got Vietnam.
Obviously, you've got the crackdowns on people, but I'm interested to hear what you have to say.
I would argue that what they will talk about next would be his performance in the debate against Kennedy.
Oh, yeah, that's way up there at the top of it, yeah.
I mean, you know, it is.
It's got to be, it's the greatest hits.
It's definitely one of the first few tracks.
And the same thing's going to happen to Biden.
And he will become branded by the guy who did the worst, you know.
And again, I think I said this before, I've watched that debate again, the Nixon debate.
I don't get it.
I don't see why people freaked out about what you saw there, even if there was some sort of sweat going on.
But Biden has firmly taken over the top spot of that, the absolute worst debate performance of all time.
I suspect that's going to be his legacy in terms of where he lives.
I will never forget coming into this recording room that I've got after that debate.
And us getting on here before we did the live show in the immediate part of that.
And we both just looked at each other.
And we didn't say anything for a couple of minutes.
Like, you were setting up the live stream.
We both knew what had happened.
We got on the live stream and we started talking about it.
We were like, that was disastrous and he needs to go.
It needs to happen tomorrow.
It needs to be done.
It is obvious that this administration hid him and protected him, and we are in a bad situation.
And I even said, and this is actually, we haven't even touched on it, it's wild.
That performance and what we saw immediately after it when he was trying to clean it up, like, it was along the lines of Woodrow Wilson.
Late in his term when his wife was effectively the President of the United States of America.
Like, we were in one of the most dangerous periods in modern American history, and I did not trust that Biden could be the President of the United States of America.
And quite frankly, I think you're right.
I think that that is going to long-term be like one of the main narratives of this.
And for the record, I think rightfully so.
Yeah.
And it'll ultimately explain why they scheduled it so early, too.
Because, again, I think my conspiracy theory is that they all knew, and they knew they weren't able to hide it any longer, so they needed to get it out of the way so that he would step down.
I mean, there might be another explanation with that one I'm willing to buy.
So I have a quick question before we wrap this episode up, Nick, because you and I both know that Americans like stereotypes.
We like that time, life, CNN, conventional history, right?
We talked about Jimmy Carter and how the history of Jimmy Carter wasn't correct.
It was just simplified and boiled down.
So if you had to do, in like a little bit of a paragraph, what would the story of the Biden presidency be?
What would be the conventional history that you think people will latch onto in the future?
Boy, in the perfect world, if Biden is lucky, then they'll be able to say he inherited an absolute mess and was able to get the ship righted again, but ultimately couldn't make the case strong enough because of his inability to lead.
I think that ends up being where we're at.
I think he'll probably be seen, and I think you're right, the inheriting of the mess is going to be part of it.
I think he'll kind of be a combination of Jimmy Carter, who, you know, has now been seen as a failure of a president, along with the presidents who were before the Civil War.
And, like, before or during the Great Depression, sort of the ineffective executives who weren't able to meet the major challenges of the moment, I think they'll go ahead and talk about his ambitions as president, how the agenda sort of fell apart.
I think Gaza is going to be a large part of this.
I think talking about his inability to use American influence to sort of, you know, do this and also his complicity in it.
But then also, I think overall, he's going to be seen as sort of a barrier that...
Trump was able to get beyond, and the authoritarian threat wasn't able to be stopped, and as a result, the building crisis that he promised to solve continued to build, and he was unable to stop it in its tracks.
And I think the debate performance and him having to drop out will ultimately be sort of the bookend at the end of it.
That is absolutely right.
He'll be the guy that lost to fascism.
Yeah, yeah.
And depending upon, and again, God willing, we'll be doing this podcast 10, 15 years from now.
Maybe it's a hologram.
I don't know what we'll be doing.
You know, it'll be on, like, whatever meta rolls out, whatever bullshit product.
And we'll be talking about, like, hopefully how fascism was eventually defeated.
We had, like, a renewal and a rebirth in the end of the neoliberal consensus and something better.
But I think you're right.
I think the way that it looks right now is he is the guy who is unable to stop the march of fascism in the United States of America.
All right, everybody.
That was our retrospective on the Biden administration.
We will be back on Friday with the Weekender edition.
Go over to patreon.com slash Mike Craig podcast in order to support the show, gain access to the Weekender.
Next week, we'll be doing coverage of the inauguration, unfortunately, and all that good stuff.
We'll keep you up to date on if we're going to do any shows or anything like that.
In the meantime, over on Blue Sky, you can find Nick at Nick Housman.
