The theatricality of American politics, never knowingly undersold, has acquired a new intensity with the denouement of Joe Biden’s presidency. The feud between the president and Barack Obama was frequently characterised by the New York Times and the Washington Post as Shakespearean. This isn’t the only reference to the Bard doing the rounds in the Beltway. Holed up in his Rehoboth Beach holiday home, Biden has been likened to Macbeth, alone, without allies, talking to ghosts.
But another comparison suggests itself: Biden as an ailing Lear, not quite able to surrender power – railing against a party to which he believes he has given everything, and a country for which he believes he has delivered. Lear, like Biden, came to know how ruthless politics can be: how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.
Yet as soon as the president left the stage, so inevitably came the applause. In the liberal opinion pages, in hour after hour of excitable rolling network coverage, Biden has been hailed as a statesman and a patriot who gave one final act of service to his party and the republic. In fact, Biden was simply, finally, recognising a crushing reality: the money had gone, the institutional support had gone and the voters had long gone. In the UK it is often assumed that Biden was undone by his disastrous performance in the debate against Donald Trump. But this was merely the culmination of an already untenable status quo.
The president’s polling numbers had long been dismal; Biden was outpolled in the crucial swing states even after Trump’s conviction as a criminal on 31 May. Americans have for some time believed what their eyes told them – that whatever his merits and considerable achievements, it was incredible to believe that Biden could be a vigorous and effective president until 2029. Even writing these words has a darkly comic feel.
Biden’s substantial patriotism was occluded by a substantial vanity. In waiting as long as he did, in eschewing his previous commitment to be a “transitional” president, in insisting that the powers of the presidency might include the bending of time itself, Biden and his aides have unleashed chaos and disorder. Their truculence has risked a crisis of confidence not only in Biden personally but in the Democratic Party itself.
It is easy to dismiss the overwrought criticism of Biden from the Republicans and the Maga right – the invocation of Watergate – but there are legitimate questions about what the White House knew and what it concealed from the American public. That includes the top of the Democratic Party and its presumptive presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. If valid questions are not answered this will, to some extent, vindicate Trump’s repeated talk of a Democratic cabal.
There are other costs too. By insisting on running until so late in the day, Biden has denied Harris the legitimacy that a full primary process would have conferred. The Democratic convention in Chicago from 19 to 22 August will likely be a coronation of the vice-president. While the networks are full of dizzying rhetoric about her ascension and the energy it has unleashed, right-wing online voices, Fox News and others mutter darkly about conspiracies, stitch-ups and party machines. Again, dismiss them at leisure, but in the atomised US media, with Silicon Valley increasingly favourable to Trump’s politics, these things matter and are noticed by voters.
Harris’s advance towards the nomination appears unstoppable. She is not as weak as commonly thought, and America is not nearly as racist or as misogynist as lofty Europeans assume, but there is a reason she didn’t beat Biden in the 2020 Democratic primary. With so little time to establish herself, any mistake will take on an outsized importance.
The vice-president won’t have time to make a second or third impression on voters, not least because Trump appears unlikely to repeat Biden’s mistake and debate his opponent. The election will be decided in the Midwest – Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin – where Biden’s deeply 20th-century Democratic mores resonated. Harris has, in the past, exemplified some of the aloofness and piety of the Democratic Party of the 21st. The reason Biden was effective in 2020 and competitive in these states was the flipside of his weakness in 2024 – he was too old to have picked up these bad habits. Harris must find another version of herself.
Trump remains the favourite. But, as with any good show, there remains the possibility of yet another twist in this astounding election cycle. What matters about the Biden decision, however belated, is that it gives the Democrats a chance where before there was none. It allows them to run the strategy they always wanted to run: framing the election as a referendum on Trump’s fitness for office; something that was simply impossible with Biden’s frailties.
Money is now pouring in from the well of donors that had previously run dry (Harris raised more than $50m in a day, a total not achieved since 2020). The Democrats are enjoying an adrenaline jolt at the prospect of electing the first woman president, and a woman of colour at that.
But the Biden saga isn’t over. His was a presidency predicated on ridding the republic of the toxin of Trump. He may yet be the handmaiden of a Trump restoration. Should that fate befall him, all his other achievements will be for naught. Perhaps he will be Macbeth after all – a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
[See also: As Biden withdraws, Labour remains cautious]
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