Politics / December 20, 2024
Gerontocracy, pro-establishment politics and deception by Democratic Party insiders all helped elect Donald Trump.
(Jacquelyn Martin / AP Photo)
Although the Democratic Party elite is desperately trying to deflect blame for this year’s election defeat, the catastrophic return of Donald Trump to the presidency demands a reckoning. As in all elections, there were many factors that fed into the ultimate results, but Joe Biden’s fateful decision to run again at age 81—making him the oldest presidential candidate in American history—looms large. The disastrous June debate with Trump that made Biden’s aging painfully visible for the all the world to see not only ended Biden’s political career; it also made it impossible for his successor Kamala Harris to defeat Trump. Biden had dug a deep hole and Harris—hobbled, to be sure, by her own lack of political confidence and secure identity—couldn’t climb her way out.
Like many observers, I had been worrying about Biden’s age before he was even elected in 2020. In 2019, I tweeted, “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the American public as a whole isn’t bothered by manifest cognitive decline in presidential candidates: Reagan 1984, Trump 2016, Biden now.” While I was right to think that Biden’s diminished faculties wouldn’t prevent him from winning the presidential primaries and general election the following year, that still left the worry that having an aging and impaired president would feed into the wider sense of national decline that would only benefit Trump and Trumpism in the long run. In 2020, I tweeted that “having the 77-year-old Biden competing against the 74-year-old Trump for the senior vote … reinforces the feeling that America is becoming a gerontocracy: no country for young people but like the USSR of the 1970s dominated by an aging cadre stuck in the past.” This February I worried that, “If Donald Trump wins the presidency this year, Biden’s decision to seek a second term will be seen as one of the greatest blunders in American history.”
Now that Trump has in fact won again, the scale and culpability of Biden’s blunder has to be measured. That culpability belongs not just to Biden alone but also to the larger Democratic establishment and the enablers on Biden’s staff, all of whom were essential in the sickening farce of a frail, failing, and flailing man clinging to the most powerful position in the world.
Part of my despair since 2019 was the knowledge that, whatever doubts I had about Biden, he already seemed on track to be the Democratic nominee since he had the overwhelming support of party leaders. The strongest argument for Biden was that he was the only one who could beat Trump. But that claim always disguised a hidden motive: The real reason Biden was preferred by Democratic Party kingmakers such as James Clyburn was that Biden was the only one who could defeat Bernie Sanders, whose insurgent candidacy threatened to push the party to the left and displace the existing elite. (Sanders, of course, was even older than Biden, but also far more intellectually present than the eventual winner. But by 2024 the Sanders threat had been neutralized, since it is too late for him to run again).
The full scale of Biden’s impairment is only now becoming apparent. There will be more reporting on this issue, but essential ground was broken by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday with a blockbuster report on “how Biden’s closest aides and advisers would manage the limitations of the oldest president in US history during his four years in office.”
Based on deep reporting that includes nearly 50 interviews, the Journal report concludes:
To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
The account notes, “Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public.” A witness is quoted as saying, “They body him to such a high degree” and do an unusual amount of “hand holding”—unlike anything other recent presidents have had.
It’s hard not to speculate on how the failures of Biden’s presidency were shaped by his aging. Would a more alert and intellectually agile president really have allowed the wars between Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine to continue for as long as Biden did? Or would a president with full executive function and will have pushed harder for diplomacy, given how these wars were harming the world? Certainly, Biden’s team of foreign policy hawks (national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and advisor Brett H. McGurk) were given free rein to carry out dangerously escalatory policies.
Biden’s impairment also hurt his political judgment—especially since his staff seems to have kept key polling data away from him.
As The Wall Street Journal reports:
Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.
People close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s core inner circle of advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could sift through the information and present it to the president.
In truth, Biden was surrounded by a bodyguard of liars, a pretorian guard of deceivers who fooled both the president and the American public. This was a massive betrayal of democracy. There is a reason the Constitution has provisions for removing an impaired chief executive (the 25th Amendment).
This body guard of liars extended to the many journalistic allies of the Biden White House. Franklin Foer and Bob Woodward both wrote books based on access to the White House that celebrated Biden as an able executive. In March of this year, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said, “Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And fuck you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I’ve known him for years.… If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.”
Of course, Biden’s decline is part of a larger story of American gerontocracy, one that applies to the political establishment at large. Over the last two decades, Democrats in particular have been hurt by the fact that stalwart leaders of liberalism have refused to step down even as they lost their ability to function or put their jobs at risk of being replaced by Republicans: this was the well-known fate of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Dianne Feinstein as well as Biden. The party’s deep commitment to gerontocracy flared up again earlier this week when the position of ranking member of the House Oversight Committee was given to Gerry Connolly, who is 74 and suffers from cancer, rather than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Ultimately, Democrats will have to decide whether they are a political party that is serious about winning power—or are just an employment agency for the superannuated. One way to show that they want to win power is to exile all of Biden’s enablers from any future political position or influence.
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Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.
