The End of Joe Biden—and the Democratic Establishment For both the king and what was once his court, a terrible reckoning has arrived. By Martin Gurri
Joe Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the tender age of 30. He looked like a president, he felt like a president, and he fully expected to rise to the top. His formula for success was that of every ambitious politician deprived by nature of directing principles or opinions: find the meandering mainstream of his party’s establishment, where the big fish swim, then wade in and drift. Biden was in turn strongly against and stridently for abortion, a righteous Vietnam dove and then a stern Iraq hawk, a friend of racist Democratic senators before becoming a promoter of compensatory quotas for racial minorities.
Virtually every time a vacancy arose, Biden, by his own admission, considered running for the presidency. In 1988, at the age of 44, he actually did so—and failed. Biden may look and feel like a president, but he has never sounded like one. Long before old age turned him into a bleary-eyed mutterer, he tended to get lost in his own verbiage. He told fantastic stories about his personal life that could be easily disproved. He plagiarized bits from Bobby Kennedy and parts of a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Biden, it seems, was as needy as he was ambitious. His campaign resembled a prolonged pratfall. He dropped out before the first primary.
Thanks to a few very big, very lucky breaks, this human weathervane eventually found himself in the White House. Just a few years later, however, President Biden’s luck looks to be running out. A disastrous performance in last month’s presidential debate pulled back the curtain, in the style of The Wizard of Oz, to reveal the president as the sad, confused old man most of us already knew him to be. Then the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, and the former president’s courageous reaction in the moments following the incident, cast Biden’s shortcomings and infirmities in an even more glaring contrast. Biden is now increasingly alone, abandoned by the very establishment that created him. For both the king and what was once his court, a terrible reckoning has arrived.
How Biden Became a Magnificent Replica of Himself
Biden spent 36 years in the Senate but never rose to any kind of power or influence there. His hour in the sun came in 1991 when, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was charged by Democratic Party grandees with the destruction of Clarence Thomas as a nominee to the Supreme Court. He failed. Thomas’s eloquence and intellectual firepower easily overwhelmed the woodenly partisan Biden.
Although an elite among elites and a member in good standing of the Democratic Party establishment, few of the decision-makers who knew Biden took him seriously. He was, in the words of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, “an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two”—but not a front man, not a protagonist, never the king. One can imagine Biden’s chagrin as the years passed him by. He had done everything asked of him. He had kissed rings and bowed to his superiors. Yet, though once a young lion, he was now viewed by his peers as “almost ridiculous— / Almost, at times, the Fool.”
Then the inscrutable destiny that rules over human lives struck like lightning. Barack Obama, the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, picked Biden to be his vice president. No Democratic insider would have done so, but Obama was very much an outsider and he needed a harmless establishment figure to balance his “transformational” image. Maybe he thought that a shuffling, compliant white guy would be payback for past stereotypes. Anyone paying close attention should have known, by this choice, that Obama was less interested in transforming the system than in taking charge of it.
It is impossible to fail if you are the U.S. vice president, but Biden was locked out of the Obama inner circle and received no sexy special assignments. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” was Obama’s famous verdict on his vice president. As in the Senate, Biden had the perks but not the power—or the respect. Nobody saw him as the natural successor to Obama. It was Hillary Clinton’s turn. Few considered him a player in the scramble to defeat Trump in 2020. At 78, he was much too old and slow.
Nevertheless, he shambled into the race. He began as he usually did—by failing. He lost contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, and seemed on the verge of irrelevancy: a has-been pursuing an impossible dream. But then destiny intervened again, in the form of the Democratic establishment that for years had treated Biden as something of a joke. Suddenly, from utter desperation, he became their man.
Younger Democratic stalwarts who could be trusted to take on Trump—Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren—had wobbled or flamed out early in the primary season. That left the field wide open for Bernie Sanders, the wild-eyed socialist who was hated and feared by the elites, if for no other reason than he was deemed unelectable. Some quick maneuvering became necessary. Like synchronized swimmers moving as one, most of Biden’s opponents dropped out of the race and endorsed him. Rules were bent. Money was found. With the endorsement of Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) and the rest of the state’s Democratic Party establishment, Biden won his first primary ever in South Carolina—and the rest, as we know, is history.
The campaign against Trump set a pattern that would continue for years. First, Biden was to be swaddled in the political equivalent of bubble wrap. He ran for the presidency of the United States from the basement of his home in Delaware. Why not? It was a time of pandemic. Second, a magnificent replica of Biden was erected by the establishment with the full complicity of the media, and it replaced, in the information sphere, the increasingly feeble, always spiteful, intellectually muddled real man. Third, a ring of iron was placed around the candidate to prevent public access. Biden’s appearances were carefully staged in the true sense of the word: they avoided reality and promoted a fictional character.
The establishment was in control and it knew what it was doing. Trump went down in defeat. The curtain rose on that extraordinary era of magical realism in American life, known prosaically as the Biden administration.
The Creation of Bidenworld, Explained
By now the alert reader has noticed that I keep using that word, establishment. What do I mean by it?
A political establishment is a caste of mutually known persons organized informally for the purpose of wielding power. Every establishment must meet two simple requirements. There must be an unyielding hierarchy with a powerful boss at the top. In addition, every member must be bound to a set of rules so ironclad that any violator is immediately cast off to the wilderness.
Trump is often credited with the demolition of the Republican establishment, but that’s not accurate. The one insider to oppose him was Jeb Bush, who had the name but not the clout and had been out of public office for nine years. By 2016, the Republican establishment was a walking corpse—Trump merely gave it a decent burial.
The resilience of the Democratic establishment under present-day conditions makes for a remarkable story, one that speaks to the growing fondness of progressives for conservative and even reactionary structures. After co-opting Obama into the fold, this establishment has done everything that can be expected of it—which is mostly fixing things. It fixed the rules so that Clinton would get the nomination over Sanders in 2016. It did much the same for Biden in 2020 and 2024, going so far as to hinder debates in the 2024 primaries, a decision with profound if unintended consequences.
Democratic submission to hierarchy is astonishing. Biden has been in physical and mental decline for years. Gavin Newsom, governor of California, almost indecently lusts after the presidency. Yet Newsom must genuflect before the president and pledge allegiance to his cause. In name at least, Biden is boss. The rules of the game must be adhered to, without exception.
With Biden, the establishment was presented with a difficult challenge: it was reality itself that needed fixing. The president, we have seen, is an inarticulate speaker, has a bizarre personality, is notoriously thin-skinned and lacks humor and charm as a public person. Furthermore, his administration has been responsible for one disaster after another, at home and abroad. All that had to be fixed. The fictional replica of Biden required an equally fictional—and magnificent—record of achievement.
In an effort that has to be unparalleled in our history, every American institution, from the prestige press to the digital platforms, from academia to the entertainment world and very much including the federal bureaucracy, was recruited to portray President Biden as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. He was said to be caring, empathetic, a totally normal Everyday Joe who bonded easily with racial minorities—but also serious about his duties, the dignified adult in the room, a reliable ally who would never be manipulated by Vladimir Putin. His administration had defeated the pandemic, saved the economy, embraced migrants of all races, ended a forever war in Afghanistan, and somehow protected Ukraine, Israel, and Hamas simultaneously. As for the president’s age, he was old but wise, sharp in private though a stutterer in public and surrounded by the best and brightest in any case.
Nothing like this had been seen before. For the Democrats in power to spin the truth was predictable. For the institutions of information and knowledge to debase themselves so completely on behalf of a political nonentity added to their crisis of authority by precipitating a depressing meltdown of integrity.
An alternate universe was invented and imposed on the American public. It was far more seamless and glimmering than reality. As in the Greek fable, the creators fell in love with their creation. Establishment elites moved their minds permanently to Bidenworld, where the boss was an energetic leader and his policies were always successful. Biden himself, one suspects, fused with his towering replica. The rest of us were told to ignore the evidence of our eyes and salute.
Biden’s actual appearances generated uncertainty and unease, but these were carefully staged and kept to a minimum. Here was the truth of the matter: Bidenworld functioned better without Biden. He was, in fact, its greatest obstacle, and would turn out to be the instrument of its destruction.
The Trump Rationale and the Unmasking of a Fraud
The fantastic universe erected around Biden wasn’t focused on the president but on his fiercest antagonist: Trump became the predicate of Bidenworld, its reason for existence. The logic is pretty straightforward. As a moral and political abomination, Trump provides the rationale for establishment rule in perpetuity. Loathing of Trump in the highest places is no doubt sincere, but that’s not the point. If the former president had never existed, someone else would be found to occupy the supervillain slot. (One could see glimmers of this dynamic in early 2023, when for a few months it seemed like Ron DeSantis might eclipse Trump and win the GOP nomination for president, prompting the media and others to begin characterizing the Florida governor as the next dark lord.) An imminent threat to democracy is required to justify extraordinary measures. The prime directive of Bidenworld has always been: Anything is licit if it helps defeat Trump.
Protection against reality holds the highest priority. Whatever whisper of truth pierces the wall of fictions is ruthlessly attacked as the product of crazed or bigoted minds. If Robert Hur, the special counsel tasked with looking into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, reports that he won’t move forward with the case because the president is “an elderly man with a poor memory,” then Hur must be a Trumpian tool. If a video shows Biden wandering off to nowhere, then the video is a lie. It’s all malicious disinformation, “cheapfakes,” deranged conspiracy theories. To strengthen the faith, punishment had to be meted out to heretics. MAGA fanatics were treated like domestic terrorists. Political opponents were prosecuted like common criminals. An elaborate censorship apparatus was constructed to protect against offending opinions and factual discrepancies. Anything is licit if it helps defeat Trump.
The fixation with Trump had another advantage: he was perceived as a weak and wounded animal. When he took out DeSantis and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his primary rivals, the Democrats cheered. He was their chosen foe—the worst, to their way of thinking, the Republicans had to offer. From a position of strength, Bidenworld planned to set the terms of the general election as it had done with the Democratic primaries. No debates would be allowed. A new basement would be found in which to hide President Biden. With Trump in the race, all they had to do was coast downhill.
The uncanny political resurrection of Donald Trump is a subject for another time. An obvious factor, though, had to be the policy failures and unpopularity of the Biden administration. Another, of course, was the president’s visible deterioration. Promoting an official fiction isn’t really feasible in the age of the internet. For whatever reasons, Trump surged when he was supposed to sink. At some point, he must have passed the president in the internal polls of the Democratic Party, and at exactly that moment began the panic that has now swelled to a glass-shattering shriek.
Why did the president’s people change their minds and challenge Trump to a debate? The only explanation I can think of is that they had migrated intellectually to the fantasy universe. They had come to believe their own comforting lies. Truth had become the habitual enemy, something to shun in horror—so they dreamed they could preserve Bidenworld by producing the real Biden.
The debate was a transcendental event, far more significant than anything that was said in it. While Biden gargled and mumbled, a ripping noise could be heard by those who listened closely, a sound like the rending of a veil, as the whole Gothic fortress of fantasies disintegrated, the replica vanished like a ghost and 100 million Americans could suddenly behold the cruel struggles of a man tormented by a dying body and a dying mind. The shock of what we saw still lingers, not because it was surprising but rather because it was so predictable and consistent with what we already knew: it was truth, and we have grown used to lies. We had witnessed, in real time, the unraveling of a colossal fraud and the end of Biden’s political life.
There is no way forward for the president, although he is a vain and stubborn man and it may take outside intervention to persuade him of this fact. Will the assassination attempt on his rival be the lever the establishment needs to lift their man out to pasture? Don’t count on it. Biden’s family and inner circle probably see the Trump shooting as a much-needed distraction from the constant drumbeat calling for his withdrawal from the race. However, the recent news should be viewed as a temporary reprieve rather than a game-changing shift.
Meanwhile, the media that once sheltered him continues to compete with itself to expose his frailties. The prime directive remains supreme but Biden now finds himself at the pointy end of that argument. He has fallen behind Trump (a gap that could well grow as polling begins to reflect the political impact of the attempt on Trump’s life) and, in consequence, he has lost The New York Times. No Democratic politician can take that kind of hit and remain a competitive candidate.
Biden may well be done, but what happens next is uncertain. If indeed he goes and the hierarchy holds, then Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, will replace Biden at the top of the ticket. Harris carries her own burden of weirdness but at least can be trusted not to drool in front of the cameras. The establishment, however, may not survive the public unmasking of its prurient fantasies. The magic has been lost, and with it the authority to anoint the next chieftain. The Democratic Party, long held together by its collective will to power, may shatter from a clash of personal ambitions. They need only peek across the aisle at the Republicans to learn what this looks like. That would be the strongest argument for keeping the president as a sacrificial offering in November.
I see no reason to pity Biden. He perpetrated a hoax on the American people and has had the misfortune of being found out. The punishment will fit the crime: humiliation for heedless vanity. If he is forced to withdraw from the presidential contest, that will be all the world remembers of his brief tenure at the top. If Trump regains the presidency in 2024, Biden will end up detested by the very elites whose good opinion he has groveled all his life to obtain. Failure, this time, will be fixed and final, like destiny itself.
He will not bear these blows stoically. I expect he’ll spend whatever time remains to him as a twenty-first-century version of King Lear—fallen, baffled, a victim of his own fatal misjudgments, an old man lost on the heath and railing at the storm.
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