WASHINGTON — Now a caretaker president, Joe Biden has no realistic hope of getting a divided Congress to pass unfinished parts of his agenda.
But what he can do in his remaining months in office may be even more important in preserving America’s democratic traditions: stop Donald Trump’s return to power, the president suggested Wednesday night in his Oval Office address.
“Nothing,” Biden said, “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition. So, I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.”
Biden has left it to his vice president, Kamala Harris, to defeat Trump. He bowed to political reality in dropping his re-election bid, conceding that the younger, more energetic Harris may stand a better chance in November.
But Biden’s legacy is tethered to the outcome of the election, even if he’s no longer on the ballot, historians say. Proud as he is of hard-won legislation aimed at upgrading roads and bridges, Biden needs a Harris victory to secure his own place in history, they said.
“People don’t go to presidential libraries to see the pen used to sign the infrastructure act under glass,” Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University presidential historian, said in an interview.
“If Harris loses, it will show that Biden’s biggest accomplishment in history — defeating Trumpism in 2020 — only meant that he contained it for a short moment.”
Biden gave a few clues about the policies he’ll champion during his last six months in office. In his speech explaining his decision to drop out, he said he’ll make the case for holding Supreme Court justices accountable by working to end their lifetime tenure and hold them to a code of ethics.
He said he’ll speak out against gun violence and work to preserve both voting and abortion rights.
But the election is bound to influence much of what he says and does as his term winds down. Harris’ senior aides attend important staff meetings in the West Wing, assuring that the two camps work in sync.
White House aides said that Biden can help his chosen successor by using his powerful megaphone to showcase economic policies that voters like and Republicans oppose.
For example, aides said that White House officials will press the point that corporations should shoulder more of the tax burden and that the Trump-era tax cuts should be allowed to expire in 2025 for those earning more than $400,000 a year.
Campaigning directly for Harris is a riskier proposition. Only 36% held a positive view of Biden in the latest NBC News survey, down from 50% in his first months in office.
Still, a sitting president is normally a fundraising draw and Biden can help the newly minted Democratic front-runner for the nomination woo donors even if he’s not especially useful stumping in battleground states.
“This will be Biden’s most important accomplishment: assuring that the torch is not only passed but that it will be used to burn down any chance the Trump campaign has of regaining the White House,” said Mark Updegrove, president of the LBJ Foundation and author of five books on the presidency.
Lame-duck presidents go out differently, depending on their predilections and the political circumstances they face.
In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, also abandoned a re-election bid, fearing defeat. Yet he passed important gun control legislation in the final three months of his term, seizing on the nation’s shock at the assassinations that year of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.
Approaching the end of his second term, Barack Obama demanded that his staff “run through the tape.” He didn’t want them letting up before turning the White House over to Trump in 2017.
In denial over his defeat in 2020, Trump devoted most of the post-election period to a failed attempt to reverse the outcome and remain in power.
“You just can’t ignore Jan. 6 and the incidents surrounding that to conclude this he [Trump] is a person who does not believe in democracy,” Updegrove said. “Democracy is the underpinning of the American system. You’ve heard from Trump very often during his campaign that if you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country. Well, if you don’t have liberal democracy, you don’t have a country. That’s the essence of who we are.”
With Republicans controlling the House, Biden aides don’t anticipate any major legislative breakthroughs in the time that remains.
A president enjoys more latitude in the foreign policy sphere, and Biden has worked to leave his imprint on the world stage before he departs.
He’d like to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza, a goal that has eluded him as Israeli officials push to eviscerate Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to a person familiar with U.S. foreign policy planning.
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, has already held at least two meetings with staff members reminding them that a considerable amount of unfinished business remains.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with Biden at the White House on Thursday. The president will attend a U.N. General Assembly meeting in September and he’d like to see a resolution of the war between Ukraine and Russia that preserves Ukrainian independence and territory.
Aides don’t expect a wave of White House departures in the coming months. Biden can be abrupt with staff, but he engenders a certain loyalty that tends to keep them in his orbit.
One White House official who is planning to stay until the end describes how Biden tried to console him when his brother died of cancer this year.
As the official was about to join a meeting with the president, an aide told him to wait in the private dining room off the Oval Office. Biden entered the room and gave the official a hug. He spoke about the love between brothers and how his son Hunter felt when his brother, Beau, died of cancer in 2015.
Biden also asked about the official’s other brother, who is ill with the same type of brain cancer that killed Beau Biden.
“I’m not exaggerating when I tell you the tears were falling from his face to the floor,” the official said. “That’s the guy he is. He feels deeply. I have a deep personal affection for him.”
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