Biden has slipped, but Trump has plummeted
“History is a merciless judge,” author David Grann wrote. “It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.”
Just how kind or merciless history will be on President Joe Biden is unclear, of course. It will take years to properly assess his successes and failures.
Still, presidential history specialists last February ranked Biden as our 14th best president. He placed a couple spots above Ronald Reagan and a bit down the list from such titans as Lincoln, F.D. Roosevelt, Washington and some others. Former President Barack Obama ranked seventh.
As for Donald J. Trump, based on his 2017-2021 tenure, he placed dead last at number 45.
Of course, this ranking was conducted before Biden’s apparently longstanding infirmities came to be widely known. It came well before his disastrous June 27 debate performance against the man he beat in 2020, his regrettably belated July 22 withdrawal from the campaign, and his Dec. 1 pardon of his son, Hunter.
Historians will have to put those developments, along with the Republican three-branch victory of Nov. 6, into perspective over time. It is, nonetheless, sad that these recent events are casting such a dark shadow on Biden’s tenure. If journalism is the first-rough draft of history, it’s been pretty rough lately on the outgoing president.
How unforgiving? Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal mentions the debate, but expands considerably on Biden’s infirmity, what she calls “the scandal of 2024,” or “the decline of Joe Biden’s mental acuity,” in a piece headlined “The President Who Wasn’t There.” The columnist thunders that Biden’s disability “won’t take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts—who did what, starting when, how it worked—will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.”
That didn’t stop Noonan from comparing Biden to Woodrow Wilson, a man who had suffered disabling strokes and whose infirmity was long concealed. She writes that this deception “forever colored Wilson’s legacy and darkened the historical reputation of First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson,” who was believed to have led a conspiracy to hide Wilson’s diminishment. Of course, in the early years of the last century, such deceptions were easier to pull off.
Oddly enough, the February ranking of presidents put Wilson at number 15, just behind Biden. Recall that Wilson created the ill-fated but idealistic League of Nations after World War I. He also presided over ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and laws that prohibited child labor and that mandated an eight-hour workday for railroad workers. And he appointed the first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Wilson had a long history of strokes and in 1919 suffered from one that incapacitated him until his term ended in 1921, historians say.
As for Biden, rumblings about his slippage had coursed through the media and Washington since at least last February, when Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s sloppiness with some classified documents noted that the president would “present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur found the president to be confused about the timeline of events and unable to respond to some questions about his time as vice president.
Questions about Biden’s lucidity persisted after that, even as the White House pooh-poohed the worries. Officials endeavored to accommodate what WSJ reporters in a Dec. 19 front-page story called the needs of a diminished leader. “Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted,” a subhed summarized.
Still, history judges a president by more than one year. Biden may yet go down in the record for some stunning contributions to the nation’s health, including physically in the early days of his presidency. As Democratic pundit Donna Brazile wrote in The Hill, Biden’s accomplishments include: winning congressional approval for $4.6 trillion in investments to end the coronavirus pandemic with free vaccinations and treatments; stimulus checks of up to $1,400 for individuals, and other programs, and efforts that helped the economy to create more than 16 million jobs and cut the unemployment rate from 6.3 percent when he took office to 4.2 percent in November.
He also reduced health insurance and prescription drug costs for millions of Americans; made efforts to combat climate change while creating clean-energy jobs and manufacturing jobs, and he cut taxes for middle-class and working-class families and some businesses, while imposing a minimum tax on big corporations and cracking down on wealthy tax cheats.
Biden also signed a bill approving $1.2 trillion in investments to improve America’s roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, airports, ports, waterways and energy systems. His policies reduced illegal crossings on the southern border below the level that held when Trump left office. Biden also signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law to invest $53 billion to create semiconductor manufacturing jobs in the U.S., boosted health care benefits for veterans, issued an executive order to protect access to reproductive health care and appointed 233 federal judges confirmed by the Senate, including Kentanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
Those were just the headline achievements that historians may take into account.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to distinguish himself in far less praiseworthy ways. Of course, there are his nominees for administration leadership positions or the Clown Cabinet as we might call it. The fight over the exceptionally unqualified Matt Gaetz (a man with morals akin to Trump’s) is over, but others loom.
Perhaps in an effort to take the spotlight off the extraordinary group, Trump issued a Christmas message that, well, departed significantly from past norms. Here, courtesy of The Intelligencer, is his most memorable text:
For his part, Biden asked Americans to find a “stillness” at the heart of the holiday. He also released an extraordinary video tour of the lavishly decorated White House:
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/HbZcyx7qKDc?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
“Really look at each other,” Biden urged, “not as Democrats or Republicans, not as members of ‘Team Red’ or ‘Team Blue,’ but as who we really are: fellow Americans.”
An anodyne sentiment, perhaps? Maybe. But it’s a holiday-time appeal to our better angels (appropriately enough).
It’s certainly an appeal far more worthy of a president than the absurd, inaccurate and angry blather of a 78-year-old whose diminished capacities have been known for far longer than those of Biden. Sadly, those abilities will only slide further in the coming four years. Is it possible for a president to rank lower than last? We may find out.