President also regrets picking Merrick Garland for attorney general, as he was slow to prosecute Trump for January 6
Joe Biden regrets having pulled out of this year’s presidential race and believes he would have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election – despite negative poll indications, White House sources have said.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garland as attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021 insurrection while presiding over a justice department that aggressively prosecuted Biden’s son Hunter.
With just more than three weeks of his single-term presidency remaining, Biden’s reported rueful reflections are revealed in a Washington Post profile that contains the clearest signs yet that he thinks he erred in withdrawing his candidacy in July after a woeful debate performance against his rival for the White House, Trump, the previous month.
Sour grapes. There are no guarantees he would have won, and the propaganda machine would have played almost exactly the same tune it did for Harris. Eggs, israel, gas prices, too old…
Hell, he might be right (I doubt it but you never know). BUT better than either of those options would have been if he'd announced by 2023 that he would not be running for reelection (like he campaigned on!) so the Dems could have had a full field and competitive primaries. That would have given them the best chance to win (but would they have? kinda doubt that too).
I DO agree with his understatement that his Garland decision was a mistake. Not just a mistake, a disaster!
He could have stepped down in 2022, given Kamala his last two years, and she would still be eligible for two more terms after that. She would have had incumbency, experience, and a younger face than the oldest guy who ever ran for president.
For an ancient venal egotist like Joe, the fact that Kamala lost is close to a best case scenario. He would've gotten completely waxed if he had stayed in... but now he gets to say he was forced aside by the party leaders (Pelosi, the Obamas etc.) and that is completely verifiably true, but he also gets to claim he totally would've won, which is very likely not true, but now we will never know.
Biden: "I'm a one term president, stability in crisis."
Biden: "I don't care, fuck it, you only live once, I'm running again!"
People: "You said you were a one term canidate, you're old, you didn't do COVID well, you broke up strikes, you aren't protecting women's rights, trans people are under attack, Mexicans are still in cages at the border, Ukraine could use more help, you're doing a bad job at stopping weapons to Israel, rent is gone up, inflation is stopped bu not down, groceries are still expensive..."
Biden: "Shut up Jack, check this out!"
["Primaries" give him the win, flops at debate, hands things to Harris]
Biden: "Well I did what I could do. ...I would have won anyways, why be consistant with what I say and do? Now lemme pardon my son after I said I wouldn't."
Of all things the pardon of his son is reasonable that guy had a whole culture of assholes trying to find anything to get him in jail just to hurt Biden.
Then we find out the basis of the entire hunter controversy was a lie and the guy admitted it was a lie after the election.
So they ended up getting for like tax evasion I would be willing to bet 90% of congress would be guilty of similar things if brought under the same scrutiny.
He likely would not have won. It surprises me how discrepancies in this election haven't been questioned, but at this point it may not matter. As for his choice of Merrick Garland. Yeah, that and not really doing much about unseating DeJoy was a mistake.
I just don't understand why Biden's family and those closest to him wouldn't have taken the time to be like "Joe, just shut your mouth. Cement your legacy as one of the best Presidents the USA has ever had, make some shit for Donald harder on the way out, and enjoy retirement."
Instead he's showing his whole ass. And for what? Once real history gets memory-holed by the fascists none of his whining matters anyway. He could have done a lot of good on his way out.
I mean he might have, a lot of people that voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote for Kamala in 2024 for various reasons. Trump did only very slightly better in 2024 than be did in 2020. Would the people who stayed home and didn't vote for Kamala have gotten out and voted for Biden? Maybe. If anything though Biden should have dropped out sooner or not ran at all, the DNC should have fielded better candidates, instead they spent 4 years (longer) trying to strangle any progressives before they could become feasible candidates.
I mean he already had, and if he had capitalized on how a LOSER was going to try and LOSE again because he was a huge loser I think he might have swayed many of the minds
Eh, does it? The whole reason he was pushed out was because he was a combination of personally incoherent and organizationally sheltered from reality. His opinion on his own greatness has little value.
The US president has reportedly also said he made a mistake in choosing Merrick Garlandas attorney general – reflecting that Garland, a former US appeals court judge, was slow to prosecute Donald Trump for his role in the 6 January 2021insurrection
I'd say his first mistake was choosing Garland. Biden then made a second mistake when he didn't immediately fire Garland as soon as it became obvious that Garland wasn't going to do his job.
It's been absolutely appalling how long it has taken to prosecute Trump.
Many cases should have been ready the second he was no-longer president.
All the lame considerations about looks and not getting involved is idiotic. if the politicians in power don't work to defend democracy, who else should?
The left have been screaming for Democrats to wake up for more than a decade, but they behave like a party with dementia that doesn't understand what's going on around them.
As AOC has stated multiple times, people will come to vote for you, if you give them a good enough reason for it. Harris was the better more moderate candidate. But I think most Americans want more, they want real change. Like better healthcare, environment protection, democracy etc.
Preventing a fascist narcissist becoming president apparently wasn't enough?!
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe the majority of Americans prefer to live with the danger of not receiving healthcare, and the danger of being financially ruined by healthcare bills. Rather than living in a "socialist hellhole" where society actually care about the citizens?
The number one cause for bankruptcies in USA is healthcare bills.
Remember how there was already a document produced by a special prosecutor that said there were crimes committed but a sitting president couldn't be prosecuted? Just fucking memory holed by Garland's DOJ. He literally could have taken that up the day he was confirmed.
Mr. I’m only gonna be a one term President seems to have a short memory, yet again.
Him and his staff misled and dragged their feet about his intentions early in then he went full out with ‘no I’m gonna run fuck you all’ and it turned into a disaster.
This is just one of the problems with the current Democratic Party. No one will work with and groom the upcoming young members to take control. The older party members literally do not have a clue what it means to step aside for the good of the party and the good of the country.
I wish this comment was higher. Biden betrayed the party and its chances of defeating Trump the moment he won the 2020 election and chose to not start preparing the nation on Jan 20th 2021 for a younger generation to lead. Merrick fucking Garland was the other, related, and just as large mistake. That one is totally on him.
And Kamala has just never been a great candidate, but he could have taken actions to try to boost her prominence. Instead he saddled her with no-win issues throughout and jealously guarded any successes for himself. And the one big bad issue I remember that he didn't dump on her (the rail strike), he farmed out to Pete Buttigieg to be the face of the administration (even though it wasn't a DOT issue). It was almost like the goal was to sabotage any potential locus of political power that wasn't Biden and his inner circle.
I don't think a better grooming would have helped Harris when she wasn't willing to be not-Biden in any way other than being coherent, but it certainly didn't help and seems indicative of their lack of intention to ever transfer power.
Google gives a bunch of examples. Did he actually say it to the press? Perhaps not. Was it discussed and was his age recognized as a liability within his campaign in 2020? Absolutely yes.
His campaign unofficially put that out in 2020, since he was near the bottom of the primary rankings. Campaigns that desperate start to float ideas as a trial balloon, to see if it would help or not. That’s how this works; a suggestion given by campaign staff that he can formally deny if it hurts his campaign or embrace if it’s helping. Once he started to gain ground in the primaries he backed off of the idea. He did many of these trial ideas.
His own staff had data that showed he would have lost even more electoral votes, giving Trump 400 instead of the 312. Biden is not aware of this data though. Kind of makes you think his staff is still heavily censoring what he sees.
"Benedict Arnold" developed a clear connotation over time. The same needs to become true for "Merrick Garland". History will remember him as a coward beyond measure and a key to enabling trump's final push to end American democracy.
He spent so much time trying to make a good legacy that he forgot to actually do the right thing in the moment.
Garland knew he’d be accused of bias and selective prosecution, so Garland took slow and deliberate steps to make an ironclad case… only to be accused of bias anyway, and doing it so slowly that the charges expired.
What would have made him a good Supreme Court Justice made him a HORRIBLE attorney general.
His tenure was so horribly handled though, that I can't help but suspect some actual intent.... Otherwise, Im I'm left to conclude that he was just that impotent and cowardly. There's no way he was that lost on what this moment was - He had an unquestionable historical mandate to act against an insurrection at the US Capitol, with police officers being beaten and stabbed with US flags on sharpened poles, all broadcast live across every channel, in full HD. He is a failure on an unimaginable scale that spans all recorded time and space. He's a fucking dunce.
Garland made a lot of sense in theory. Obama had picked him first and he had been denied his likely singular life's goal by obstructionist gop with trump egging it on. He should have sought justice for this country, while feeling the cathartic release of righting his personal wrongs.
But he didn't, because he's feckless and an absolute waste of that historical moment.
No, all the problems left of fascists have with Kamala were even moreso with him. The only way Democrats could have won was to hold a fair primary which they haven't done in a long time. They needed to get people voting for a candidate and not against the other guy which has been the strategy of both parties for ages, but doesn't work well when one side has people voting for him and your side actually wanted to vote against you, but were never given an alternate.
Dude I’ll be the first to say the DNC stacked the deck against Bernie but he lost at the ballot box ultimately. His miracle contingent of young voters did not materialize. Nobody stole the candidacy from him in any concrete way, but the democrats absolutely should have stepped back more or - god forbid - supported him (particularly in 2015/2016. 2019 he ran the same playbook and worse, that was stupid).
If that is not what you are referencing then I am very curious what you mean.
Bernie is one example of not running a fair primary, but not specifically what I was referencing. I was referencing the 2024 Democratic Primary specifically, and then mentioning that very few in the past have been fair to candidates. Not just because of the way the party treats the candidates publicly, but because of the way funding works and the direct control the leaders of the party have over that funding and how blackballing works if any candidate doesn't follow the party line. Which would be fine if there were allowed to be more than two viable, active parties at once. But the electoral college, among other things, makes that almost impossible, thus why Bernie had to run as a Democrat in the first place when he doesn't usually belong to the party.
I'm having problems rationalizing what you're trying to get to. You admit "the DNC stacked the deck" but you don't think that effected his outcome? You ran on the campaigns but have completely forgotten about the Nevada scandals involving unions and the caucus or what happened in SC when the DNC pressured high profile representatives to back Biden instead of Bernie (of which historically Biden has been horrible for minority communities). These are just off the top of my head, articles and references if you need them and I'll make sure to find you some more to help with the analysis.
Seems like you're splitting hairs trying to form some type of narrative. Democratic primaries have nothing to do with the two-party system? You'd have to completely wretch out decades of political knowledge from my head to even consider that nothing is connected. If there's a real, viable point you're trying to make besides "nuh uh", would love to be exposed to it.
I would say "wow, the dementia is even farther along than we realized" but it's likely the entire neoliberal faction that will be determined to come to this erroneous conclusion. They will grasp at any straw, even racist/sexist ones, in order to avoid admitting that the electorate is crying out for anti-corporate change.
Yes, I know what neoliberalism is and yes, I really do mean that.
The dominant faction of the Democratic Party is, in fact, neoliberal. As a result, the party's platform as a whole supports free-market capitalism, free trade, low regulations, weak worker protections, etc.
That's why (for example) Hillary Clinton championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and why politicians like Elizabeth Warren and AOC who care about things like workers' rights and Wall Street reform are among the minority within the party.
Neoliberals are guys like Elon Musk.
No, Neoliberals are guys like Elon Musk pretended to be before he came out as full-blown fascist.
Oh dude lemmy has decided that there are no normal liberals left. It's progressives and neoliberals. And no amount of reasoning, showing them academic materials, or engaging with the tenets of the ideologies will shift it. Neoliberals is the new "rich people I don't like" label.
This ghoul was propped up in 2020 with the full force of the party and then won thanks to covid, but he thinks he's some hero. Democrats lost in 2024 in large part thanks to him. Fuck you biden, you racist, genocidal, and power-hungry piece of shit.
Actual primaries are against what the DNC wants. 2016, 2020, and 2024 all had sham ones and argued in court "We don't have to have fair ones, it's mainly for show. We're a private organization, we don't need to abide by fair election practices."
So… I take it he’s completely forgotten that disastrous debate by now huh? It was pretty clear to even the most fervent Biden supporters that he wasn’t going to win. When even those folks were telling him to resign, it as done by that point.
If anything, staying in would’ve driven more people to Trump or caused them to stay home due to disillusionment.
He certainly seemed like a patient who had escaped the memory care unit. I still remember my wife came in to see how it was going, she saw my face and turned right around. There just wasn't any recovery to that. I would not have been surprised if Adult Protective Services had showed up on that stage.
Hey, hey. Rude of you to call the guy who was supposed to save us from another 4 years of Trump but then delivered it anyways a failure. All he did was tread water for 4 years and then hang on to power way too long, simultaneously tanking his own campaign, and making it much more difficult for someone to follow him.
Rude of you to call the guy who was supposed to save us from another 4 years of Trump but then delivered it anyways a failure.
Biden literally kept a lot of Trump's policies in place, kept his tax cuts in place, and did things Trump was considering despite public outcry, like limiting COVID protections and telling the CDC to stop covering it.
What a prick. No ownership of his candidacy-destroying debate performance. And thanks for taking so long to withdraw after you fucked that to the moon. Let him be the basis for age ceilings on presidential candidates.
You can go back and look at Pew polling or Gallup polling. The top concern for people who voted Trump was the economy. Within that, the aspect that they were most concerned about was prices. That is, people were very unhappy about inflation. There was a lot of inflation relative to normal US levels under Biden.
The Trump administration also adopted inflationary policy. And doing so was generally considered desirable by economists; having inflation is preferable to recession in terms of the impact on a country, and COVID-19 was going to produce some level of economic disruption. But that doesn't change the fact that the public doesn't view inflation in that way; it's very unpopular with the public, and past polling has shown that the public, in the US and elsewhere, is more upset about having inflation than a recession.
The results show that most people in all countries would choose low inflation even if it meant that millions more people would be unemployed.
In general, the American public also attributes short-term aspects of the economy directly to the President.
The Trump campaign also worked to drive those concerns and associate them with the Biden administration.
Benefitting from mis-attribution of economic behavior and policy is not unique to the Republicans. Clinton benefited from it; the "it's the economy, stupid" slogan played off public concern about economic policy where there probably wasn't much to blame Bush for, but the public was still upset about it. To some extent, it winds up being luck of the draw; if the economy is growing when you're President, people tend to credit you for it, whether you really deserve credit or not, and if it's contracting, people tend to blame you for it, again whether you really deserve blame or not. They don't go digging through data or reading much about where policy originated.
That's been a property of American elections for some time.
If you want to change that, you have a hard communications problem.
My guess is that neither Biden nor Harris was going to solve that communication problem, fundamentally change that aspect of electoral politics, and I think that unless they managed to pull some very large rabbit out of the hat, that was going to dominate the election.
To me, there are a couple problems of perception that gave Biden/Harris a huge uphill battle in the election that they didn't need to have.
Biden actually did a ton to address problems of inequality and income in America. He worked harder on it than any president since Johnson at least, and scored some huge successes driving up low-income wages and strengthening unions. But, he didn't do it in ways that were visible to the average American, I think because he's so far removed from the present-day average American that he genuinely didn't realize how invisible a lot of his reforms would turn out to be.
His two huge mistakes were:
Talking about, and letting people in his adminstration talk about, inflation, in terms of "how much have prices gone up this year?" He bragged about getting inflation back down, which speaking from an economist's point of view is accurate. But things are still expensive. To the average American, "getting inflation back down" would have meant that eggs go back down to costing what they used to cost. He could have gotten away with half as much gains on wages, but taking strong action to bring down grocery prices and rent prices. People respond to how much stuff costs, even if they're making 20% more than they used to a year before.
Focusing all his wage efforts on people who are in the "W-2 economy," even at a low level. The biggest economic victims in the country are undocumented people, people driving Uber, people working at Wal-mart being kept just barely under full-time employment, all of whose rent goes up every year to match anything they're gaining. People are being squeezed out of the full-time-job-having economy steadily more and more every year and into the desperation economy. I know he did the Climate Corps, but something more like the CCC or WPA, giving real full-time working jobs that can pay a decent income on a massive scale, would have been better than looking out for people who already have a W-2 union job having their union more effectively able to fight for them.
And then, also, letting Merrick Garland twiddle his thumbs for four years like the cowardly lump that he is. I think history will look back on this past few years of slow-walking the Trump prosecutions as a massive error that led to untold misery and bloodshed. Honestly, even if he fucked up everything else and lost the 2024 election, if he had simply taken the fire on the roof as an urgent problem that needs all hands on deck, instead of one more renovation project that needs to wait its turn until it comes up in the agenda, it would have been better.
Focusing all his wage efforts on people who are in the “W-2 economy,” even at a low level.
Do people not in the W-2 economy turn out to vote? (Undocumented people clearly don't.) This isn't a rhetorical question.
Edit: a quick search found this from 2016, but it would need to adjusted by the number of people in each segment. (And "W-2 economy" isn't synonymous with income, but they are correlated.)
No Democrat will in our lifetime. It's to late for that. The wealthy own all major social media outlets, all major traditional media outlets, and are turning them to disinformation and AI slop. Even as they spin up thousands of AI slop and misinformation farms masquerading as small independent outlets to keep the fools that stray corralled.
Liberal or economic liberal politics will never solve it either. As this is a feature of them. It's working as intended, in the interests of the worst possible people.
Technically, Inflation peaked in Biden's first year. That means it rose under Trump and declined under Biden. I'm sure people really did think what you said, but I think it needs to be clarified that the economy actually did improve, from how it was in the Covid 2020 Era, after Biden took office.
Might've, might not've. It's irrelevant now, of course.
What Biden and Harris will be remembered most for, is their peaceful transition of power to a mentally unbalanced fascist tyrant, knowingly, compliantly, without even any public statements of caution.
Biden and Harris are ready to quietly shake hands with Trump and Pence, hand them control of everything, after then retire to a quiet life of luxury and highly-paid speaking engagements, where they'll continue the Democratic Party's proud tradition of speaking without really saying anything.
Seems like this is his way of arrogantly throwing Harris under the bus for his own historically low ratings, starting back in 2022 after Roe was lost. Theres no way he could have done better than Harris. With him running it would have been an even bigger blowout. He seems to think he could run a genocide against his parties wishes and then go on to win an election. Its idiotic.
I'm reading the WaPo article it's based on and guys this is some pure grade bullshit. They start with 5d Chess; then they say people were unable to hear about his victories because of the media, they were unable to appreciate the best Covid recovery in the world; and yes, he claims he could have beaten Trump.
It's an incredibly flattering article for a man who was so far out of touch he called outrage over inflation the best recovery in the world. Yeah they managed a soft landing, but that shit didn't trickle down. We're on our second year of record breaking increases in homeless people. We don't give a goddamn shit about the stock market when we're shopping for used Recreational Vehicles to use as our primary housing. If families are choosing between utilities, rent, and food, then your Bidenomics message is going to do worse than fall flat, it's going to blow up in your face.
And the whole style over substance thing. Just holy shit batman, he broke the strike of workers who were (and are still) massively abused. He did that on prime time television. And then he negotiated for the office worker parts of the unions to get improvements and it's a complete submarine. Not only did he do the bad, he did no PR damage control, not even to show what little he gave the workers after he shut down their strike. At one point in the WaPo article someone mentions that Biden tried to run the country like it was 1972, and I agree with that statement.
Which brings us to the crux of his sins as a leader. He was unwilling to listen to the people he was supposed to be leading. At every turn he decided that he and his high paid advisors from the corporate world knew better then the people actually struggling. He might have thought he was playing 5d chess but he was losing at checkers... badly.
Fuck's sake. As deluded as he was when he stayed in despite internal polling showing him losing in a landslide. Fuckwad very well may have handed American democracy over to its execution.
on no fucking planet is this the case. Also, him hanging on as long as he did, didn't help things. It's not like the Harris campaign did themselves any favors, but was clear not one person the the management caste of the DNC really gave a fuck about winning.
They don't care about winning, because it changes nothing for them. If they win, they keep taking kickbacks and bribes. If they lose, they keep taking kickbacks and bribes.
If they win, they wring their hands about how they can't do what they want, so it's not even worth trying. If they lose, they wring their hands about things they can't stop, so it's not even worth trying.
Money in politics is always the case, and being in the opposition where you can make deals and promises for when you are back in power is big money.
It's like how the hour of Roe v. Wade being overturned, people got texts wanting money to put it back into place with the next president.
The president can't just declare abortion legal or illegal, my $5 isn't going to help a candidate get elected when millions are spent on a press tour in one day. There's a clear reason why they do it.
I just hope they don't think Harris lost because she didn't have enough time and then run her again in 2028, either without a primary or with a heavily one-sided primary like in 2016.
Anyone who figured out messaging beyond "Look how bad Trump is, even Bush republicans won't vote for him" probably wins that election. No one had a broad vision to latch for sale, and no one did anything inspiring.
That was already the game under Biden. There was zero attempts to actually prevent annexation of Gaza. Just a lot of finger waving while they sent more shit and even US troops.
You're not in a position to talk down to anyone, are you. Centrists just lost every single lever of government and their reputation has never been worse. They've turned the democratic party into a big joke on their watch.
Every time you guys talk things just get worse. Maybe its time to sit down and take a look at where you're at instead of talking. At the very least, your talking wont help anything, now will it.
The statistics and composite polls predicted the Trump victory, and they predicted it even before Biden dropped out by a larger margin, so he is incorrect.
But, given how people chose Trump over Kamala, I can't blame him for thinking that way. Clearly the USA does have reservations about electing a women and a minority.
Oh no he doesn't get to say anything about it. He shit the bed, and his team shit the bed. Then when they were staring at polls showing Trump would take 400 electoral college votes they doubled down. They didn't start a hand off in the background like everyone assumed. No they wasted nearly a month and then called up Kamala Harris one day and told her she was the candidate now, with no warning.
If anyone is responsible for Trump winning it is Biden and his team. They hid how bad Biden was aging instead of getting a ton of grown-up points by having him retire or get removed by the 25th amendment. That would have given Kamala Harris a year or two of time in office to get the incumbent advantage and set up a real campaign. No they played this like little boys who don't want to come home because then the party ends.
It's weird to say, but Harris was like the third most responsible person for her loss. She still is responsible, but Biden and Garland set her up for failure.
So, I get that. But the thing is he should be man enough to accept he made a choice and now accept the consequences.
Smart people count the cost of a decision before making it. That way they can hold their head high on one thing at least. As it stands Biden can't even do that.
He’s a stubborn idiot. He genuinely thought he’d be able to pull off a miracle and dig himself out of the hole he was in with the underwater electoral polls and falling favorability rating. When his internal polls said he was losing to Trump with a possible 400-138 split, he ignored it and said he would be able to comeback like he always does. Pelosi tried to force him to see reality and he went along with her plan angrily, and now he’s angry he didn’t ignore her and fight her on it.
Yeah there was a huge stink on him. It wasn't just the debate. His every appearance and utterance just made him look geriatric. The debate just made it so obvious he was indefensible.
I honestly don’t think people care that much about a woman running. Because at that level, their gender is not ‘man’ or ‘woman’ but ‘politician’.
People didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she was quite unlikeable and the campaign centred around it being ‘her turn’. People didn’t vote for Harris because she was generally invisible and had to run a very truncated campaign. The fact that both were women was the least of their worries.
Other countries have elected women leaders with no issues. Heck, you see women presidents all the time in movies and TV shows. Nobody bats an eye.