Joe Biden faces a late, cruel humiliation in a tough closing chapter to his presidency

The day before Hurricane Milton came barrelling across the west coast of Florida, president Joe Biden and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, participated in a communications call with on-the-ground officials that was broadcast live on several networks. It lasted for more than 30 minutes and the president led the White House conversation, asking a series of sharp, pertinent questions.
For anyone watching, the scene might have registered simply because it was rare, in the midst of the furious electoral cycle, to see Biden starring in the news cycle. And it was a glimpse of what once had been. The currents of the 2024 election have been so fast and treacherous that they carried the national conversation a very long way from the smudgy evening in July when Biden called time on his presidential candidacy.
If there is truth in the intermittent reports of his continuing resentment towards close friends and party colleagues such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, Biden has done a terrific job of smarting in private. He has remained the good soldier; throwing his support behind Harris, vowing to get as much done as possible in the remaining months of his presidency and getting on with what must be a surreal closing act, when the fixation on the next occupant of the White House is such that everyone forgets about the current one.
Biden’s performance on that lunchtime call was natural and in command. He seemed less hesitant and haunted than he did during the terrible last few weeks of his election campaign. At the time, the surge of support and enthusiasm generated by Harris’s elevation had stalled and the Republican Party spokespeople were beginning to sound bullish about Donald Trump’s chances. The thought may have crossed Democratic minds just then: what if they had made a terrible mistake? What if Biden had been sacrificed for what he always insisted was just a bad night?
Last Tuesday night quashed even the faintest doubt. A strong speech by Harris, delivered at the Ellipse, drew an extraordinarily large crowd of Washingtonians. One of Harris’s greatest strengths as a speaker is, in fact, her brevity. She rarely speaks for longer than 30 minutes. As soon as she left the stage, she would have learned that her president, in a video call with Hispanic advocacy group Voto Latino, had inadvertently caused a problem.
Criticising the now-infamous joke made by a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday – about an island of floating garbage with the punchline: “I think it’s called Puerto Rico” – Biden’s retort was: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” Or at least, that was what it sounded like on audio. Within hours, it was seized upon as evidence that the president had called the entire Republican support base “garbage”. The White House quickly issued a clarification that he was referring to “supporter’s” in the singular possessive. And it’s obvious that is what he meant. But he couldn’t have chosen a worse way to express it.
When you are explaining, you are losing. When you are explaining in terms of grammar, you are flailing. To intense Democratic irritation, the gaffe dominated the election news cycle for most of the week, allowing Trump to don a high-visibility vest and appear at a Wisconsin rally in a garbage truck. Trump would incite a furore of his own, saying in a Thursday night interview with Tucker Carlson of “war hawk” Liz Cheney: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know when the guns are trained on her face.”
Trump has long established himself as the say-anything candidate. Biden’s words and gaffes are held to a different standard. The “garbage” incident was a late, cruel humiliation for Biden in what has been an extraordinarily tough closing chapter to his 50-year political career. All the Harris campaign needed him to say was precisely nothing. Campaign attempts to place some distance between Harris and Biden have become less subtle in recent weeks. And as former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have been among the high profile cast stumping for Harris and Tim Walz, the sitting president has been conspicuous in his absence.
But even as the sun sets on this election, the accomplishments of Biden’s four years in office continue to make themselves heard. Fuel costs and the inflation rate have dropped steadily over the past two months. And as Clinton, the great explainer, promised a gathering in Wisconsin on Thursday night, the achievements of the Biden term will positively affect the United States in the years to come regardless of who takes office.
“Joe Biden saw how long it took us to get over the crash [of] 2008. When he leaves office the Biden-Harris administration will have created about 16 million jobs. More than any administration has created in four years. What happened [in 2016 was that Trump] got the tail end of the Obama recovery. Now he wants to get the tail end of what happened in the Biden-Harris years. Because even though they had 16 million jobs there is going to be a lot more with the Infrastructure Act, with the Chips Act.”
The announcement of just 12,000 jobs added for October pushes back, in the immediate term, against Clinton’s picture. But for an Irish-American Catholic conservative, Biden was an extraordinarily progressive, liberal president. Even during the fraught post-Trump years, some of his brightest legislative triumphs, from gun safety to the infrastructure Bill to federal protection for same-sex couples, were achieved through bipartisan co-operation.
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There’s a sting to the Biden legacy in that for all of his vast foreign policy knowledge, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was disastrously botched and he has been patient to the point of meek in his dealing with Binyamin Netanyahu, to the anguish of the fading Arab-American Democratic support base.
The full measure of his presidency will be reviewed and discussed in the weeks when the Bidens are exiting the White House. But his last contribution to Harris’s election campaign is an unfortunate footnote to a historic, spectacular example of the brutally cold heart of the political life.