President Joe Biden said his presidency would be a bridge — and it was. But he didn’t build it to a promised new Democratic generation.
Instead, he’s the president who stayed too long and whose administration thus arched between two terms of a nemesis he once defeated and then let back into power: Donald Trump.
To call this Biden’s political tragedy would be crass. This, after all, is a man who lived unending personal anguish after burying his first wife and two of his children. But it’s the fate he’s been handed by history — and his own grave electoral miscalculation.
This dark reality shadowed Biden’s farewell address on Wednesday night — his latest attempt to write a first draft of history about a presidency he insists is worth far more than the ignominy of a single term.
“My eternal thanks to you, the American people,” the president said from the Oval Office at just after 8 p.m. on the East Coast. “After 50 years of public service, I give you my word I still believe in the idea for which this nation stands, a nation where the strengths of our institutions and the character of our people matter and must endure.”
But by Monday afternoon, the foe who Biden warned in 2020 represented a mortal threat to America’s soul will be back behind the Oval Office desk, with Biden headed into a Delaware retirement and leaving the country to face whatever happens next.
With this in mind, Biden used his address to warn of the threat he thinks Trump’s second term — and what he styled as his successor’s band of “robber barons” — represents. If anything, he appears to believe the existential peril is greater now that it was when he launched his 2020 campaign.
“Tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern,” Biden said. He cited “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people” and sounded an alarm about “dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”
Like President George Washington in his farewell address, Biden warned of storms gathering around democracy.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” he said.