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Joe Biden ascended to the highest office in America with a pledge to unite the country, strengthen his party and defend democracy.
Instead, in the 82-year-old’s Oval Office denouement, he leaves a nation divided, a party in tatters and the American people questioning the self-described institutionalist’s respect for the rule of law.
Many Democrats are blaming Biden for handing the White House to Donald Trump, criticizing the aging politician for staying in office too long and reeling after he pardoned his son. Exacerbating the frustrations, Biden recently expressed doubt about his ability to serve another four years after dismissing voters’ concerns about that very issue as he sought re-election.
The president harbors similar resentment toward members of his own party. After the November election, he privately mused about the idea of pardoning Trump as a magnanimous move, according to a person directly familiar with his comments, though it’s not clear he seriously considered it. A White House official said “to our knowledge, this was not raised.” At the same time, Biden is not on speaking terms with some of his closest allies.
It is all an inglorious coda to five decades in public office.
“The Joe Biden story is one of the great tragedies of American politics. I really mean that. He should be having a glorious, well deserved, highly acclaimed retirement. And he’s not,” veteran Democratic political strategist James Carville said. “It’s hard to blame anybody but him.”
Biden plans to write another book, providing him with the opportunity to tell his version of his presidency and its conclusion. Despite public polls showing in 2023 that Democratic voters did not want him to run again, he went forward anyway, with the backing of party insiders. He was later forced to step aside in July following a cataclysmic debate that seemed to expose his cognitive state. His late departure gave Vice President Kamala Harris just 107 days to build an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against Trump.
Throughout his presidency, Biden granted fewer interviews than his recent predecessors and is ending his term the same way: He does not plan to hold the traditional final formal news conference.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said Biden is proud of the number of interviews and impromptu question-and-answer sessions he’s held with reporters.
In the White House, the mood feels “like a morgue,” according to a person who recently met with officials there. Biden leaves office feeling he contributed significant wins for the country that Americans don’t appreciate. Privately, he has vacillated from feeling melancholy to resigned to angry to wistful as he reflects on his legacy, two people close to him said.
“He’s totally dejected and the people around him are, as well,” another person close to the president said. One White House official attributed the glum atmosphere to Trump’s impending return to the Oval Office and noted that Biden’s aides warmly reacted with cheers when he surprised them at a staff party earlier this week.
Another White House official depicted personnel as holding back on emotions until Jan. 20 actually arrives.
“It’s hard to reflect, it’s hard for it to sink in that we’re done here — until we’re actually done and out the gates with our stuff,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. That’s their mood … it hasn’t sunk in for people who are still here yet because we’re working until the last minute.”
Once the elder statesman who was to serve as a bridge to the next generation of leadership, Biden departs with an array of fractured relationships. He is estranged from some of the people who were once among his most powerful allies. He harbors, along with first lady Jill Biden, a simmering resentment toward former President Barack Obama, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and several former aides, including Bob Bauer and Anita Dunn, all of whom he believes either failed him or pushed him out of the 2024 race, according to several people close to him.
Biden hasn’t spoken in months to Dunn, a former top adviser who was among the few notable Democrats willing to back him if he decided to mount a 2016 campaign to challenge Hillary Clinton for the party’s nomination, according to multiple people familiar with the dynamic. Dunn departed the White House during the summer as part of the fallout from Biden’s June debate performance.
Biden’s relationship with Bauer, his longtime personal lawyer who is married to Dunn, also has deteriorated since the debate and tensions related to the criminal trials of his son Hunter Biden, the people familiar with the situation said. Neither Bauer nor Dunn attended a large black-tie dinner the Bidens hosted in November to thank longtime supporters.
And Bauer will no longer represent Biden once he leaves office, three people familiar with the decision said.
Asked about this deterioration of his relationship with Dunn and Bauer, a Biden aide said, “Anita and Bob are well regarded and loyal to the president.”
While Biden and Pelosi have crossed paths at social events since she pushed for him to end his candidacy in July, they have not had a substantive conversation, according to a Pelosi aide.
“That relationship is permanently damaged,” a person close to Biden said.
Biden has not expressed his frustrations with Obama directly to him, a person familiar with their conversations said.
One former top Obama aide who publicly argued after the June debate that Biden should drop out pointedly noted this week that Biden recently named aircraft carriers after former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, he has not offered any similar honor to Obama.
“Barack H. Obama did not get a f—ing personnel carrier named after him,” Ben Rhodes said on the podcast “Pod Save The World.”
Before he left office, Obama surprised Biden by awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in an emotional White House ceremony.
Asked about the president’s frustrations with Pelosi and Obama, Bates, the White House spokesperson, said in a statement, “President Biden’s focus is squarely on making as big of a difference as he can in the lives of American families — not events from the campaign.”
Biden went back on his promise to protect the norms he said undergirded the nation’s stability by pardoning his Hunter Biden on federal gun and tax charges. The president blamed “raw politics” for his son’s prosecution, saying it “infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” tapping the kind of language Trump often uses.
Biden was surprised, and angered, by Democrats’ criticism of the pardon, according to multiple people familiar with his reaction. Dunn was among those who publicly criticized the move.
Throughout his term, Biden felt the tug of war between his White House inner circle and his family members. Some of his family felt at times that the president was not being served well by his team, which has included Dunn, former top White House aide and then campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and longtime close advisers Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon. That was particularly the case as the 2024 campaign got into full swing and Biden’s approval rating continued to sag while Trump gained ground among voters.
Biden didn’t make changes to his team until after he dropped out of the 2024 race. In the weeks and months after that gut-wrenching decision, anger intensified from some of his family members toward his closest aides.
In some instances, it flowed both ways. Dunn and Bauer resented being unceremoniously cast out of the president’s inner circle and blamed two Biden family members in particular for that — Hunter Biden and Jill Biden.
Aspects of the family drama could continue into the next administration. Some members of the president’s staff are bracing for possible congressional investigations into Hunter Biden’s pardon and accusations, denied by the White House, that administration officials covered up the extent of Biden’s mental decline.
Biden has argued that he set up the country for long-term economic success after shepherding major pieces of legislation through Congress — even if Americans don’t feel the benefits now. He also sees his efforts to unite U.S. allies around Ukraine after Russia’s invasion as a critical foreign policy achievement.
In a major development Wednesday, Israel and Hamas struck a deal for a ceasefire after 15 months of devastating war in the Gaza Strip, in exchange for the release of hostages taken by Hamas in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack. Biden worked to achieve a ceasefire deal for months, but he now shares some credit for it with Trump, given their two teams coordinated on the round of negotiations that secured the agreement.
When reporters asked Biden at a Wednesday news conference whether he or Trump deserves credit for the ceasefire, Biden turned and smiled: “Is that a joke?”
Bates, the White House spokesperson, said of the president’s record in office: “President Biden put his unique qualification and his whole heart into delivering for the American people, and the results are the strongest record of any modern administration.”
Critics have relentlessly hit Biden for softening border policies early on in his administration, prompting a surge in illegal crossings. While he later tightened controls at the border, public opinion had already swung against him.
Some Democrats said Biden missed the mark early on when it came to the economy. He should have spent more time railing against greedy corporations rather than trying to convince the public the economy really was better than it thought, said Pete Giangreco, a veteran in presidential Democratic politics.
“There was always this internal struggle from the day he walked into the White House: Was he Joe from Scranton, the populist, union guy? Or is he Joe the senator from Delaware, which is corporate friendly?” Giangreco said. “He could never make up his mind who he was. If he had been Joe from Scranton from day one and stayed Joe from Scranton from day one, it might have been a different outcome.”
Biden paid a political price for the pandemic-era policies of the last two presidencies, said Lynn Vavreck, an American politics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Many voters became accustomed to the subsidies the Trump and the Biden administrations doled out and then watched prices go up as the subsidies ran out — a double whammy that hit when Trump was long gone from office.
“They believed that they were better off financially during the Trump presidency,” Vavreck said. “That is probably true for very, very many people because of those government stimulus payments and all of the support” for aid programs.
But another longtime ally, prominent Democratic donor John Morgan, said that Biden is right to feel bitter by the lack of fanfare around his presidency, pointing to massive investments in infrastructure, a booming stock market, low unemployment and for having navigated the pandemic “masterfully.”
“Objectively, I believe it was a great presidency. You know they believe it. You can hear it in the president’s voice,’” Morgan said. “You look at all the statistics and it’s like: ‘Why aren’t you all carrying me on your shoulders?’”
In the immediate term, it has all done little to move the public. Biden is poised to leave office with a 36% approval rating, according to a CNN poll released Wednesday. Low approval numbers dogged him throughout his presidency and now he’s particularly smarting over leaving office without his standing with Americans having improved, according to two people familiar with the matter.
In an alternate universe, one in which Biden would have stepped aside as the Democratic nominee in 2023, the president would have ridden waves of accolades in his final weeks, cutting ribbons at airports named in his honor or banking hundreds of millions of dollars for an Ivy League policy center in his name, Carville suggested.
“Joe Biden had many successful acts in his life. Unfortunately, you get remembered for your last act,” Carville said. “Right now, he’s remembered as the guy who stayed too long.”
Natasha Korecki is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.
Carol E. Lee is the Washington managing editor.
Jonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News.
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