The Atlantic staff writer and biographer of President Biden, Franklin Foer, wrote a searing indictment of Biden following Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week, saying her loss is Biden’s “legacy.”
Foer, who wrote the 2023 book “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future,” argued that Harris’ failure is his own, and he might feel it more than she will.
“Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk,” Foer wrote in an Atlantic article published on Thursday.
Foer opened his piece by noting how some people on Biden’s team were aware that a Harris loss would be brutal on the president’s legacy, who was elected in 2020 on the promise that he would end Trump’s agenda.
“Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: ‘You have more to lose than she does.’ And now he’s lost it,” he wrote.
Foer’s Atlantic story then offered a window into how Biden’s team was processing Election Day, and their own criticisms of the Harris campaign.
“They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite,” he wrote, adding, “They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.”
The biographer noted that Biden’s team seemed to show an “unstated faith that they could have done better.”
He described some of the Biden critiques of the Harris campaign, the first being that she “abandoned her most potent attack,” being that she initially portrayed herself as a “relentless scourge of Big Business” who went after Trump as a “a stooge of corporate interests.”
According to the Biden aides he spoke to, Harris ditched this messaging at the behest of her brother-in-law.
“Then, quite suddenly, this strain of populism disappeared. One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edged messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer,” Foer wrote.
“To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of its chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked,” he added.
Another Bidenland critique he included was that Harris did not push back against identity politics enough. According to his team, Biden “would have clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports.”
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“Of course, he never staked out that position in his presidency,” Foer wrote in Harris’ defense, adding that she didn’t run a woke campaign. “To the contrary, she bathed herself in patriotism. She presented herself as a prosecutor, a friend of law enforcement, and a proud gun owner.”
However, the author did admit that “she failed to respond to the ubiquitous ads the Trump campaign ran claiming that Harris supports sex-change operations for prisoners. She allowed Trump to create the impression that she favored the most radical version of transgender rights.”
Foer concluded with the notion that Biden’s legacy will even suffer his successes being destroyed and even some of them claimed by Trump during the president-elect’s second term.
“Biden helped build the foundations for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments enabled by all three of those bills will take years to bear fruit, Biden never had the chance to reap the harvest.”
“Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could bolster his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantive legacy as a gift to his successor,” Foer declared.
Biden offered a conciliatory message to the nation on Thursday following Trump’s victory, urging Americans to accept the election results and expressing his administration’s commitment to “ensure a peaceful and orderly transition” to a Trump administration.
“A country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made. I’ve said many times, you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree. Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, you see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans,” he said.