Haunted Biden
How Joe Biden became an angel of death
Nausicaa Renner
A vulture was circling Joe Biden. It followed the reek of death that seems to accompany his person wherever he goes. Joe Biden stumbled below it, disoriented and halting like a toddler. The world, to him, was black and white. He, and everything that surrounded him, was the pinnacle of the good, and his enemies were entirely bad. He was battling for the soul of the nation against Donald Trump. His son reassured him he was “scrappy, and in command of the facts.” The powerful glow of the sun warmed his back as he chased, futilely, the dark shadow in front of him. No one was “pushing me out,” he said on a campaign call. The vulture flew a little lower. “I’m in the race till the end.” We all insist we’re immortal until we die, says Freud.
During Biden’s 2020 campaign, New York Review of Books author Fintan O’Toole wrote a heralded piece about how his defining feature as a politician was “haunted” by a “public sense of loss” after the deaths of his first wife and baby daughter in a car accident that he survived, and later of his prodigal son, of a brain tumor. The ability to converse with death may have been badly needed after months of Covid and years of Donald Trump. Biden could grieve with people, feel their pain. He could be depressed with the nation after four years of psychosis. “As an antidote to Donald Trump’s grotesquely inflated ‘greatness,’” O’Toole wrote, Biden’s ability to grieve “has authentic force. It is a different, and much better, way of talking about distress, of making pain a shared thing rather than a motor of resentment.” Biden was America’s “designated mourner.”
When Joe Biden received the Democratic nomination in 2020, his acceptance speech was suffused with a sense of the world as a grand battle between light and dark and his own predestiny within that scheme. The speech, like everything Biden, was simultaneously impossibly cliched and also spoke directly to his own traumatic history. “We can choose the path of becoming angrier, less hopeful and more divided. A path of shadow and suspicion. Or we can choose a different path, and together, take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light,” Biden said. “I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”
Four years later, Biden’s deftness with death feels sinister and sick rather than healing. At the same time that his sympathy for American deaths and his kindness toward veteran families seeps from his person, his insensitivity for the loss of the “other” is baffling in its brutality. The tens of thousands Israel has murdered in Gaza have been accompanied by Biden’s weak protest of on-background “increasing frustration” with Benjamin Netanyahu and his strong promise that the U.S. will defend Israel to the end.
As Biden’s cognition slipped, the splits in his mind between good and bad, self and other, grew more polarized. He believed he had a duty to run. Paradoxically, we were told we must vote for him and no other option was possible in order to preserve democracy. Some voters bought this; for others, Gaza turned the question of Trump vs. Biden into a morbid battle of atrocities. If we had Biden, then we would have genocide. If we had Trump, then we would have genocide and no abortion. Was this really the grand choice between democracy and fascism? Many did not wish to choose a side at all. Even Biden seemed to sneak out the side door. By announcing in a letter he would not seek reelection, he dodged the chaos caused by the lateness of his own decision.
Biden froze the Democratic Party in place around him into a phalanx of resistance liberals who had, as Sam Adler-Bell astutely put it, “a primal, conservative fear of disorder, masquerading as principle.” Or, as Christian Lorentzen wrote in the London Review of Books, “The debate [in June] between Biden and Trump was painful to watch because it reminded us that someday we’ll all die”; to hold back that knowledge, they clung to Biden for dear life. Then, as Biden’s own mortality became less and less possible to deny, they peeled off, one by one, like family members finally accepting that their loved one would never be the same again. Biden was the only one holding on to his own centrality, staving off his annihilation anxiety for just another week, just another day. As long as he could keep killing thousands of people, he—and the imperialism he represents—could stay alive.
I am often tempted to ask what happened to change Biden in the second half of his term. The first half was full of manic repair — if not the emotional reparation that O’Toole anticipated, then in the form of unprecedented economic legislation. Before October 7, 2023, Biden had done a lot to redeem the political reputation he built in the Senate and as Obama’s vice president, passing historic bills in the first two years of his presidency. The left even ironically deemed Joe Biden “Dark Brandon” for his student loan forgiveness program and passing the Inflation Reduction Act — the biggest piece of climate legislation ever. As Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders keeps reminding us, he’s done more for the working class than any other president in modern history. I was in a group chat named “Marxist Bidenists,” which we later, sheepishly, had to rename “kermit fan club.” The United States even left Afghanistan after twenty years of war. It was, in no uncertain terms, a total fucking nightmare that left millions at risk of starvation through sanctions on the Taliban government, “but still.”
But the likelier scenario is that his first two years in office were the anomaly—a historical contingency, the result of crescendoing national crisis. The bills were enabled by both a Democratic House and Senate, and hastened by the atmosphere of emergency that accompanied the months after Trump’s presidency ended, but the aftermath of the insurrection and the Covid-19 pandemic were still very much with us. His first two years were not, it turns out, a late-game turning point for Biden himself. After more than nine long months of seeing the bodies of Gazans crammed vertically in the boxes of social media feeds, the idea that Joe Biden could have ever been considered a de-colonizer feels like ancient history. “Dark Brandon” has now been coopted as a marketing tool for the campaign, and not well.
“Biden was a dose of death at a time when we needed to temper the national mood. He deadened a volatile atmosphere, depressed a national psychosis.”
I think O’Toole was right: Biden was a dose of death at a time when we needed to temper the national mood. He deadened a volatile atmosphere, depressed a national psychosis. He surmounted the paranoid attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He successfully if quite imperfectly turned Operation Warp Speed into a widely available, free vaccine. I am by no means anything but an armchair psychologist, but it seems to me that Biden, consoler-in-chief though he may be, has not actually “worked through” his grief. This is conjecture, but it’s also a fact: the pain from his past is still very present to him. And so, Biden cannot help but recreate his internal world in the external one, repeatedly damaging far away parts of the world to reexperience, and re-survive the crisis, again and again, rather than feel that he himself is not whole. The healthy dose of death became a destructive one.
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In 2020, what we needed was a presidential candidate whose only quality was being able to win, with the largest possible margin, against Trump. Or, at least, that was the depressing line of the visionless Democrats.
Joe Biden pitched himself as the presidential candidate who could unify the country, entwining his history as a stolid negotiator in the Senate with his more sensitive, mournful side into a droopy braid of institutionalism. “I know the new ‘New Left’ tells me that I’m — this is old-fashioned,” he told donors during the campaign, in 2019. “Well guess what? If we can’t reach a consensus in our system, what happens? It encourages and demands the abuse of power by a president. That’s what it does. You have to be able to reach consensus under our system — our constitutional system of separation of powers.” He could reach consensus with segregationists, he bragged, and he wanted to work with the rich as well as the poor.
Trump was the candidate of abuse of power and executive action; Biden was the candidate of democratic process. So the narrative went. Where Trump was the punitive, patriarchal father, Biden was figured as the good enough parent — the president who was attuned to the needs of the country, but whose function was more emotional than material; he wasn’t going to be a socialist or anything. “Nothing would fundamentally change,” he said at the donor event, a message that frustrated the left wing and cemented Biden as the mainstream, status-quo candidate. “The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke,” said Biden during a 2020 New Hampshire campaign stop. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”
The epiphany actually occurred among progressives. For a little while, it seemed like Biden was indeed willing to enact a vision of the future, displaying ambition that his presidency could bring a tidal wave of economic justice. “In the usual course of a presidential campaign, a Democrat leans left during the primary and then marches right in the general,” writes Evan Osnos in his 2020 biography of Biden. “Biden went in the opposite direction,” adopting policies from primary rivals Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. “Almost precisely a year after assuring skittish voters that ‘nothing would fundamentally change,’” Osnos writes, Biden was declaring that “America was due for ‘some revolutionary institutional changes.’” And, indeed, the first few months of Biden’s presidency were marked by remarkable, large pieces of legislation (benefitting working families and also large companies) that seemed possible only under another emergency situation, the Covid pandemic. Biden had come into office with a series of executive actions already drafted, ready to sign on day one — and passed the American Rescue Act within a few months.
He earned comparisons to LBJ. “The American people are demanding things to happen,” said House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat whose support for Biden during the primary paved the way for his win, in April 2021. “The American people are demanding that we do judicial reform, and it’s going to happen. The American people are demanding we do something about all these guns — it’s going to happen. … He’s going to do much more.”
In selling the Rescue Act, Biden threw off the shackles of Larry Summers — Obama’s economic advisor — and said the 2009 Recovery Act responding to the housing bubble and 2008 market crash hadn’t been big enough: “The biggest risk is not going too big, if we go — it’s if we go too small. We’ve been here before. When this nation hit the Great Recession that Barack and I inherited in 2009, I was asked to lead the effort on the economic Recovery Act to get it passed. It was a big recovery package, roughly $800 billion. I did everything I could to get it passed, including getting three Republicans to change their votes and vote for it. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t quite big enough. It stemmed the crisis, but the recovery could have been faster and even bigger.”
Was it a true concession to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, who Biden had managed to undermine just ahead of Super Tuesday? Or was it competitiveness? Obama was a natural comparison for Biden, but also one that made no one comfortable. “I am confident that Barack is not happy with the coverage of this administration as more transformative than his,” Biden told an adviser, as reported in “This Will Not Pass,” by reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. Speaker Nancy Pelosi told a friend, that “Obama is jealous of Biden.”
“Where Trump was the punitive, patriarchal father, Biden was figured as the good enough parent—the president who was attuned to the needs of the country, but whose function was more emotional than material.”
When challenged about whether any of these changes would last after the momentum of the pandemic and the election had faded, Democrats punted. “It’s difficult to grant people freedoms and then take them away,” said Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia. “Yeah, some of these things were temporary, but they’re also now part of the fabric of our economy.”
Beyer was wrong about this—at least about the expanded Child Tax Credit, which lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty but was killed along with the rest of Build Back Better. The Democratic trifecta was still here, for the time being. Party leaders endorsed—and still support—mammoth changes on climate policy and the social safety net. But the fog of the pandemic — the fog of emergency, which seems to be necessary in the U.S. to accomplish anything at all — lifted, vaccines became widespread, the normalcy promised by Biden indeed came to pass.
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Mania can’t last forever. By the summer, the urgent atmosphere needed to motivate Congress had dissipated and then froze. With the Covid vaccination effort in full swing, the nation was eager to move on from lockdown; people were willing to sacrifice the lives of others for the sake of their own enjoyment, and Biden, who had promised a return to normalcy during his campaign, was eager to appease. On June 2, Biden told Americans to expect a “summer of freedom” and hosted a fireworks party for first-responders on the South Lawn on the Fourth of July. On July 6, Biden gave a speech saying, “And the bottom line is: The virus is on the run, and America is coming back. … We are emerging from one of the darkest years in our nation’s history into a summer of hope and joy, hopefully.”
With the Delta variant yet to come and the public health emergency continued, Biden’s summer of freedom seemed premature, repressive of reality. All the same, his speech marked an end to the atmosphere of emergency; a special lacuna in legislative unity enabled by the pandemic and the end of Trump was not closed. Democrats were free to fracture, and as they negotiated what was supposed to be the second part to the Rescue Act, Build Back Better, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin was beginning to make known his obstinacy.
Over the course of the fall, while the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed, Build Back Better, which included significant climate legislation, died on the vine. By January 2022, Democrats engaged in a debate about whether or not to advertise the legislative work they were attempting as “transformative” — the theory being that people don’t want the government to change their lives, and pitching Democratic rule as such would lose them the midterms. A fear of change among Democratic Party hacks was, of course, a fear of symbolic death through irrelevancy: a feeling that their situation was so tenuous, so under threat, that any movement at all was a risk.
“People tell me, don't use the word transformative,” Pelosi said. “Just say it lowers costs. It lowers costs for health care whether it's home health care -- costs for families across America, it lowers cost of child care, it enables so much more to happen. So we're very, very proud of the legislation. Now we just have to get it passed. And what all that I said about it: it creates jobs, it lowers taxes for families, it lowers costs for families, and it is fully paid for by making everyone – wealthiest and corporate America – pay their fair share."
In spring of 2022, things continued to stagnate. The only things that were getting passed were bills to support Ukraine. Oh, and in March, the Senate surprisingly passed a bill getting rid of daylight savings time. “I was so concerned about the inflation we were dealing with,” Connecticut Rep. John Larson told Politico. “But you know what? They fixed daylight saving time. God bless. My life has just been made.”
Democrats were no longer willing to bend the rules in order to exercise authority. Expanding the Supreme Court, disobeying the parliamentarian, canceling debt, reforming the Electoral College, enforcing pandemic mandates. This even happened in redistricting: Certain blue states voluntarily gave up partisan gerrymandering. A noble cause if everyone did it, but embracing it on the state-level was a hastening of their own death; it meant that Democrats were actually giving up seats by purporting to be the party of neutrality.
Now, the excuse was that they feared comparison to the big words they invoked as their antithesis — or, more accurately, they feared the right weaponizing those words against them. After years of Trump abusing his power, Democrats were supposed to be the gentle, ginger ones — using the levers at their disposal to impose big changes from above, but only the well-worn levers. The excuse is that they see breaking the rules as setting a dangerous precedent, but given that Republicans don’t seem to care about breaking rules anyways, the result is that Democrats come off as rule lovers, people who love to follow authority rather than to be the authority. “I can’t dictate this stuff,” Biden said on gun reform after 19 children were killed in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, 2022. The kind of leader who dictates, after all, is a dictator.
In July 2022, all hope for meaningful climate legislation to pass seemed to be gone, and the White House was seriously considering whether to declare climate change a national emergency. There was a drought across Europe and the summer’s high temperatures. It was also a pressure tactic on Congress, which, as Manchin yet again said he had to wait and see how inflation was going before agreeing to a package, seemed to have no prospects for meaningful climate legislation this term. And, if they lost the midterms, for many years to come.
The possible move was assiduously supported by progressive groups, seeing it as the only option to deal with a true emergency after comprehensive legislation was derailed by Joe Manchin. A national emergency grants the president special powers, many of which allow things like toxic dumping, but some of which could be retooled in the service of the climate, reportedly allowing Biden to restrict crude oil exports and stop offshore rigs from operating. Biden already invoked the Defense Production Act — one of the more famous emergency capabilities following its use in the pandemic — to boost domestic supplies of batteries of electric vehicles. It could have also been used to stop exports of alfalfa — a crop costly in water — to Saudi Arabia, which came under scrutiny for owning swathes of land off the Colorado River for that very purpose.
“Congress enacted emergency powers to allow the executive branch greater flexibility to respond to extraordinary events,” wrote the Center for Biological Diversity in a summer report. “The climate emergency is the pinnacle of extraordinary events faced in our lifetimes. Biden should lawfully use emergency powers to address this existential threat.”
“With legislative climate options now closed, it’s now time for executive Beast Mode,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., tweeted in July. “It’s clear this doesn’t need to be just an arrow in the quiver,” Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer said. “This can be something that the administration can proceed with because it can happen quickly.”
Biden was reportedly ready to pull the trigger on July 20, 2022 in a speech at a Massachusetts coal plant, but kicked the can down the road at the last moment, telling reporters the next day “I’m running into traps on the totality of the authority I have. I will make that decision soon.” A week later, the Inflation Reduction Act was announced. According to the Washington Post, “Congressional aides later said they learned the administration had backed away from the emergency, partly out of fear it could upset the already delicate negotiations over a spending package.” The “national emergency,” then, was a political chit to trade away for a legislative concession.
This well articulates the trap we repeatedly find ourselves in. As the public gets increasingly panicked, the conditions of emergency are never actually alleviated, but only extended; emergency makes it possible for elected officials to leave a political mark, stay in office, and justify their own positions. It made it possible for Biden to say he was the only person holding back a tidal wave of chaos. And tortuously, we have to care, because there is a huge difference between passing the Inflation Reduction Act and passing nothing.
“A fear of change among Democratic Party hacks was, of course, a fear of symbolic death through irrelevancy: a feeling that their situation was so tenuous, so under threat, that any movement at all was a risk.”
(The threat of the end times is also of course present on the right, which seems to beckon for civil war at every turn. But they seem to have figured out how to perversely enjoy their symptom. “We know that we are in the last of the last days, but it’s not a time to complain about it. It’s not a time to get upset about it,” said Lauren Boebert last year, speaking to an audience with a tiny microphone glued to her face. “This is a time to know that you were called to be a part of these days. You get to have a role in ushering in the Second Coming of Jesus.”)
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By contrast, there will likely be little difference between Biden and whoever replaces him at the Democratic National Convention—which is the best reason I can think of that the left did not expend much energy in taking Biden down. Progressives like Ocasio-Cortez stood by Biden, to the utter dismay of many on the left who expected to act by their moral compass instead of their political nose. Perhaps they knew that Biden could only internalize the advice of those very close to him, who had once believed him to be a singular and fateful figure. If the end of Biden’s candidacy was about anything besides Biden—that is to say, if it were at all about Gaza—there’s no way it would happen.
One of Biden’s favorite poems is Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy” — a poem that his daughter Ashley reportedly mocks him for quoting so often (and so might we): “History says, don’t hope on this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.” In the television special after the inauguration, hosted by Tom Hanks on the National Mall, Lin-Manuel Miranda was enlisted to read the whole poem with a discomfiting stare. “This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme,” Biden said at his speech at the last DNC in 2020.
The real rhyme was not that Biden became president and brought with him a wave of justice; it was that, for a while, left-wing policy aimed at improving working people’s lives rhymed with Biden’s own closely held ambitions—or should I say, his repetitions: to almost go down in history as not just any president, but a president among the likes of Obama and FDR. In his personal lore, he was always the man who still felt like an outsider, even while he became the ultimate insider. As Evan Osnos notes in his biography of Biden, “He never entirely shed the insecurity” that came with his stutter. “Over the years, I’ve heard him return over and over to matters of respect and vulnerability. He can still name the grade school students who humiliated him. And, in office, aides learned quickly that Biden was especially wary of embarrassment.”
As Biden’s aging accelerated during his four years in the presidency, his impulse to steel his own position and the position of the United States against threats, imagined and real, became reflexive. Hope and history stopped rhyming, because they never did. In his first campaign, he signaled, but did not pledge, that he would be a one-term president — a safe stopover on the way from Trump to the next generation of Democratic Party politicians. We now know that he was just that, in a way. But as he came into power, the challenge to his authority by Trump and Jan 6 immediately created an environment of threat that froze the political hierarchy. Perhaps Biden felt he had no heir, either in Congress or in his family, his adult sons being dead and disgraced.
When Hamas retaliated against the Israeli army on October 7, Biden’s acute perception of threat immediately translated from the U.S. to Israel. (For some Palestinians, Hamas’s action was seen as an expression of life force: of defiance in the face of erasure. For others, it was seen as a death wish and a collective suicide mission intended on taking Israel down as well. As Freud indicates, the life and death instincts are bound up, uneasily, with one another.) Biden has called himself a Zionist for many years, but in the past Biden’s support for Israel has explicitly been about the U.S. having an outpost in the region. “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region,” Biden said as a young senator. “The security of Israel and the United States is inextricably tied, and we will never ever ever abandon Israel out of our own self-interest,” he said to an AIPAC audience.
But after October 7, the “U.S. interests” part often disappeared, and the existence of Israel became a narcissistic object in his fantasy world. “I have long said: If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it —” Biden said after October 7, the em-dash hanging where he usually inserted the US of A. Now, Biden layers the U.S. and Israel on top of one another, so that they are the same state and even seem to share a border: Earlier this year, Biden referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico. It is no coincidence that the southern border under Biden has, in the past six months, become even more unyielding — and that he seemed to ignite with feeling when he called immigrants “illegals” during the State of the Union. Everything outside the border — Hamas militants, civilian Palestinians, migrants, and refugees — was the same: an evil presence clawing to get in and poison the good within the borders. And Biden’s flaccid tugging at Netanyahu’s sleeve in “increasing frustration” feels a bit like someone chiding themselves for procrastinating — no real protest, because Netanyahu’s actions are confirmations of Biden’s own hidden wishes.
A final loss to Trump may also have been Biden’s secret wish, the real reason he decided to run again and why he stayed in for so long. His repetition is always to flub his chance — to make a mistake so silly it ruins him (calling Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”). His whole presidency now appears as one big gaffe, a slip on a banana peel. Freud writes that the compulsion to repeat is, by definition, a desire to return to a past state. What is the state that Biden keeps bringing himself back to, where good things must inevitably turn bad? Apart from the car accident, one possibility that springs to mind is that he was born in the throes of World War II, into the “silent generation” which had all the benefits of the post-war years. We will never know the quality of his infancy, but those children must have had a nagging darkness from their early lives.
And America’s secret wish … what is it? Our fear of violence or civil war belies our invitation and enjoyment of it; our collective giggling nervousness is delight in something happening, whether it is Biden dropping out or Trump being assassinated or a genocide in Gaza — whatever it takes to distract us away, in anxious flight, from the deterioration of the country, the U.S. empire’s mortality, and the vulture circling overhead.