“It is very difficult to process how much has happened since Joe Biden was last at this table,” Whoopi Goldberg said at the start of Thursday’s episode of “The View.”
That’s an understatement. Biden last went on the show in September 2024, during the heat of the campaign, in an attempt to boost the prospects of his vice president, Kamala Harris, in her brief and ultimately unsuccessful run for the presidency. Now, he was showing up as an ex-president, in order both to critique Donald Trump’s chaotic early months in office and to defend his own legacy. For all that’s shifted in American life, though, one element remained consistent: It was unclear what Biden hoped to accomplish by appearing on “The View.”
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As a former president, Biden’s appearance will inherently be newsworthy. And yet there was something fundamentally frustrating about the hourlong broadcast (joined at the midway point by his wife, Jill), part of what is reported to be a concerted push to shore up his legacy. Asked admirably direct questions about whether the late timing of his decision to quit the presidential race hurt the Democratic ticket’s prospects, Biden was unreflective. Equally unproductive were responses that lent themselves to unfortunate sound bites, as when Biden said he “wasn’t surprised” that Harris lost the election (due, he claimed, to the Trump campaign’s leveraging sexist attitudes toward Harris), and, later, that he would have won had he stayed in. While Biden was sharper than he was at, say, the cataclysmic June 2024 debate that led to his dropping out, he did himself no favors by allowing Jill Biden to jump in and finish the answer to a question about his cognitive abilities. As she spoke, Biden cast his gaze downward and allowed his expression to go blank.
Trump, Biden’s electoral nemesis, is the ultimate creature of television, while Biden — close to him in age but having spent his career in the deliberative body of the Senate rather than before Manhattan flashbulbs, is quite the opposite. Even in his prime, Biden’s appeals weren’t necessarily optimized for TV. And now, Biden, in attempting to define himself against his successor, Biden fell short. While the hosts of “The View” asked direct and fair questions, they also seemed invested in helping their guest out. When the former president responded to a question about Trump calling his pardons “void” and “vacant” with “He’s vacant,” Goldberg declared “That was the dropping of the mic!” (It was more like the bobbling of the mic, perhaps.) Elsewhere, asked a softball question about his take on the current president’s first 100 days in office, Biden declared them “the worst” first 100 days forcefully, before slowing his cadence and declaring, quietly, “I would not say that honesty’s been his strong point.”
It’s hard to know what the right approach in opposing the force of Trump is — many, many Democrats are currently in the process of figuring that out. But Biden’s muted sarcasm and passive-aggression isn’t getting the job done. But perhaps he isn’t trying to. Various other Democrats’ media endeavors at least gesture toward the idea that job one is opposing the party currently in power: Whether that takes the form of Harris’ reintroductory address or Pete Buttigieg’s amiable media blitzing or Gavin Newsom’s overly online podcasting, various political figures are presenting a vision of what might be a way forward. Restating four years’ worth of policy triumphs and gracelessly declaring that he was forced out of a race he would have won is only looking back.
But there’s a human drama here that was far more interesting, and even poignant, than the predictable, unproductive attempts to reclaim the past. At the top of the show, asked how he was doing, Biden didn’t have much to say. “Things are moving along, getting squared away,” he said. He is writing a memoir, which, he said, an unnamed publisher asked him to complete in a year. “No one’s ever done one in a year,” he declared. The subtext seemed to be that, should he take any longer, he will recede further into the past, a figure with little to say about a chaotic and fast-moving present but that things were better when he was in charge. A public figure at the center of American life for four years now, suddenly and jarringly, has nowhere to be.
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