Biden’s insistence on holding the nation’s focus in the last months of his term is likely to remind Americans why they wanted him to leave in the first ...
Biden’s insistence on holding the nation’s focus in the last months of his term is likely to remind Americans why they wanted him to leave in the first place.
P resident Joe Biden wanted to take a victory lap, and, arguably, he deserved the one he allowed himself on Thursday morning.
Flanked by the family members of the Americans held in Russian captivity, Biden announced that he had negotiated their loved ones’ freedom. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, onetime security contractor Paul Whelan, Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, and a number of prominent Russian political dissidents are today liberated. Both Biden and America’s allies abroad deserve all the credit.
“It says a lot about the United States that we work relentlessly to free Americans who were unjustly held around the world,” the president said. He’s right — it does say a lot, and all of it is good. But the trade did not come without cost. In exchange for the liberation of American civilians and some Russian political prisoners, Moscow will receive an FSB-linked hit man, a spy who provided Russian defense manufacturers with U.S. technology, a hacker who stole $93 million from U.S. computer networks, and an accomplished fraudster with ties to the Russian government, among others.
The justified ebullience that accompanies the release of American prisoners must be tempered by the lopsided nature of the deals that secured their freedom. Just as American basketball player Brittney Griner was traded for a notorious arms dealer convicted of conspiring to murder Americans and a killer-for-hire with Western blood on his hands, this latest exchange illustrates the profitability of Russia’s kidnapping enterprise. America bends over backward to deliver its civilians from persecution, and, in turn, Russia reclaims tactical and strategic assets in its ongoing campaign to destabilize and subvert the West.
The president’s allies are, however, in no mood for nuance. On Thursday, Biden’s erstwhile boosters marveled over a tertiary anecdote in the Wall Street Journal’s account of this prisoner swap. Even as Biden languished in his Delaware home amid his recovery from a Covid infection, he still managed to “push the deal over the finish line.” Only “about an hour before he notified the world he was dropping out of the presidential race,” Biden rang his Slovenian counterpart to coordinate that nation’s contribution of two convicted Russian spies to the deal.
“According to very senior aides on very deep background,” snarked White House political director Emmy Ruiz, “Joe Biden is still working around the clock and delivering for the American people.” Given her acrimonious tone, it’s likely that Biden’s resurfacing came as a surprise to many. If so, that reaction only confirms why Biden’s longevity in the job he currently occupies is still very much in doubt. Not only is he the president of the United States — a role that precludes sick days, much less the prospect of simply disappearing from public life — he clearly resents the ignominy to which his party consigned him.
Among the “mixture of emotions” Biden is experiencing, the Associated Press reported, are “bitterness and regret” over the bum’s rush to which his party treated him. Biden thinks he deserves an extended and gratuitously adulatory send-off, and his aides appear inclined to make that happen. The administration is “planning possible foreign travel” for the president well into the late fall to highlight “his biggest foreign policy focus areas,” Fox News reported. Biden hopes to make a swing through “Europe, Africa, and the Middle East,” and he plans to attend the South America–based G-20 summit and APEC in mid November.
If Biden isn’t going to gracefully disappear into the shrubbery after the Democratic National Convention treats him to a lavish send-off, neither are his jilted advisers. “If you had not had Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office, I don’t think this would’ve happened,” said Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan — a remark that is hard to divorce from the news that Kamala Harris intends to clean house and populate the national-security apparatus with her own people if she wins the presidency.
Biden’s insistence on overstaying his welcome will test his party’s resolve to pretend that his administration has been typified by near-otherworldly competence. The president has enjoyed a bit of a political renaissance since he left the race. His job-approval ratings have improved modestly but only from the historic lows they hit amid the full-scale Democratic revolt against his candidacy. Today, they’re back where they were prior to the first presidential debate — when, we should remember, Biden was still the most unpopular president in the history of modern polling.
Biden intends to stick around long enough to be garlanded with laurels, even if his flatterers resent him for it. But he’s kidding himself if he thinks the next four months will for him be one extended episode of This Is Your Life. Crises are brewing in all the regions of the globe Biden plans to shed spotlights on. His presence on the national political stage will frustrate Harris’s efforts to distinguish herself from her unpopular boss. Unforeseeable events will intervene and command the president’s attention. He and his chosen successor will be judged not on the gauzy revisionist history of his term in office that Democrats are retailing now. They’ll be judged on results.
The miasma of rare good fortune has lulled Democrats into a false sense of self-assuredness, but Biden’s insistence on holding the nation’s focus is only likely to remind Americans why they thought he had to go. Either out of vanity or a lack of presence of mind, Biden doesn’t seem to know it. He’s setting himself up for another painful reminder of why he was defenestrated in the first place.