Remember Joe Biden?

G ather ’round, children, and let me regale you with tales of the distant past, when dinosaurs roamed the land, the rains came for years upon end, and Joseph R. Biden was the president of the United States.

We were so green, so innocent, so naïve back then. I apprehend that this may be hard for the youngsters here to believe, but time was when you could peruse the White House’s Daily Guidance and Press Schedule and see more listed on the agenda than:

12:30 PM        THE PRESIDENT receives the President’s Daily Brief
Closed Press

I will confess that these memories are starting to fade, but, if I try hard, I can just about recall what it felt like to see the president of the United States doing something other than lying on a beach in Delaware. Indeed, if my recollections serve, Joe Biden used to do things that were more traditionally associated with the presidency. He spoke, debated, issued orders, advanced policies, ran the executive branch, and more besides. There was even a title for the overarching organization: In the common parlance, it was typically referred to as “the Biden-Harris administration” — so called because the powers contained within Article I of the Constitution had been conferred upon Joe Biden, who was the president, and Kamala Harris, who was the vice president. With both of them gone, that title has lost much of its obvious meaning, but, for a while in the early 2020s, most Americans could be expected to comprehend what it implied, and most did.

One of the biggest problems that you younger observers will face when attempting to imagine the old days is that our language changes over time. Six months ago, for example, the term “vice president” was widely accepted to imply incumbency, whereas the term “former president” conveyed that the person thereby described no longer held political power. Nowadays, alas, these two terms of art have come to be inverted, such that “former president” now suggests active tenure and “vice president” conjures up images of a fresh outsider who has heretofore been unsullied by power. Perhaps more than anything else, these semantic evolutions make it difficult for newcomers and novices such as yourselves to imagine the Biden years as something concrete rather than as a vague and protean concept that exists only in political lore.

Another challenge inherent in conveying the nature of this period is that the Biden presidency ended outside of the customary schedule. Traditionally, Americans elect chief executives for a fixed period of exactly four years and mark their ascendancy to, and departure from, the office with a much-publicized inauguration. But, for reasons that have been lost to the ether, Joe Biden’s presidency did not take this course. Instead, he was summarily removed from office — along with his vice president — in the summer of 2024, and the powers that the public had granted him were transferred to the American press. This unusual schedule gave the entire administration a peculiar, hypnagogic air — as if Joe Biden had never quite been the president at all but had instead been a fragile figurehead at the front of a faceless clique.

They say that the past is another country, and that, indeed, is what it felt like to us when, all of a sudden, the leader of the federal executive branch was spirited away from the position that he’d held and never mentioned in public again. One moment, Biden was attending state dinners, engaging in debates, and visiting sites around the nation; the next, he was a myth, a phantom, a fable. Before long, he will slip from my recall completely — like other hazy and half-forgotten illusions, such as Kamala Harris’s policy agenda, the media as an inquisitive force, and the conviction that objective reality was a useful idea to preserve.