A President’s Final Days

On a recent Tuesday morning, in a dim underground parking garage in west Los Angeles, President Joe Biden sat idly in his car, seemingly paralyzed by events.

Biden had flown across the country to stand within a cluster of dramatic canyon walls and announce the creation of two national monuments in California. The designations would set a land conservation record, the finishing touches on a climate agenda Biden believed would eventually be viewed among history’s most expansive.

Only the climate wasn’t cooperating. A major windstorm was gathering strength, raising safety concerns and ultimately scuttling the mission-accomplished moment into which he had chosen to invest so much staff planning and presidential travel time.

It was one of many instances over his final weeks in office — a period Biden and his staff hoped to use to burnish his political legacy — that drove home the limitations of even a president’s power to control the agenda. The heightened air of futility punctuated a four-year term that, for everything accomplished legislatively, is ending where it began — with Donald Trump in the White House.

Biden’s team struggled in the final days and weeks of his term, as it did for four years, to drive a message that might capture the country’s attention and bolster a battered legacy.

Sometimes forces outside Biden’s purview — like the wind and drought in Southern California or sudden spasms of violence at home and abroad — were the problem. But his own actions compounded his troubles. Pardoning his son Hunter, after vowing not to do so for months, was one of the few actions he took in the final weeks that broke through the news cycle.

Biden and his aides have made a mantra of insisting that history will look more kindly on the president. But even close allies, who once hoped Biden would be the next FDR, have set their sights considerably lower, embracing comparisons with Jimmy Carter.

Instead of a triumphant ending to a half-century political career, Biden is leaving Washington like Willy Loman, relegated to the background, his party in the wilderness, his country rejecting Biden’s central promise that he would break the “fever” of Trumpism.

While Biden was marooned in Los Angeles, Trump, as he so often does, stole the spotlight, conducting a stemwinder of a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago estate in which he threatened to seize Greenland and suggested rebranding the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

It was the type of contrast that galled Biden and his longtime aides. Biden was taking specific, albeit wonky policy action on two properties in California and would have gotten little attention, even if weather hadn’t gotten in the way; while Trump was inspiring hours of cable news panel discussions and think pieces with speculative promises and Putinesque threats about seizing property that America doesn’t own.

"It has been a challenge," said former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, a close Biden ally, who acknowledged that Biden's struggle to break through has been a constant frustration "for him, for his family, for his staff. Of course it is."

‘Run out of gas’

Since ending his bid for a second term last summer, Biden pushed his senior aides to ensure his final months were just as consequential as any other period over the last four years. Despite leading the nation out of a brutal pandemic, reviving the economy and passing three landmark pieces of legislation, the president's approval rating is as low as it's ever been. Democrats who blame Biden for enabling Trump's rise, and even many who believe him to have been an effective, underappreciated president, are eager to see him off into the sunset.

And as the White House raced to finish off a series of priorities, capped by an eleventh-hour cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, Biden struggled to shake the perception that he had personally shrunk from view.

"There are certain presidencies that end with an acceleration of events and activities," said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and senior research scholar at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. "This presidency, on the other hand, just seems to have run out of gas."

Biden has steered conspicuously clear of the debates raging within the Democratic Party over how best to rebuild, declining to weigh in on the intensifying race for DNC chair and offering few prescriptions for the mounting challenges he has worried that Democrats will face in the coming Trump era.

After Trump blew up a funding deal late last year just days before the government was due to shut down, Biden, who was in Delaware with his family to mark the anniversary of his first wife and daughter’s death, initially chose not to get directly involved. Instead, he dispatched aides to manage negotiations and communicate with Democratic leaders, a decision that allies insisted was strategic yet left lawmakers with little sense of how the president felt about the deal he would ultimately have to approve.

Perhaps most frustrating for Democrats who had supported Biden's reelection run, believing the existential stakes eclipsed their lingering reservations about his age and fitness, was the president's sudden reluctance to go toe-to-toe with Trump. After losing what he often termed a "battle for the soul of America," Biden made clear he would welcome Trump to the White House out of a belief in the need to ensure a smooth transition — opting not even to reference him by name in a Jan. 6 op-ed in the Washington Post urging Americans not to rewrite the Capitol riot that Trump played a central role in encouraging.

"Pretty disappointing," said Ezra Levin, the co-founder of the progressive organization Indivisible, which had worked to boost enthusiasm for Biden’s aborted reelection run. "He campaigned and many Democrats campaigned on this guy being an existential threat. I believed it and many of the folks we were organizing believed it."

Tending to Biden’s policy bucket list

For many staffers, Trump’s imminent arrival in the West Wing was almost too depressing to think about. But inside the building, chief of staff Jeff Zients tried to focus those who hadn’t left to find other jobs on their collective accomplishments — and the idea that more could be achieved in the final weeks.

A number of Biden’s policy announcements sought to ensure, to the extent possible, their work would endure. There were billion-dollar disbursements of transportation funding, new defense aid for Ukraine to defend itself against Russia. This week, Biden signed the proclamations he’d intended to enact in the California desert creating new national monuments and reversed Trump’s Cuba policy, angering Florida Democrats. And the White House announced a sweeping new executive order on cybersecurity, a first tranche of commutations for long-serving drug offenders and a non-binding and ultimately meaningless declaration that the Equal Rights Amendment, which could overrule state restrictions on reproductive rights, should be part of the Constitution.

But none of those actions generated much news coverage in a power-obsessed city already gaming out the administration to come. Biden’s East Room celebration of 235 judicial appointments was overshadowed by the deadly New Year’s Day terror attack in New Orleans, which he commented on upon taking the stage. The death and state funeral for President Jimmy Carter, at which Biden offered a eulogy for a predecessor whose single term and humbling political end drew comparisons to his own, cast an evermore elegiac shadow over these cold January days.

The Carter comparisons

Surprisingly, many in Biden’s circle welcomed those comparisons, even though historians have shown more respect for Carter’s post-presidency than for the four years he sat in the Oval Office.

“This is also a president who took the long view and is proud to have taken the long view on issues,” said Anita Dunn, a longtime Biden adviser who left the White House last summer. “And if that is his legacy and hallmark, I think he’ll be comfortable with that.”

"There are always going to be times, in solitude or late at night, when you're going to second-guess yourself," Jones said of the pivot points of Biden's presidency, including his decision to run for reelection and — following a disastrous debate performance — drop out just months from Election Day. "But I think he is at peace with, No. 1, his decisions. And No. 2,, what he has done and what he has accomplished the last four years."

Biden’s foreign policy capstone, Wednesday's long-awaited cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, came with its own complications. His depleted White House staff was forced to respond in haste. Biden emerged to offer brief remarks that afternoon, upstaging a major primetime address planned to give that night and scoffing at a question about whether he or Trump, whose Middle East envoy Biden’s team chose to involve in the final round of talks, deserved credit for the deal.

Ironically, while many of Biden’s final moves were intended to Trump-proof his policy accomplishments, his biggest win in that period came with an assist from the president-elect, who put pressure on the sides to reach a deal before he took office.

Although he was tending to more of his personal interests in the weeks after the election — pardoning his son, Hunter, in November, scheduling a visit with the pope in January as well as the California trip in order to be on hand for the birth of his first great-grandchild — Biden was wary of the perception he was checking out.

Stymied, again

As Biden flew back from California aboard Air Force One, he spoke with his senior team of aides back at the White House, many of them huddled around chief of staff Zients’ long wooden table. They had another decision to make: whether the president could still travel to Rome the next day for a meeting with Pope Francis, and subsequent sit-downs with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Southern California was engulfed in a series of deadly and destructive fires that will likely rank among the costliest natural disasters in American history.

The trip to Rome, two senior White House officials conceded, had been a personal priority for the 82-year-old president, a devout Catholic who felt both a kinship with this particular pope and a desire, on some level, for absolution — to leave office after five decades in politics with a clear head, especially after a disappointing election cycle.

But Biden’s desire for valediction at the Vatican was countered by a sense of obligation. Yes, the president could sign disaster declarations from Air Force One or overseas. Yes, he was a lame duck who might ignore public criticism at some level. But he still felt that presidents, whatever their status, shouldn’t leave the country during a natural disaster, a senior adviser said.

His concern, the senior adviser said, was about finding other ways to honor commitments to Meloni, Zelenskyy and Pope Francis, to whom he’d been planning to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and one that has never been given to a pope. Aides arranged private phone calls with the Italian and Ukrainian leaders and had to scramble to plan a private weekend ceremony at the White House, inviting the Vatican’s U.S. representative on short notice to meet with Biden and receive the medal.

An institutionalist to his core, Biden has also carried out the more quotidian aspects of the job.

After grumbling across the executive branch, Biden scheduled more time for departure photos with current and former administration aides. On several nights in December, he stood before the fireplace in the Diplomatic Room on the ground floor, shaking hundreds of hands and smiling — again and again — as the host of his last round of White House Christmas parties. On Monday, after delivering a speech recapping his foreign policy achievements at the State Department, Biden’s motorcade drove him to Falls Church in the evening so he could take the stage briefly — he was only in the building for five minutes — to thank staffers who had gathered for a final party.

Biden, as he had been for weeks, was focused on what he would say at his farewell address, which was just two nights away.

An initial plan to deliver the speech from New York City was scrapped, although the final version, from the Oval Office, still began and ended with references to the Statue of Liberty. The decision to speak in primetime left the president at the mercy of TV networks, requiring the speech be concise. In the days prior, he pushed his closest aides to consider what mattered most.

The fine-tuning continued into the final hours. A “talkers call” to preview the speech and relay talking points to outside supporters was delayed three times on Tuesday before being pushed to Wednesday afternoon, as aides continued to work.

The speech, delivered haltingly, included grave warnings about a growing American “oligarchy,” the perils of climate change and artificial intelligence. Biden, a senior aide said, wanted to lay down “a marker” about the country’s future.

But Biden’s return to the theme of democracy that he’d hoped would define a successful bid for a second term made clear that, nearly four years after he triumphantly declared atop the Capitol’s west steps that “democracy has prevailed,” he is leaving the office with American democracy in a state that he and other Democrats view as precarious.

The best he could do in this, his final remarks to the country, was pass the torch. “Now, it’s your turn to stand watch.”

And his recitation of substantial policy achievements included a hopeful qualifier — the explicit suggestion that history would judge his presidency more favorably than the country has in real time.

“It will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together, but the seeds are planted,” he said, after ticking through infrastructure improvements, new investments in American manufacturing and a green industrial policy and the expansion of health care and lowering of drug costs. “They’ll grow and they’ll bloom for decades to come.”

Afterward, the news networks that took the speech live went right back to scheduled programming. But inside the White House, a large group of aides gathered in the first floor foyer and Cross Hall. Staffers joined family members who’d been in the Oval as Biden spoke, united in the belief that attention must be paid here and now. They cheered and held up phones to capture the moment as Biden smiled and offered his thanks from the landing of the main staircase, a hulking portrait of President Abraham Lincoln hanging over his shoulder, before heading upstairs.