Biden Cements A Sad New Tradition: The Presidential Medal Of Trolling Your Successor

When President Donald Trump used his final State of the Union address to announce a Presidential Medal of Freedom for Rush Limbaugh — and then, after his 2020 defeat, conferred the same medal on congressional ultras Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes — Washington largely scoffed: It was a cheapening of an award that’s supposed to represent the best of America.

There was a lot less tut-tutting this month, when President Joe Biden — who was supposed to restore the old-time virtues of the presidency — announced his own final roster of winners for the Medal of Freedom and the Presidential Citizens Medal. That’s a shame, because Biden’s laureates also feel like a last-minute political diss of the incoming administration.

Worse still, the politics are unlikely to help Biden’s party or his legacy: The group looks like a microcosm of the social sectors that just failed to stave off Trump’s return.

Consider the worlds occupied by some of the best-known recipients: Upscale media (Vogue’s Anna Wintour), philanthropic finance (Carlyle Group titan David Rubenstein), activist Hollywood (Bono, Michael J. Fox) and anti-Trump resistance (Jan. 6 committee stalwarts Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney). There’s also cosmopolitan cuisine (humanitarian chef José Andrés), still-vaguely-foreign sports (Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi), country-club Republicanism (the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, represented at the ceremony by his Trump-averse son Mitt), and the Democratic pantheon of martyrs (the late Robert F. Kennedy, not represented at the ceremony by his Trump-adoring son Bobby Junior).

There was even Hillary Rodham Clinton herself.

To some Republicans — who particularly reacted against the inclusion of George Soros, the bankroller of liberal causes and longtime conservative smear-campaign target — it felt like trolling.

But that merely makes it an acceleration of a trend that has taken hold during the political wars of the 21st century — a trend Biden was supposed to undo. Trump’s lame-duck honoring of election deniers wasn’t even the first example: As George W. Bush exited the White House, he stopped to confer medals of freedom on Tony Blair and John Howard, the British and Australian prime ministers who had endorsed the calamitous Iraq war that the incoming president had railed against.

Outgoing presidents may not be able to change the will of the voters, but these days they can use this final ceremony to underline what they care about. Particularly when that involves something the new guy won’t like.

Individually, Biden’s most recent honorees represent an admirable group. They include the late civil rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer, the conservationist Jane Goodall and the public-TV science educator Bill Nye. The list also includes several people active in the marriage-equality movement, something Biden is particularly proud of — and which gets weirdly short shrift from some progressives in his own party.

All the same, the roster writ large won’t do much to undo the post-election sense that the Democrats are out of touch. For all their cultural and humanitarian accomplishments, Wintour and Andrés aren’t exactly selling products that ordinary Americans can afford. The Republicanism of the Romney and Cheney families lost elections because it was unpopular. (This year, the Cheney endorsement didn’t help the Democratic candidate, either.)

The most tone-deaf were the awards to Rubenstein and Soros. Both are accomplished and public-spirited men, but Rubenstein’s famous support for the loophole that lets private equity tycoons avoid taxes is distinctly off-brand for the union-boosting Biden. And embracing billionaires in general undercuts what should be a post-election theme for the party: That there’s something unseemly about Elon Musk’s influence with the incoming Trump administration.

There were also a number of prototypically Biden winners. A longtime creature of the Senate, he conferred Presidential Citizen Medals on former colleagues Chris Dodd and Nancy Landon Kassebaum.

And at least a few had other ties to the first family. Consider the Citizen Medal for Ted Kaufman, the longtime Biden staffer who briefly held Biden’s own Senate seat in the hopes that it could be turned over to Biden’s son Beau. Or the Medal of Freedom for Ralph Lauren, an iconic American designer but also someone who happened to have created Naomi Biden’s wedding dress. (In addition, Biden spent his presidential Thanksgivings at Rubenstein’s Nantucket house, with the administration declining to say whether he had paid for the stay.)

It feels a little churlish to flay a departing president for celebrating his own favorites as the curtain drops — especially since, in this case, the winners clear the hurdle of having spent years atop their fields. Yet the overtly political vibe marks a cheapening of the nation’s highest civilian honor, which is meant to celebrate great contributions to America.

“There was a formal process where recs would come from NEA and NEH,” Tevi Troy, who worked in the Bush White House, recalled about the way the big honors used to be handled. “Bush’s office would be involved. And I know Karl Rove’s office would get to see them. But my perception wasn’t that the White House was really picking them.” Troy said it was pretty typical across parties: “I don’t really remember ever being offended by Democratic picks.”

That’s not to say the president’s own values weren’t part of the mix. Conservative intellectuals like James Q. Wilson and Norman Podhoretz won medals under Republicans; labor leaders like Lane Kirkland and Albert Shanker got them under Democrats. But the overall group was broadly bipartisan. Bill Clinton gave an award to former Senate GOP leader Bob Dole; Ronald Reagan gave one to former Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield. “Presidents were trying to pick unity with these picks,” said Troy, now a Ronald Reagan Institute scholar who has written several books about the presidency.

For better or worse, that tendency is unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon.

Where Biden promised a normal, old-school presidency — and during his term gave medals to bygone GOP luminaries like Elizabeth Dole and Alan Simpson — Trump’s inclination has been to pick at America’s scabs. This includes his choices of Medal of Freedom honorees, which included few Democrats alongside the bomb-throwing conservatives. Even on Biden’s final list, no one is associated with the sort of personal vitriol that characterized Limbaugh’s role in politics.

Given the tone of the campaign and the interregnum, there’s no reason to think that’s going to change in Trump II.

But Trump also didn’t vow the sort of old-school style that would return events like Medal of Freedom ceremonies to their consensus-oriented 20th-century origins. Biden did. Which makes his final roster of winners another disappointment — even if it’s probably better than what his successor will do.