Op-Ed

Biden’s Ghost

By Matthew Continetti

Commentary

May 16, 2025

Another day, another Joe Biden sighting. While most former presidents wait a decent interval—say, longer than three months—before plunging back into politics, Biden has wasted no time attempting to salvage his reputation and attack his successor (and predecessor) Donald Trump.

He should stay home. Biden’s public appearances are cringeworthy reminders of why he withdrew from the 2024 Democratic ticket—and why the Democrats won’t be able to crawl out from under his shadow anytime soon.

Biden’s reemergence is not a response to audience demand. The New York Post reports that he’s having trouble booking gigs. No surprise there: The 82-year-old Biden is our only one-term president this century. His favorable rating, according to Gallup, is a pathetic 39 percent. He’s the least popular living chief executive.

Nor is Biden known for bringing down the house. His March 14 appearance at the National High School Model United Nations Conference barely made an impression—Spinal Tap’s gig at Lindberg Air Force Base had more impact.

In Chicago the following month, during his first major post-presidential address, Biden defended Social Security at the conference of Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled. He mystified the crowd with a random and pointless story about his first encounter with black children who, Biden said, were “at the time called ‘colored kids.’”

The next day, April 16, Biden went to Harvard. He spoke to students enrolled in a private Institute of Politics seminar run by former aide Mike Donilon. At one point in the discussion, Biden mixed up Iraq and Ukraine. Later on, reported the Harvard Crimson, “when Biden bit into an ice cream bar after the talk, the partially melted dessert fell to the floor.”

Cue the sad trombone.

Two factors drive Biden’s return: need and vanity. Journalist Mark Halperin, who broke the story that Biden would leave the presidential race last year, said on his “2Way” YouTube platform recently that the former president is strapped for cash. “Biden, Inc.”—the network of family members and associates who profited from Biden’s half century in national politics—is out of money. The “Big Guy” is unemployed. The contracts are gone. The brand is tarnished. Hunter Biden’s paintings aren’t selling.

There’s another explanation: Biden is desperately attempting to counter the mounting accusations that his team covered up—with help from a compliant press—his cognitive decline. By the time you read this, three books will have set out the damning facts.

The first two, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, by Chris Whipple, came out in April. The Allen and Parnes book reports, among other things, that Biden stayed in the race as long as he did because he feared, correctly, that Kamala Harris would be a disastrous replacement.

Meanwhile, Whipple quotes one of Biden’s most trusted consiglieres, former chief of staff Ron Klain, as saying the then-president was “out of it” during debate prep last year. This must be the understatement of the century. The notion that Biden’s cognitive impairment first surfaced in June 2024—which just happens to have been more than a year after Klain left the White House—is nonsense. Was Klain not paying attention in 2022 when Biden asked whether a dead congresswoman was at a White House event? Or was he too busy tweeting?

At this writing, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, has yet to be released. Politico, where Thompson worked before moving to Axios, says it’s “the book Biden allies fear the most.” With reason: Thompson made his reputation with hard-hitting stories on the Biden influence network.

Accepting an award for his reporting at the White House Correspondents Dinner in April, Thompson chided his colleagues for scrutinizing only one of America’s political parties (not the Democrats). “President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him,” Thompson said, “is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception.” The flabbergasted audience was silent—as if Thompson was speaking Japanese.

Now that Biden is safely out of office, the press no longer has an interest in hiding the facts. Media appearances don’t help Biden’s cause. Each interview shows him more tired, downtrodden, and spent than the last.

On May 7, for example, Biden gave his first post-presidential interview to BBC correspondent Nick Robinson, who hosts a show called Political Thinking. The two met at the Hotel Dupont, where Biden launched his first Senate campaign in 1972. “It’s clear that the passion that drove Joe Biden into politics in this magnificent hotel in Wilmington, in Delaware, is undimmed,” Robinson said.

What interview was Robinson talking about? The Biden on camera was dejected and subdued. His voice was soft and shaky. He had a cough. He kept looking at the floor. His speech was full of the usual politically correct malapropisms. Marking eight decades since the end of World War II in Europe, Biden extolled “the tens of thousands of men and women—mostly men—who stormed the beaches” of Normandy.

He needs to rewatch Saving Private Ryan. D-Day was not an exercise in gender equality.

Biden’s visit with the ladies of ABC’s The View the next day was no better. When answering questions, Biden would trail off in mid-sentence before giving up entirely. He kept saying, “I’m not joking,” when no one—literally no one—suggested he was. He blamed Kamala Harris’s loss on sexism—a red herring that absolves Harris of responsibility and pathologizes the more than 77 million people who voted for Trump.

Biden also defended Harris’s supercilious and infamous campaign response (“Not a thing comes to mind”) to the question of whether she’d do anything differently from him. Ticking off the huge spending packages he signed into law, Biden said, “She was every single part of that.” Which was the problem.

Former First Lady Jill Biden appeared midway through the show to help her husband answer Alyssa Farah
Griffin’s questions about his cognitive decline. In response to the claims of the bestselling exposés, Jill Biden said, “There’s nothing to sustain that.” Case closed, apparently.

“Joe worked really hard,” Jill went on. “I think he was a great president.”

Sunny Hostin nodded enthusiastically.

And there, for all to see, was the central flaw of the Biden presidency: a denial of reality so total, so stubborn, so haughty that it sank the entire enterprise. The Bidens remain oblivious to, or dismissive of, his physical and mental condition, the record inflation caused by his vast spending programs, and his authority to shut down the southern border without waiting for Congress. The Bidens departed the White House unloved and unmissed, with the Democrats out of power and careening to the left. Yet still they demand relevance.

Hear those rattling chains? Biden’s ghost will haunt his party for years to come.

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