Strongman

The tragic legacy of the mourner-in-chief.

IT IS THE FATE OF most presidents to watch the inauguration of their replacements with rueful thoughts: in the words of King Lear, "They told me I was everything. 'Tis a lie." As Joe Biden prepares to pass the torch to Donald Trump, I find myself reflecting on Biden's own hand in this humbling ordeal. In those whirlwind weeks of blame and recrimination after his disastrous June debate, Biden was often compared to Lear: an aged sovereign with no clear successor, not entirely sound in mind, undone by a crisis born of vanity, vengeance, and fickle nature.

Like Lear, Biden had been insulated from criticism, preferring loyalty to blunt counsel, collusion to collaboration. Like all tragic heroes, he suffered from certainty, monomania, an unwillingness to yield. Shakespeare's tragedies, write Adam Phillips and Stephen Greenblatt, "are always tragedies about the violence of self-justification, the defending of an intractable position. What we see in tragedy is the worst-case scenario of the need to be right: life as a protracted tantrum."

When Biden’s tantrum exhausted itself, it was too late. Advisers, allies, and media sycophants had schemed to conceal his debilitation; the charade worked just long enough to preclude a primary and imperil the prospects of any substitute. In the end, it wasn’t infirmity that doomed the final months of Biden’s presidency but his delusional revolt against it, in which he expected the entire Democratic Party to conspire. This, I think, will define his legacy: the rejection of vulnerability. If one looks for it, the compulsion to flee from weakness, disavow that which is fragile, and compensate with bluster and strength is everywhere in his record. What he could not abide in himself he also turned against in the world. Biden was the anti-frailty president.