Biden is content to bask in the humiliation of his detractors even as his party descends into abject despair.
Joe Biden hadn’t looked as alive in months as he did on Thursday morning. The weight of electoral uncertainty lifted, the president seemed almost jaunty as he dwelled on the depths of their party’s defeats for an audience of White House staffers. The verbal miscues, exhaustion, and gratuitous slights directed at his opponents that defined his public persona for so long were gone. Why? Perhaps because the pain of the Democratic Party’s most comprehensive defeat in decades is mitigated by the humiliation of his erstwhile allies who pushed him aside.
Biden’s ebullient affect betrays the degree to which the president’s few remaining loyalists are luxuriating in Kamala Harris’s defeat and, by extension, the mortification of the Democratic powerbrokers who kicked him off the presidential ticket.
“How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f***?” one unnamed Biden staffer sneered amid the news that the Harris campaign somehow ended up $20 million in debt after raising historic sums from the party’s donor class. “The Harris team benched [Biden], and then they lost, so now the people who represent Biden are saying, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have benched him,’” another taunted.
Armed with a misplaced sense of vindication, figures in Biden’s orbit are training their fire on the figures responsible for pushing the president onto the ice floe.
“There is no singular reason why we lost,” one Biden staffer conceded, “but a big reason is because the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviors of the campaign only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama.”
The outlet wasn’t the only sounding board for Biden loyalists to vent their frustrations. “Sources said Mr. Biden’s aides feel this was the wrong decision, just as when Mr. Obama pushed for Mrs. Clinton to be given the Democratic nomination,” the Telegraph reported.
Nor have the president’s allies not been coy about the resentments they harbor toward former speaker Nancy Pelosi, who took a leading role in the behind-the-scenes effort to be done with Biden. “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” Biden adviser Anita Dunn mused ruefully in August in what many interpreted as a veiled threat against Pelosi and her entourage.
“Some have privately pledged to find ways to diminish Pelosi’s influence in the party after the November election,” the Washington Post reported at the time. In their own minds, at least, Biden world’s plans are measured in generations. They “may seek to target her daughter, Christine Pelosi,” the Post continued, “who is rumored to be considering a run for her mother’s House seat whenever Pelosi decides to permanently step aside.”
These aren’t rogue staffers freelancing their desire to exact vengeance against their co-partisan tormentors. This is the sort of thing that comes from the top. But the delusions that fuel the Bidenites’ misplaced sense of vindication are the same as those that led them to believe the president was capable of running for reelection in the first place. There was no greater drag on Kamala Harris’s candidacy than the Biden administration’s record. For evidence, look no further than the 2024 electorate, which held Biden in low regard and bitterly resented the economic hardships over which he presided.
That introspection can wait. For now, Biden is content to bask in the humiliation of his detractors even as his party descends into abject despair. It is the final spiteful flourish from a man whose career in public life has been typified by unearned self-regard and unconcealed contempt for his critics. The anguish the Democratic Party’s true believers are experiencing today seems a source of life-affirming solace for the president, which is perfectly in keeping with his pettiness and resentment toward even his gentlest critics. It was precisely those flaws that led him to abandon his promise to be a “transitional” figure in the White House, and it was the implicit threat of his own ego-fueled petulance that complicated Harris’s efforts to create distance between her and her unpopular boss.
But Joe Biden doesn’t have to care about any of that anymore. The party made its bed. He no longer has to pretend to share in their discomfort, and he can barely conceal his relief.