Atlantic staff writer and President Biden biographer Franklin Foer penned a scathing indictment of Biden following Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week, saying her loss is the “legacy” of Biden.
Foer, who wrote the 2023 book “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Fight for America’s Future,” argued that Harris’ failure is his and he may feel it more than she does.
“Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for Donald Trump’s return. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk,” Foer wrote in an Atlantic article published Thursday.
Foer opened his piece by noting how some people on Biden’s team were aware that a Harris loss would be brutal for the legacy of the president, who was elected in 2020 on a promise to deliver end of Trump’s agenda.
“Earlier this fall, one of Joe Biden’s closest aides felt compelled to tell the president a hard truth about Kamala Harris’s run for the presidency: “You have more to lose than she “. now he’s lost it,” he wrote.
Foer’s Atlantic story then offered a window into how the Biden team was processing Election Day and their criticism of the Harris campaign.
“They seemed as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite,” he wrote, adding, “They also had a concern of their own: Members of the Biden clan continue to entertain the illusion that his families would have won the election. and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly express that profoundly erroneous view.”
The biographer noted that Biden’s team seemed to show an “unstated belief that they could have done better.”
He outlined some of Biden’s criticisms of the Harris campaign, the first being that she “abandoned her strongest attack” as she initially portrayed herself as a “relentless scourge of Big Big Business.” which went after Trump as “an embarrassment to corporate interests.”
According to Biden aides he spoke with, Harris gave up the message at the behest of her brother-in-law.
“Then, all of a sudden, this kind of populism disappeared. A Biden aide told me that Harris shied away from such tough messages at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer,” Foer wrote.
“To win over the CEOs, Harris threw out a strong argument that diverted attention from one of her weaker issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of her primary surrogates, the kind of rich guy she had recently attacked,” he added.
Another criticism of Bidenland he included was that Harris didn’t push back enough against identity politics. According to his team, Biden “would have clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports.”
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“Of course, he never made that position in his presidency,” Foer wrote in defense of Harris, adding that she did not run a revival campaign. “On the contrary, she bathed in patriotism. She presented herself as a prosecutor, a friend of law enforcement and a proud gun owner.”
However, the author admitted that “she did not respond to the ubiquitous ads that the Trump campaign ran claiming that Harris supports sex-reassignment surgeries for prisoners. It allowed Trump to create the impression that she favored the most radical version of transgender rights.
Foer concluded with the notion that Biden’s legacy will even suffer from his successes being destroyed and even some of them claimed by Trump during the president-elect’s second term.
“Biden helped build the foundation for economic growth, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill. Because the investments made possible by all three of these bills would take years to bear fruit, Biden never had a chance to reap the rewards.
“Despite Trump’s opposition to those pieces of legislation, the benefits of those bills could strengthen his presidency. Biden will have passed along his most substantial legacy as a gift to his successor,” Foer said.
Biden offered a conciliatory message to the nation on Thursday after Trump’s victory, urging Americans to accept the election results and expressing his administration’s commitment to “ensuring a peaceful and orderly transition” to a Trump administration.
“A country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made. I’ve said it many times, you can’t love your country just when you win. You cannot love your neighbor only when you agree. “Something I hope we can do is, no matter who you voted for, you see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans,” he said.
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