Biden Biographer Declares That Trump’s Victory Is Biden’s ‘Legacy’: ‘Everything Else Is an Asterisk’

Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic and biographer of President Joe Biden, made a damning declaration about the outgoing commander-in-chief in a new article summing up his camp’s criticisms of Vice President Kamala Harris’s unsuccessful campaign.

“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 does,'” reported Foer, the author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future.

Then he weighed in with some analysis of his own, declaring that “And now he’s lost it. Joe Biden cannot escape the fact that his four years in office paved the way for the return of Donald Trump. This is his legacy. Everything else is an asterisk.”

He continued:

In the hours after Harris’s defeat, I called and texted members of Biden’s inner circle to heartheir postmortems of the campaign. They sounded as deflated as the rest of the Democratic elite. They also had a worry of their own: Members of Biden’s clan continue to stoke the delusion that its paterfamilias would have won the election, and some of his advisers feared that he might publicly voice that deeply misguided view.

Although the Biden advisers I spoke with were reluctant to say anything negative about
Harris as a candidate, they did level critiques of her campaign, based on the months they’d spent strategizing in anticipation of the election. Embedded in their autopsies was their own unstated faith that they could have done better

According to Foer, Biden’s team felt that Harris “abandoned her most potent attack,” by not continuing to cast Trump as an ally of Big Business and instead making her own play for its affection, as well as struggled to counter the Trump team’s attacks on her over cultural issues.