In 2022, President Joe Biden stood at a crossroads. His party had just shattered midterm expectations — the strongest showing for a first-term president in decades. It was a triumphant moment that came with a choice: step aside in victory or tempt fate for four more years. A graceful exit then would have allowed an open primary, giving presidential hopefuls time to make their case to voters.
He chose wrong. After delivering a devastating debate performance, the rapidly diminishing 81-year-old president was still convinced that he, and precisely no one else, could save America. This astonishing Buchananesque approach — declaring yourself the only solution while actively making the problem worse — inspired unprecedented reactions: House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi emerged from retirement to pressure a transition. Democrats increasingly broke their silence. And this presidential historian found herself writing the hardest essay of her career: I called for an ostensibly successful, unindicted president to resign in these pages.
I calibrated my appeal to his outsized ego — a trait he shares with the 44 men who preceded him. My focus wasn't saving democracy — though that would be a welcome bonus — but to what the archives have taught me commanders-in-chief hold most dear: their place in presidential history. I celebrated his truly FDR-scale achievements while offering a dignity-preserving escape plan wrapped in historical glory: by listening to the electorate's concerns and elevating the first woman president, he could join George Washington in democracy's most exclusive club — one Donald Trump will never be accepted into — those rare leaders who chose to walk away from power.
My legacy-saving solution was simple:
- Step aside as the 2024 candidate, signaling to the party he leads that they could move forward decisively.
- Resign because most Americans believe you are unfit — and let those Oval Office photos of Kamala Harris silence the “she's not presidential” chorus.
- Retreat faster than Washington crossed the Delaware, allowing Harris to distance herself from your policies, secure your position as one of the greats in presidential history.
One needn't be a presidential historian to see impending disasters everywhere. He ignored them all. The most unsubtle red flags:
Two days after my essay was published, Biden announced he would indeed step aside — and a hurried coronation would follow. In that moment, he did to his legacy what Charles Guiteau did to James A. Garfield in that fateful July of 1881: inflicted a mortal wound that would take a few months to kill. Yes, Biden resigned — but with a poisoned chalice in hand, giving Harris merely two months to defend his indefensible position on Gaza while he periodically emerged from Delaware to kneecap her.
Biden could have been his legacy's savior; instead, he chose to become its executioner, surrounded by a Greek chorus of enablers who hummed approval as he sharpened the blade. When future historians chronicle his presidency, his pathological grip on power will eclipse everything else — a tragedy Shakespeare himself might have deemed too obvious in his hubris. His truly spectacular list of accomplishments will serve merely as dramatic irony, a glittering prelude to catastrophe.
The C-SPAN presidential survey — where 142 historians score each president from 1 to 10 on leadership qualities — looms like an approaching executioner, ready to bury Biden's legacy alive. In 2021, Trump was fourth from the bottom. Biden may now rank toward the middle tier, but that's quicksand territory that few escape. I think it's more than likely he'll soon join history's basement dwellers: James Buchanan (watched the Union crumble with the passive interest of a theater critic), Herbert Hoover (conducted the economy's funeral march), and Trump, who at least never posed as democracy's champion while suffocating it.
Biden will be the only resident of this dark basement with genuine achievements worth eulogizing: He remains the only presidential candidate to defeat Trump. The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (at last, bridges that don't threaten suicide), the CHIPS Act (America flexing its technological biceps at China), and the first meaningful climate legislation since humans discovered they could wound the atmosphere. He conjured 3.1 percent GDP growth from economists' doom prophecies. His unemployment numbers made statisticians blush. NATO expanded like a European block party with an open bar. He restored America to something resembling sanity. And, of course, he can be credited with the first woman and first Black woman vice president.
Trump can't erase Kamala Harris — though he'll attack her at every turn — but he will most certainly reduce most of Biden's achievements to rubble with the gleeful efficiency of a demolition crew, taking liberal democracy down with them. Some progressive policies may survive, like lower drug prices for seniors, but the most unpopular are more likely: a China strategy whose wisdom remains as murky as Beijing's air, and a morally bankrupt stance on Gaza, where Biden's response oscillated between comatose and criminal.
And the compounds nightmare: The Supreme Court, already listing hard to starboard, likely faces two vacancies in the next four years. Trump will cement a judicial fortress that will overshadow not just our lifetimes, but our children's — a death sentence for countless daughters who will bleed out in states where their grandmothers secured their right to live.
Biden entered politics at 29, barely old enough to meet the Senate's constitutional threshold, and he'll exit at 82, having methodically dismantled his life's work. In the court of presidential history, the verdict will be brutal: He squandered his legacy and left democracy's door ajar for precisely what he promised to prevent.
Alexis Coe is an American presidential historian, senior fellow at New America, and the author of, most recently, the New York Times best-selling You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.
