President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden waving to the crowd inside the 'Beast' presidential vehicle.
It's easy to forget (as it was half a decade ago), but in late 2020 the Coronavirus pandemic was raging and thousands were dying from the virus every day.
The vaccine was developed but distribution was difficult and largely inefficient. An exit from the epidemic in the United States was not a guarantee.
That is the situation that then President-elect Biden found himself in, taking power amid the height of the economic and medical crisis.
By 2025, and the hand back to President Trump, for the overwhelming majority COVID was a thing of the past and the economy was returning to normal strength, if not new heights. Whilst this was not a universal or equitable economy, it was miles better than the dark days of 2020 and 2021.
Despite this, voters tended to look at Biden and see not a president who had taken them out of COVID, but an old man who had overseen an economy that they felt was giving them higher prices, and harsher living costs.
Biden was burned by three things.
First, the Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021. Arguably a brave political decision, if executed poorly, it was something Trump had promised to do, but completely failed to commit to. It ended one of the 'forever wars' that MAGA have railed against since 2015, but done little to actually resolve.
The second was the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It set off global inflation that ravaged the economies of almost every major western country, and resulted in incumbents across the political spectrum being dumped from power in 2023 and 2024 elections.
Despite what you probably heard at the time (and probably still hear now), inflation was not a US-specific condition. It affected economies across Europe and America, if not the world.
PM Sunak and Pres. Biden at an outdoor meeting, drinking from mugs.
For example, in the UK, Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was also blamed for inflation and the cost of living crisis, and subsequently lost the 2024 election.
The final thing that crushed Biden's presidential hopes was his increasing age, and the way that the American public viewed him, irreparably, as a cognitively limited and physically tired old man.
This was something that Biden was never able to overcome or fix, even from a PR standpoint, for rather obvious reasons; he was and is an old man who is visibly slower and less physically capable than he was even 5 years ago.
No amount of campaigning or ads were going to change this.
This was compounded by a categorical error of judgement on his part.
Biden's seeming refusal to recognise the fact of his age doomed both his 2024 run, and that of his vice president, Kamala Harris, who was given just 107 days to run a general election campaign against an opponent who had been continually running since 2015.
Harris stood little chance against the full force of a resurgent, assassination-surviving Trump, riding the wave of anti-incumbency sentiment that heralded an almost unwinnable 2024 for the Democrats.
