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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world

If the essence of the Greek tragedy is that the hero is undone by his faults, Joe Biden gets star billing. He defeated Donald Trump, stood up to Russia, made more reforms than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and left behind a strong economy. That makes Biden a hero to the left in America and beyond. But most of his achievements will be erased. His legacy is Trump’s comeback. After Biden, the flood. He largely has himself to blame.

The flaw of the Greek tragic hero is hubris. Last week Biden SAYS he would have won the 2024 election if he had stayed in the race. This is despite the fact that Only 27 percent of Americans last June thought he had the mental capacity to be president again. It is more likely that Trump won a bigger victory. Whatever blame Kamala Harris deserves, her vote came within 1.5 percentage points of Trump.

More has been reported about the conspiracy of silence around Biden’s diminished capacities. Although he was shielded from press conferences and other unscripted events, it was an open secret in Washington that his mind was failing. Biden’s inner cabinet of family and longtime aides are to blame. This is also a media fail. The rare journalist who blows the whistle risks losing access and ostracism on liberal social media.

But the buck stops with Biden. If he redeems his promise to be a “bridge” term in the post-Trump era, the Democratic party will have time to find a stronger candidate than Harris – someone who can move away from their itself from the unpopularity of Biden’s economy. Instead an isolated Biden is cut off from public sentiment. Certainly, the biggest swing to Harris in November came from voters who paid the most attention to the news. On the other hand, Trump swept the low information vote by sweeping margins, regardless of race, income and gender. All right-thinking Americans are with you, one supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the twice-defeated 1950s Democratic nominee. Yes, but I need the majority, he teased.

Nobody says politics is fair. Biden helped ensure that the post-Covid US rebound was stronger than that of any other major economy. But a nation nostalgically associated with Trump in the pre-Covid era. People blame Biden for inflation – and his stimulus helped fuel it. But the voters did not give him credit for others. A clear majority of Americans polled by Gallup this week said the US has lost ground in six areas under Biden. These are the economy, federal debt, immigration, income inequality, America’s position in the world and crime.

In only one area did most say progress was made during Biden’s presidency — “the situation for gay, lesbian and transgender people”. No data better captures the weakness of the Biden administration’s narrative and leadership. Until he quit in July, Biden continued to double down on the threat Trump posed to democracy, even though his team had known for months that democracy did not appear in voters’ top five concerns. .

But it is the false grandeur of the hero that gives Biden a Greek ending. Virtue and hubris are both present in his personal tragedies. When Biden was vice-president, his net worth was estimated at about half a million dollars. After nearly half a century in public life, that was a bad mistake. No American knows who thinks Biden is corrupt. But he is estranged from his son, Hunter, who is trying to make money in the family name even though he is addicted. Biden paid a heavy price for that extravagance. Like Othello, Biden loves unwisely but very well.

Ukrainians will remember Biden fondly. The same cannot be said for the Palestinians. Amid the devastation of the worst civilian death toll in years, the Gaza Strip is riddled with US ammunition provided by Biden. He believed he was acting nobly to prevent higher charges and stop a war in the Middle East. By bottling Vladimir Putin’s military resources in Ukraine, Biden may have also contributed to the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But much of the global south sees Biden as someone who has failed to live up to the values ​​he promised. That Trump is seen as a different version of Biden by much of the world — not as a radical departure — may be the hardest judgment of all.

Biden promised four years ago to be “an ally of light not darkness”. He explained it. As Biden bids farewell to the nation on Wednesday night, only he will know what it feels like to hand over the stage to Trump.

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