There is not a person elected president who, at least once a day, does not think of the type of political legacy they will leave once they are no longer in office.
President Joe Biden is no exception to that rule, having had a lengthy career in public office that spans over half a century.
He has less than two weeks left in his sole term as president, with the Monday certification of Donald Trump’s November election victory over Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, undoubtedly a bitter pill for Biden to swallow.
And make no mistake about it: Biden is indeed a bitter person at this point, having been pushed out of the presidential race by his own party because they thought he couldn’t win and now having to grin and bear it as his biggest nemesis prepares to take office for the second time after one of the most remarkable political comebacks in American history.
Regardless of what one thinks about Biden’s policy positions and so-called “accomplishments” during his four years in office, his last weeks in the White House have confirmed to the American people who he really is as he takes one action after another designed to do two things: protect himself and his family from potential future investigations and hamstring Trump’s next term in office before it gets started.
The first was his sweeping pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, over what Joe Biden said in so many words is an unfair, politically motivated prosecution even though the head of the Justice Department, Merrick Garland, is a Biden political appointee.
This action, which some viewed as invoking Democrat privilege, was also taken despite the fact that over the summer, Biden vowed to respect the rule of law and not interfere in his son’s cases.
“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Biden declared in the statement he issued.
After that was Biden’s commutation of the sentences of nearly 1,500 people, among them one public official in Illinois who stole $53 million from a small town; a Pennsylvania judge who received massive kickbacks for sending kids to for-profit detention centers, and a woman convicted of insurance fraud who was known as the “Black Widow” and who investigators believe was responsible for the deaths of three former lovers, two of whom she was married at the time.
Not long after that, Biden used his power to convert the sentences of 37 of 40 people on federal death row to life in prison without parole out of spite for Trump, who had pledged to resume carrying out their original sentences after the moratorium put on inmate executions by Biden.
And as this column was being written, Reuters reported that Biden “will ban new offshore oil and gas development along most U.S. coastlines, a decision President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to boost domestic energy production, may find difficult to reverse.”
The fact sheet posted to the White House website proclaimed, “Following this action, President Biden will have conserved more lands and waters than any other U.S. president in history.”
With these actions, combined with others like the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal debacle and the ongoing border crisis, history is not going to be kind to Biden’s presidency, if it remembers it at all.
In fact, as one senior administration official recently put it (per CNN), when all is said and done, Biden might only be remembered merely as “the guy who was just in between the Trump terms.”
A brutal assessment. But entirely possible.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
