When Joe Biden finally ends his self-imposed seclusion at his vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, this week he will emerge into a very different world than the one from which he isolated when diagnosed with Covid last Wednesday.
He will still be president of the United States, and as such the most powerful person on Earth. But it may not feel like that to him. His hopes of carrying on in that office died at 1.46pm ET on Sunday when he announced that he was standing down from the 2024 race.
Very little is known about Biden’s specific plans for the next six months. Given the speed at which the final demise of his campaign happened, he may not know much himself.
What we do know is that attempts by Donald Trump and his inner circle to force him out of the Oval Office now, on grounds that “if he can’t run for office, he can’t run our country”, are as half-hearted as they sound. Barring surprises, Biden will remain in the White House until noon on 20 January 2025.
The president’s immediate diary is still empty. He had a tentative arrangement to go to Austin, Texas, on Wednesday to attend a postponed civil rights celebration at the Lyndon B Johnson presidential library, but that event is now postponed. Biden may not be in the mood for inviting comparisons with Johnson, another Democratic president who dropped out of his re-election contest in March 1968.
In fact, the Johnson parallel should be quite happy for Biden. As the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recalls in her recent book An Unfinished Love Story, Johnson was showered with Democratic adulation after he stepped aside, and his abysmal popularity level bounced from 57% disapproval to 57% approval virtually overnight.
A similar abrupt improvement can already be felt in Biden’s fortunes. Top Democrats are publicly lauding him for putting country before self with as much passion as a few hours earlier they were calling for his departure behind his back.
“He’s getting a lot of attaboys and pats on the back for being selfless. That should take a bit of the sting out of the situation,” said Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida.
So it is quite possible that there will be a Biden bounce in the last six months of his presidency, even if he is a lame duck. The question is, what will he do with it?
Top of the list is likely to be helping Kamala Harris, his vice-president and chosen heir – or whoever else replaces him as Democratic nominee – win in November. Biden has expended so much of his political capital running as the candidate to protect American democracy against the existential threat of Trump that he would find it hard to turn his back on the fight now.
Whether Harris or an alternative would want Biden on the campaign trail is another matter entirely. The new Democratic candidate will want to emphasise that they come from a younger generation, and to disassociate themselves with some of the less popular aspects of the past four years such as inflation – on either count Biden might be an incumbrance.
There is plenty else Biden could do to support the candidate. If he can keep inflation on its downward path, that would blunt one of Trump’s main attack lines.
Similarly with immigration. The number of immigrants crossing illegally over the southern border fell to a three-year low last month, dulling some of Trump’s more lurid language about “open borders” and “carnage and killing … destroying the country”.
“We can expect Biden to continue what he’s been doing for the past several months, which is basically cracking down on illegal immigration,” Jewett said.
Merely holding the country steady to the benefit of whoever replaces him is unlikely to be ambitious enough for as legacy-minded a president as Biden. Though Congress is stymied with divided leadership, he does have some chance to shape the narrative of his presidency through executive orders.
He may be tempted to use those powers to highlight areas which he considers to be his greatest achievements. They include tackling the climate crisis, having passed the largest investment in US history in renewable energy and measures to cut emissions.
There may be more executive orders coming to cut student debt, a running theme of Biden’s presidency to the benefit of millions of low-income Americans.
Then there are the two big conflicts that are raging around the world as his term draws to a close. Therein lies danger: Biden is at risk of leaving the White House burdened by a reputation as the president who saw the deaths of more than 40,000 Palestinians on his watch and with no resolution in sight.
He has been reported to have grown increasingly frustrated with the hardline government of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure to secure a pause in the Gaza fighting. Those tensions may be on display when Netanyahu travels to Washington for a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday.
On Ukraine, Biden can be expected to focus on executive actions that would temporarily help shore up Ukraine’s military strength before the advent of a possible Trump administration. Trump’s newly selected running mate, JD Vance, has been a leading opponent of additional aid to Ukraine, and a Republican victory in November would be an ominous development for the region.
There is one other power available to Biden before he steps down: pardon power. Should he be tempted to use it, he needs look no further than to Trump himself – the former president pardoned or commuted the sentences of 143 people, including his chief strategist Steve Bannon, on his last day in office.
Biden has tried to take the high ground in his dealings with the justice department, insisting that he keeps a distance from all prosecutorial decisions. He has also indicated that he would not pardon Hunter Biden, after his eldest living child was found guilty of buying a handgun while using cocaine.
Jewett said that given Biden’s track record, “I presume that when he said that, he meant it.” But outgoing presidents have repeatedly succumbed to the allure of the pardon power, he said.
“I don’t think it’s likely, but as a dad he might be tempted.”
