The line Joe Biden used to put into nearly every big speech — “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future” — is a long way from what he says in private now.The line Joe Biden used to put into nearly every big speech — “I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future” — is a long way from what he says in private now.

These days, multiple people who’ve spoken to him over the last year say, Biden often punctuates conversations with: “You think we can actually come back from this?”

The 83-year-old Biden continues to feel out a post-presidency that may prove to be one of the shortest in history and is already one of the most complicated.

There are days when Biden is heartbroken, indignant or in disbelief about what is happening as President Donald Trump — the man he defeated in 2020 — returned and moved not just to tear down his accomplishments, but to dig in with petty insults like the autopen photograph he put in Biden’s spot in the “Presidential Walk of Fame” installed at the White House.

    • 3abas@lemmy.world
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      36 minutes ago

      He wanted to have his genocide and give Israel everything he could, and as soon as he was gone Bibi shit on him and said he did very little. Fuck Biden.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        So. like. the too-long-didn’t-care is treating responsibility for things like it’s zero sum game is stupid. Absolutely… incomprehensibly stupid.

        Biden is absolutely repsonsible for having not done everything in his power as POTUS to put trump in jail.

        and lets not forget… for the first half of Biden’s presidency, he had both the house and the senate- not by supermajority levels, no. but they had control and they pissed it away with compromise.

        And if you’re going to give Biden credit for the Build Back Better bill and the other one… which I’m sure you do… then Biden can also take credit for that. (especially the decision to not pack the courts, or break the filibuster.)

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        Dude sat on the Trump/Epstein files for 4 years and did nothing about it because it would have hurt the donor class and Israel.

        Trump won on a (false) pledge to release the files.

        Who deserves the blame for this situation in your mind?

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            You’re correct but apparently this thread is only for hyperbole. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

        • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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          Dude sat on the Trump/Epstein files for 4 years and did nothing

          This just in: investigations take longer in real life than on TV. Investigations of people with lots of lawyers take even more time and - stay with me - strategy.

          Just because you didn’t see something happening, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. That’s like Object Permanence.

          • itsamelemmy@piefed.zip
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            Fucker tried to overthrow the government. If you can’t convict someone for that and prevent him from running again in 4 years that’s a serious failure to your duties as president. If the court system can’t handle it then maybe he should have used his presidential immunity the fucking supreme court ruled to get rid of the threat.

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            You’re telling me 4 years was too short a time to build a case against an insurrectionist pedophile who was referenced more than any other individual in the files?

            And your chastising me for object permanence? L O fucking L

            • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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              Or the case put together by Mueller during Trump’s presidency! Where the only impediment to going to trial was that Trump was currently president.

              These people will talk about slow and steady justice until the statute of limitations expires and then praise the prosecution for being cautious. If this was the best our justice system could do, we don’t have one.

      • dhork@lemmy.world
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        Actually, I do blame him for overestimating his health, and thinking he had enough in the tank for another run. He clearly did not.

        Would Harris have still been the nominee had there been an actual primary? Maybe, maybe not. But whoever won that would have been a better candidate.

        I was extremely pissed off after watching that debate. The man I saw that night simply didn’t have it anymore, and it was more than just jeylag or a cold. There was nobody close to Biden who could have sat down with him before the election and told him directly that he didn’t have it anymore?

        We talk about how Trump surrounds himself with yes-men and sycophants. I think Biden didn’t do much better.

        • ClassStruggle@lemmy.ml
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          His health was plain as day before he was elected, but liberals kept insisting it was only a stutter. They buried their heads in the sand so they could be the oppressors of the working class again.

          • Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca
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            Although somehow, Trump being just as mentally incompetent, wasn’t an issue. He may be a couple years younger but he is in no objectively measured way more competent. The GOP could run a sewer rat and leftists would still complain that the human Democrat was more of a problem. No, Biden, there isn’t a way back. America is hooped.

          • GreenBottles@lemmy.world
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            He still speaks better than Trump. He is more cognitively in tact and shows better judgement as well. Always has.

        • SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.worldOP
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          Biden was one of the best presidents in my lifetime and he would have been for a second run too.

          Being a white male he probably could have pulled off the win again too.

          • aquovie@lemmy.cafe
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            Uhh, I guess that really depends on how old you are? If you’re a millenial you’ve only seen 5-6 presidents and half of them are Republicans. So the “best of” list is really just like 2-3 people.

            He would have only won if his staff could successfully manage a Weekend at Bernie’s campaign. And even then, that doesn’t make him the best or right choice.

            Trump is not Biden’s fault but Biden failed to act to prevent another Trump presidency by not aggressively prosecuting the J6 coup.

          • dhork@lemmy.world
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            Not after that debate. If he had stayed in, all Trump would have had to do was play clips from it.

            I do think that he was a very good President. His entire legacy is tarnished by holding on too long. If this is it for America, historians will write volumes on how Fascist America was enabled by people like him (and RBG) holding on to power past their “best by” dates.

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            You’ll notice all these comments are basically a criticism for Biden not being the superhero they wish for…

            None speak to anything the admin did or what actually happened during his four years vs the four prior or after…

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                LOUD NOISES!

                I LOVE LAMP!

                Plenty of things to criticize but this mindless bullshit misses the forest for the trees…

                • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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                  Oh I’m sorry, I thought your complaint was that no one was criticizing anything under his control that happened during his time in office. But it seems like you were just jerking off and now want to make an entirely different argument.

          • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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            Bro. It took Biden until October '24 to even realize that half of america lives pay check to pay check and is struggling to buy fucking food and housing.

            Biden was not a good president. he just wasn’t as bad as some of the others, and that’s an incredibly low bar.

            Also, good presidents lock up pedophiles.

            one of the reasons Kamala had such a hard time was that she wasn’t coming in on a fresh campaign, but rather trying to clean up and fix the mess Biden handed her. (there’s other reasons like not distancing herself from biden on certain issues, too. And racism. racism and mysogeny probably didn’t help, but that was surmountable.)

      • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        I guess letting Trump run out the clock on justice was the voters fault too, then, eh? Even when Biden was literally handed a way to prevent Trump from running on a silver platter by the Supreme Court that basically ruled that anything a President does is part of Presidential Duties. He and the entire apparatus around him including twerps like Merrick Garland has so many fucking options to stop this. The courts, the department of justice, the President, all of them had taken an oath to protect democracy and that oath doesn’t disappear because the voters are stupid. They all bend over like grass under a push-me-pull-you lawnmower going “oh for fucks sake” and deciding that fighting corruption was too hard and too risky for themselves personally. People whined about judges getting death threats and that’s why they were hesitant to play hardball… Are you fucking kidding me? Like they thought that would protect them or anyone else? Now fascism is boldly kicking the fucking doors in and those people and their families are in more danger than they were back then, except now the whole country is in just as much danger. They bent over because their pussy asses thought they could and should save themselves instead of fight fascism and asshats are all like “it’s the voters fault!” when Trump legally shouldn’t have been allowed to run for the Presidency at all for a litany of reasons and nobody with any real power did anything to stop it! Sure, it’s our fault, not a system that allowed it to happen, fuck me, give me a break!

        • SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.worldOP
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          If the voters and non-voters hadn’t voted him back in the wheels of justice would probably kept turning slowly as they do.

          Do you want to establish the precedence of a president demanding the DOJ arrest their opposition?

          Because I’m not sure that’s a great idea.

          • Scirocco@lemmy.world
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            Merrick Fucking Garland was a poor choice in the first place, a sop to ‘the other side’ and he performed exactly as expected.

            Bernie Sanders would have won against Trump all three races, if we just had to have an old white guy.

            Biden was earnest, but he did not, and does not have the balls required in these modern times

            Can we come back from this?

            What a joke. Biden himself had the opportunity and the authority to start that process, and his entire administration farted around for three full years.

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            Well, it sure seems to have worked without taking so long that the assholes who already broke the laws came back into power like in South Korea and Brazil. Those systems didn’t go “whoopsies we ran out of time, I guess they can take power again!”

            A system that allows this to happen and places the blame on the voters instead of fighting for a better world is a system that was always going to end up this way.

            A system that can just have the clock run out on justice is always going to be gamed like this, stop lying to yourself.

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              7 hours ago

              To be fair the voters and non-voters have a large share of the responsibility for this situation that’s how a democracy works.

              • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                Yes and we voted in people to represent us by upholding the law and following their oaths to office and they failed at representing our interests miserably.

                  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                    After voting in Obama, who didn’t want anything to do with prosecuting Bush & Cheney for warcrimes, and then Biden, who didn’t want anything to do with prosecuting Trump, obviously. But I guess those times don’t count for whatever fucking reason??

                    American reluctance to hold powerful figures accountable isn’t a good thing and we’ve literally just left the question of whether you can prosecute a President at all dangling since we allowed Nixon to resign and fly away. That’s qualitatively a bad thing. We have had decades of chances to fix this problem and it doesn’t matter who we vote in, no one is dismantling the horrific things that are created in the meantime.

                    For example, instead of questioning why the TSA and it’s security theater exists or whether or not the DHS was a good idea at all, we have people going “Oh but the TSA agents aren’t getting paid!” They miss something like 60% of illicit items anyway, and if someone wanted to kill a mass amount of people they would just have to set off a bomb in the long security lines leading up to the airports. It’s been security theater since the fucking Bush era, but it’s become so normalized we’re whining about people who are violating the fourth amendment against unlawful search and seizure by choosing us at random for an unlawful search of our bags not getting paid! Boo hoo! These people who helped throw the fourth amendment out the window two decades ago now aren’t getting paid! Cry me a fucking river.

                    We voted, numerous times, as a country, to hold this kind of corruption to account and numerous times the people in charge failed us miserably, all the way back to Nixon.

          • GalacticSushi@piefed.blahaj.zone
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            Two things can be true.

            People shouldn’t have abstained from voting to protest the DNC’s position on a genocide that is still happening under Trump (a guy who wants to turn Gaza into a resort town once the Palestinians have been exterminated) alongside everything else he’s doing domestically as well as the trade and doomsday clusterfucks.

            But Biden also should have repressed the Epstein files, he should’ve stepped down as a one term president and allowed a primary to decide the next candidate, there DNC and Biden/Harris campaigns should’ve ran much stronger campaigns rather than assume “we’re not Trump” would do enough of the work for them.

            There’s plenty of blame to go around. It’s no one group or individuals fault.

            • ClassStruggle@lemmy.ml
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              If a persons red line wasn’t genocide they don’t deserve support, they deserve to lose

          • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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            You gave them the options between genocide and genocide. We told you that this would lose the election for the Democrats. You got the outcome you advocated for.

            • SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.worldOP
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              Genocides are horrible things that should never happen but too many people are using the word as critical-thought terminating cliches.

              It’s like trying to talk to an anti-abortionist and the only thing they can do is call you a baby killer.

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                You have to decide if you wanted to win the election or not, and its never been clear to me that you ever actually wanted to win. What its always appeared to be, is that you wanted to mantain ideological control of the party (which you did do, and have continued to: the party is still pro-genocide).

                But what is clear, is that the party could not win with the general election with a Democratic candidate supporting a genocide.

            • Devolution@lemmy.world
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              God that argument is so disengenuous. It basically comes to “cater to us a vocal minority or we won’t play.”

              You leftists scream about the genocide but what exactly did you accomish? Smugness? Superiority? I haven’t heard a single leftist give a shit about South Sudan or Myanmar. Leftists are quiet when it comes to Ukraine. But you’re incredibly loud about Gaza… you know, the crater where a people used to live because the crap candidate didn’t capitulate to your demands.

              Well now everything is fucked, the US has zero creditability, our allies hate us, ICE is officially the Gestapo, and concentration camps are being built.

              But hey. Continue the tired ass line about “well we should have had a candidate who was against the genocide.”

              Fun fact. Historically, when fascists take control, the first ones they try to stamp out is leftists.

              But at least you can sleep at night now knowing that because you didn’t vote for genocide, you now allowed one to be completed with impunity.

              Well done tankies.

                  • Sunforged@lemmy.ml
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                    Wait is the point you are trying to make right now that less Palestinians would have died under Harris?

                • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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                  Schrödinger’s anti-genocide vote. Simultaneously able to have determined the outcome of an entire election, but also not important enough of a coalition to address their concerns and bring them (back) into the tent.

                  • ClassStruggle@lemmy.ml
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                    This country has been fascist. Liberals bury their heads in the sand when it’s their team doing it

              • gravitas@lem.ugh.im
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                Its interesting how “we told you this would lose” equates to "you will lose because you alienate leftists.

                The reality is voter apathy and a majority of the population choosing not to vote because they see no difference between the outcome regardless of who wins.

                Democrats will do the same shit to appease Their donor bosses, they just feel a little bit of shame about the means they think justify those ends. Thats why youll never hear libs talking about somthing like abolishing ice, only better training them so they have less collateral damage.

                • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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                  The people who don’t see a difference are fucking morons. Biden never invaded any US cities.

                  • superglue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    You are wasting your time my friend, these people will endlessly perform mental gymnastics to overcomplicate this into being something more than harm reduction.

                  • Sunforged@lemmy.ml
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                    Yes, dude the majority of American voters are morons dude. The people in this thread you are arguing against are not the same group, we are trying to advocate how to engage that moronic majority.

                    Advocate for policies that impact their life. Spending billions on Isreal, to fund their genocide or not, instead of domestically is a huge issue that people care about. Pointing out the genocide was pointing to the way the wind was blowing for public support.

                  • gravitas@lem.ugh.im
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                    Obama was the one who started building some of the camps both biden and trump use to imprison migrants. Tell that to all the people whos relatives they deported.

                    This is what i mean by no differnce in outcome, because yeah sure the dems are more sly about it, they dont “invade” cities, they let the state governments handle delpoying cops against protests, but they still fund the same agencies with the same agendas, they just have more competency about how to do it without making as much noise.

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                You leftists scream about the genocide but what exactly did you accomish?

                What did you reactionary centrists accomplish? You handed us Trump. We gave you the path to winning and you chose not to take it. Its on you.

                Well now everything is fucked, the US has zero creditability, our allies hate us, ICE is officially the Gestapo, and concentration camps are being built.

                Yeah, your fucking fault dude.

                But hey. Continue the tired ass line about “well we should have had a candidate who was against the genocide.”

                You couldn’t win the election otherwise. Did you actually want to win the election or not? Because it follows that if you defended the candidate while they held an unelectable policy position, you were doing the work to get Trump elected.

                • Devolution@lemmy.world
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                  Leftists rarely show up anyways. But hey. Continue to shift the blame. Whining and doing nothing is what you do best.

                  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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                    I’m not shifting the blame. I’ve always blamed fake “centrists” (read: reactionary rightwing voters who wear a blue hat) for losing the election. Its your fault.

                    Did you want to win the election or not? Because there was a path to doing so: The candidate needed to change their policy on Gaza.

            • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              Here it is. Not pretending that this is about anything beyond your ability to claim the high ground. How has that worked out for Gaza?

            • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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              The USA is a democracy; every one of us is responsible individually for what we do with our votes.

              You, I infer, decided that the best thing to do with your vote was endorse the rapist who promised to do absolutely nothing to stop the genocide in Gaza over the candidate who at the least would have protested.

              Which sure as fuck was your right, but it’s kinda weird that you’re trying to argue that this isn’t exactly what you voted for.

              In a single-ballot plurality-wins-all election anything but a vote for the runner up is an endorsement of the eventual winner.

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                You’re trying to place blame on an individual instead of a party that encourages policies that creates voter disenfranchisement.

                Why is critical analysis attacked?

                • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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                  You’re trying to place blame on an individual instead of a party that encourages policies that creates voter disenfranchisement.

                  No. I’m recognizing the actual system we have pointing out that anti-genocide non-voters made a deliberate choice.

                  This isn’t a disenfeanchisement issue so much as it is a disengagement problem. There citizens had the sane franchise as everyone else, and chose not to go vote against a rapist.

                  There’s plenty of blame to slap on the Democratic party from the former president and candidate all the way down. But Biden not standing by his purported morals and Harris not breaking with him when he didnt compel non-voters not to cast a vote. They’re adults and citizens and should either stand by their choice and argure that it was correct or else concede that they made a mistake and would change it if they could

                  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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                    IF you are going to make that argument, you also have to provide a mechanism which can change the minds or engage the millions of voters necessary for Harris to win, otherwise its irrelevant.

                    Harris could have changed her policy to win the election. She’s a single individual, in the exact position of power to do precisely this.

                    If you can’t offer a credible mechanism for changing the minds of 6 million plus voters on the issue of genocide over the course of approximately 4 months (July/August 24 to November 24), you must cede that the only path to Harris winning was to change their policy.

              • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                But the system we vote for isn’t responsible for enforcing laws like… *checks notes… putting 34 time felons in prison, preventing insurrectionists for running for office, and letting people who commit treason of stealing and selling state secrets to the highest bidder run for office? It’s all our fault huh? The system didn’t fail us first, huh?

            • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
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              Single issue voters are one of the biggest problems with US politics. They’re willing to ignore everything else about reality. Doesn’t matter if it’s Genocide, LGBTQ issues, or Abortion, it’s the same outcome.

              The worst option overall becomes the most likely.

              • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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                You don’t control the electorate. You don’t have to like the way people are to recognize that they are in-fact that way. Stop confusing how you want the world to be with how the world is.

                Candidates can either address the issues of those single issue voters or they lose the election.

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                    I’m torn. Do you think what you are doing is more like the ‘Tu quoque’ fallacy or more of a ‘red herring’?

                    ‘Tu quoque’ would be like, because we think you did thing X, your argument about A or B is invalid.

                    ‘red herring’ would be like, instead of engaging the actual claim (that the campaign lost for strategic reasons), you’re trying to drag the conversation onto something about personal preference, which doesn’t answer the strategy argument at all.

                    Or it could just be an appeal to hypocrisy / circumstantial ad hominem, where you’re implying I don’t have standing to make the argument (or that my argument should be discounted) because of what you assume about my personal behavior.

                    Any which way, it doesn’t do anything to detract from my claims.