The Joe Biden Tragedy: Julian Zelizer on the Last New Deal President

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Sunday, April 5th, 2026 — Easter Sunday, resurrection day — and we are perhaps talking resurrection today. Some people might remember that before the current president of the United States, there was a fellow called Joe Biden, who was the forty-sixth president of the United States. We don't think of him very much these days. But my guest today is one of America's most distinguished historians, and he has edited a new book about the presidency of Joseph R. Biden. Julian Zelizer is a very distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, and he edits a series every four years in which he and fellow historians evaluate the presidency. He's done it on Bush, Obama, Trump, and, of course, Biden. Julian, am I being a bit cruel here talking about the resurrection of Joseph R. Biden?

00:01:40 Julian Zelizer: No, I don't think that's cruel at all.

00:01:43 Andrew Keen: Not cruel?

00:01:45 Julian Zelizer: No, not cruel. The reality is, after how his presidency ended — from the debate to the withdrawal to the success of President Trump winning, which was exactly what Biden had promised not to do — I think "resurrection" for many might be the right word. Right now he doesn't sit well, not only with many Republicans, but with many Democrats. So looking back at him without just focusing on those final few weeks and months is a bit of a resurrection.

00:02:21 Andrew Keen: There was that famous remark — I think it was Zhou Enlai, to Henry Kissinger, when Kissinger asked him about the French Revolution back in 1972 — Zhou Enlai said, "Oh, it's too early to tell." Is it a bit early to tell on these presidencies? I mean, you come out with these books every four years, but have the myths of history cleared in any way when it comes to Joe Biden, or is it entirely dominated by the character who came before and after him as president?

00:02:52 Julian Zelizer: Look, the reality is we always are debating and learning about the history of a presidency, whether it's a few years after it ends or two hundred years after it ends. And so these are first takes — efforts to start the conversation. I don't think it's too early at all. I think the historians who wrote chapters were really thoughtful in getting beyond the day-by-day that you get from a lot of journalists and initial retrospectives, and instead trying to think big about what the presidency was about, what some of the big issues were — while not losing sight of who came before and after, which is the only way to study President Biden, to be honest. You have to understand what he was able to accomplish in those years and exactly what was at stake beyond him when everything fell apart.

00:03:47 Andrew Keen: You've collected a number of America's leading historians, including yourself — colleagues like Michael Kazin, Joyce Mao, Ekaterina Pravilova — very interesting and influential historians. You select these historians, so this book reflects your own editorial judgment. Did you find a degree of — I'm guessing that most of the historians are probably more on the left than on the right — did you find a degree of frustration and anger about Biden? Did some historians turn you down and say, "I don't want to write or think about this guy"?

00:04:34 Julian Zelizer: No, I did not have that, and all the historians were eager to participate. I think maybe the record of these books is enough to entice them to contribute. There were different feelings about the presidency. There were some who personally, I'm sure, felt the way you just described. There were others who believed he had actually done more than he was given credit for. But all of them are pretty good at not ignoring those feelings and pretending that sentiment does not exist, while still bringing the tools they bring to studying the different issues in this book — the economy, race, foreign policy — to really analyze, as best they can, what had just happened. And so those feelings did not shape the way they write about the president. That's partly my selection, in terms of what I'm looking for.

00:05:38 Andrew Keen: It's quite a traditional book — I don't mean that in any critical way — but you're looking at his foreign policy, his domestic policy, his policy on race and identity, on the Middle East, the media, Russia, and Ukraine. Biden, for better or worse — I think most people probably agree for worse — was a very traditional president who viewed politics in a very traditional way. Of course, Trump is the reverse. Is this the right format to analyze Biden by going chapter by chapter and issue by issue?

00:06:16 Julian Zelizer: I think it is. Obviously there can be disagreements about how you organize the topics and how you think about it. But the essays are not written in a traditional textbook manner. The essay on the economy, for example — it's about economic policy and what some of the legislation tried to achieve, but it also tackles the issues many of us are familiar with: how effective was this president in terms of the media, and how effective was the president in dealing with the economy while navigating the bitter polarization that shapes the country and the increasingly radical Republican Party. So I think the essays do work this way, and by doing this they put you in conversation with presidents of the past and issues of the past. But I think the authors are sophisticated enough not to treat it like any other period in American history — they understand the particularities of the moment.

00:07:20 Andrew Keen: You teach a class at Princeton — "Divided We Stand: The United States since 1974" — and you are all too familiar with those divisions. You were on my show back in 2020 talking about how Newt Gingrich and his band of grifters made politics into entertainment. Your book Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich and the Rise of the New Republican Party was very influential. Can one write about the Democrats, Julian? I mean, how much is Biden himself — who seems so paralyzed, so old, so pathetic in so many ways — simply a reflection of the pathetic quality of the Democratic Party?

00:08:11 Julian Zelizer: Well, that's clearly a judgment call.

00:08:16 Andrew Keen: Yeah, of course that's my view. I may well be wrong.

00:08:19 Julian Zelizer: But I do think one of the points you're touching on is important. I do think some of the problems he faced were not just problems of his own. Some of the inability to deal with the modern media infrastructure — which is not only polarized but very fragmented, taking place on new outlets — I think some of the essays show is reflective of problems of the Democratic Party more broadly. He is old, but he in fact represents where a lot of the party leadership is, and that became a huge political obstacle, not just for him, but for the party. And I think it'll be on the table moving forward. He also reflects an unwillingness or inability to deal with the nature of the Republican opposition that Democrats face in modern times. My book on Gingrich was also about that. I write an essay here about Biden still hoping — like Obama — that you could break through the red-blue divide, that you could govern in a normal way, that politics could still work the way it used to. And that's a huge liability for him, because that isn't the world in which he lived. Ultimately, despite many legislative accomplishments, he wasn't able to build a political coalition that would outlast them, and Democrats and their policies are certainly paying the price.

00:09:48 Andrew Keen: The first two chapters in the book are by you — the first, "Trying to Save the Soul of America," and the second, which you just referred to, "The Red and the Blue Endure." There's that famous Gramsci quote that everyone seems to be repeating these days, Julian — I'm sure you're all too familiar — about the interregnum caught between the new and the old. Is Biden the epitome of an interregnum figure, frozen between the past and the future?

00:10:22 Julian Zelizer: He might be. I do want to stress that one of the things some of the authors found, which was interesting, was just how robust some of his policies were. What he was able to put on the books for the climate, for race, for the economy was pretty impressive, even given the times in which we govern. But again, in the end, it's all about what outlasts you and what survives. And right now, that's not looking good. I do think he's from a generation of the seventies and eighties — the post-1960s Democratic Party — that still very much believed in the older institutions of governance. I suspect you will not have the same kind of leadership in the next cycle or maybe two cycles of presidential politics. The party is going to adjust. And he was certainly the last to believe that you had a Republican opposition that could somehow be brought back to where it was in the seventies. That's just no longer possible to see. So on those two fronts, you're correct.

00:11:35 Andrew Keen: The first chapter you write about is the soul of America — S-O-U-L, not S-O-L-E. What do you mean by this word? I have to admit I'm slightly surprised that a historian of your objectivity and seriousness would talk about something called the soul of America, which is a very tricky, slippery thing. Do you use this term rhetorically, or do you believe there is such a thing as the soul of America?

00:12:09 Julian Zelizer: Well, it comes from Biden's own rhetoric and his promise when he started to run. He was talking about Charlottesville and its connection to Trumpism. He promised to bring back a country — and this is how he saw the soul of America — where that kind of reactionary politics was not at the heart of American power.

00:12:36 Andrew Keen: And you're referring, of course, to the racist rally that resulted in someone's death in Charlottesville.

00:12:44 Julian Zelizer: Neo-Nazi rally, to be even more specific. And so that's where the title comes from. My point is less to say "this is the soul of America" and ask whether or not he accomplished it, and more to frame what the basic promise of his presidency was — that Trumpism would not be at its center. And in the end, as I tried to argue, his ultimate failure is not simply losing, and it's not even simply losing his agenda because of what follows. It's his failure to stop Trumpism and the MAGA coalition from being such a dominant force in America. On his own terms, he was unable to recover what he saw as the soul of the country.

00:13:35 Andrew Keen: His failure to come up with an alternative story, I guess. There was that piece in the New York Times a couple of days ago about how David Plouffe, Obama's political adviser, tried to discourage Biden from running in 2016. In your introductory piece, you talk about Biden being — and I'm quoting you here — "an unlikely person to be put in charge of carrying out the grand mission of saving the nation's soul." How would you introduce Biden? I mean, you teach American politics at Princeton. What's your overview of this guy?

00:14:18 Julian Zelizer: Before he wins, he's a successful politician — a lifelong member of the Senate and then Vice President. But he's not always the most successful candidate. He's full of controversy: from the nineteen-seventies, when he formed alliances with very conservative southerners who were on the wrong side of history on issues such as race, to his failure to run for the presidency during the nineteen-eighties because of a famous plagiarism scandal, and even to the problems when he wanted to succeed President Obama but really didn't have the support of the Obama administration. So he's a problematic candidate — not particularly inspiring. And I do think the circumstances of 2020 were so unique because of the pandemic and because the campaign was not a traditional campaign; you weren't running all the time. Two journalists said he was a bit lucky, and I think that's very apt. He is a committed New Deal/Great Society liberal. I do believe he thought that the federal government could help alleviate problems that middle-class Americans found so problematic. I don't think he was quite as much in the neoliberal Democratic camp as President Clinton, for example. So it's a convergence: someone who's not the best politician in the world, who has this agenda, and everything came together in 2020 to put him in office.

00:16:04 Andrew Keen: Yes — rather like asking Lincoln's widow about the theater she saw. I mean, where is his strength then? He's clearly not intellectually particularly strong. He has an interesting story built around tragedy — the personal story of the death of his first wife and some of his children, which is obviously awful. But why did anyone ever fancy this guy in the first place?

00:16:33 Julian Zelizer: Well, I think there is something appealing in the Democratic Party — the modern version, which really goes back to the nineteen-thirties — that has built itself around policies that help working and middle-class Americans and puts that at the center of the agenda. He still did that. That was still fundamentally what concerned him most, if you listen to his old speeches or his work as Vice President. I think part of it, by 2020, even as politics was moving in a different direction, there was some appeal — especially in the chaos of the COVID pandemic — in that traditional, old-fashioned commitment to governing and to working through institutions, as opposed to the chaos many people saw with the first Trump administration. He does know the levers of government. He knows the old processes of Capitol Hill, like a Lyndon Johnson figure. And so even if he wasn't particularly eloquent or inspiring, even if he didn't run a great campaign, I think in that era both of those qualities really mattered to a lot of voters. And you couldn't think of someone more antithetical, ironically, in the minds of many voters to President Trump. The boring — the lack of drama — that was all very appealing.

00:17:56 Andrew Keen: He's clearly the antithesis of Trump. I wonder, though, if you step back a little and think in more Gramscian terms, not just in broad historical language but for the Democrats — you noted that he was a New Dealer in a sense, but of course the New Deal was a century ago. You noted he wasn't really Clinton in his ambiguous embrace of neoliberalism. Does his lack of any kind of ideological coherence reflect the lack of ideological coherence within the Democratic Party? Or was it just the coalitional element — the compromise candidate because no one agreed about anything, so they found Joe Biden, who didn't really offend anyone but didn't inspire anyone either?

00:18:54 Julian Zelizer: As a candidate in 2020, I think it's the coalitional element of him that was appealing. The Democratic Party is not as coherent as the Republican Party. Some would say there's not a single belief that drives the party. Others would say it is in fact a coalition of different interests and ideas that still revolves around using government to help alleviate some of the problems of American society. As president, he did move to the left. And if you look at his domestic record in particular, it's still pretty robust — it's not simply an ambiguous, nothing-kind-of agenda. It really was a systematic agenda with a lot of legislation pouring money into producing jobs, trying to achieve diversity within government programs, and dealing with the climate in a way that certainly no president before him had been able to do at that level.

00:20:03 Andrew Keen: Maybe I'm being unfair, and I'm obviously not as careful an observer of all this as you or the people who contributed to your volume. But my understanding of the Biden era was that you had something like the CHIPS and Science Act, which on paper was great — they got all the money, but nothing actually changed. You talk about him having an impact in environmental terms and economic terms. What do you think is, in terms of this collection of essays, the most convincing case for the positive legacy of Bidenomics or of the Biden administration? I know you have John Fabian Witt, who does the third chapter — he was on the show a few months ago as well. And in fact his wife, Beverly Gage, is coming on the show next week. So lots of historians.

00:21:13 Julian Zelizer: Yes — he was in my Trump book as well. Let me just rewind to your first point. It is true there is a criticism that the money didn't go out the door fast enough and that ultimately all of the legislation didn't manifest itself before he left. To be fair, it's not always the case that programs of this magnitude are up and running within even a year. Part of the failure I see in the essays isn't that the programs were inherently broken or flawed — it's the political failure to create a coalition that would last. That doomed the programs because they didn't have time to mature. If you look at the climate legislation and policies embedded in many of the different bills — had they had a few more years — I'm pretty convinced you would have seen investment in green cars, in semiconductor plants, and those are not even climate issues, just the economy, that would have been working right now. Part of our problem is we're talking in a very short time frame. Even the New Deal wasn't all up and running within a year or two. It takes some time. One essay that is really interesting is by the historian Khalil Muhammad, who wrote about the administration's efforts to integrate equity —

00:22:48 Andrew Keen: — that's the chapter called "The Equity President: Biden's Reckoning with Race and the Nation."

00:22:57 Julian Zelizer: Yes. And he shows that on many different policy fronts, there was a very aggressive effort to integrate concerns about diversity and racial inclusiveness into programs — in ways, Khalil argues, that other liberal presidents had not accomplished. So the climate investments, the economy, and race were three areas where I don't know what the legacy will be, because again he didn't build a coalition to give his own programs time. But the promise was quite significant.

00:23:38 Andrew Keen: Who was running the show? It's clear with Trump — and we'll come to Trump in a few minutes; it's hard to keep him out of the conversation when we're talking about Biden. But he was running the show. One of my senses, just as someone who reads the newspapers and talks about these things in a generalist way, is that there was no one really running the presidency of Joseph R. Biden. Maybe he was sometimes. Maybe Jill Biden was from time to time, but nobody was quite in charge. Is that unfair?

00:24:13 Julian Zelizer: Well, that's not something that is front and center in the book — the historians are writing these essays from the outside, looking for context and the big picture on all these policies. That said, he did have a tight group of advisers who'd been with him for a long time — people like Ron Klain, his chief of staff — who I do think were quite influential working with the president. I do think in the first few years there is evidence that President Biden, though he might have been slower than he used to be, was on top of a lot of issues and was in the room making decisions. The Biden you see in that debate is not the Biden who was there in the first few years, from what these essays show. I wouldn't take him out of the picture. He also had many capable cabinet officials and advisers — Anthony Blinken, for example — who were quite formidable. So I don't think it was an empty chair in the Situation Room or in the Oval Office. He was actually pretty present until the final year, and then I don't know the answer — that will be for future historians to learn more about.

00:25:30 Andrew Keen: But isn't that the ultimate legacy? You write about that debate with Trump, when it was clear that Biden was — I don't know how you would describe it — not fully present on any front. Isn't that how ultimately, for better or worse, we're going to remember the presidency of Joseph R. Biden? Not for policy, not for his position on Ukraine or the Middle East or the environment or race or the CHIPS Act, but simply: here was a guy who showed up thinking he wanted to run for president again, who was clearly — to everybody observing, on the left and the right — clearly at best out to lunch.

00:26:13 Julian Zelizer: I would be wrong to say that won't be front and center in the history books, and I don't think it will simply be his state of mind. I think it will be the fact that that cost the Democrats the White House — and cost them the White House to an incredibly radical administration intent on dismantling so much. That said, there are many moments in American history where either presidents or losing candidates — what they represented and what they fought for — are looked at down the line as pretty important. On the right, people look at Barry Goldwater, who was a right-wing Republican who lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by one of the worst margins on record and was seen as basically the wrong direction in American politics. Decades later, a lot of his ideas are at the core of the modern conservative Republican Party. Jimmy Carter, whose one-term presidency was often seen as the embodiment of failure — everyone focused on the end, when his inability to resolve the Iran hostage crisis opened the door to Reaganism. Now we look back and study what he had to do with energy policy, human rights, and issues that are still important. I think with Biden, right now, there's a lot of talk about affordability and how you deal with middle-class concerns in terms of the budget. I suspect people will actually look back at not only what he said he was going to achieve, but what he was able to get on the books in terms of real government programs that dealt with some of those questions. In terms of bringing jobs into the United States, his legislation to actually invest in semiconductor plants is going to be something, I think, both parties — but certainly Democrats — will be taking a closer look at as they try to answer these questions in the years ahead. So I actually think the picture will change. It will be more complicated and complex, and there will be a variety of legacies that people talk about, as is the case with all presidents.

00:28:26 Andrew Keen: I'm intrigued that you compare Biden with, of all people, Barry Goldwater — who, as you know, lost the election in '64, was trounced by LBJ, but whose ideas became enormously influential. You've written about them in Burning Down the House, of course — influential not just with Reagan but probably with Trump. Are you suggesting, Julian, historically, that Biden's ideas on big government — maybe with a little bit of an industrial policy slant — are going to come into fashion, maybe in the Democratic Party, even the Republican Party?

00:29:07 Julian Zelizer: The Republican Party — I don't know, certainly not in the state it's in right now. But yes, I really am arguing that, and this is something I learned by reading the authors who contributed and being in conversation with them. On domestic policy in particular, there's a lot in that record that I do think Democrats are going to look back on more favorably as they try to build an agenda around issues of affordability. I don't know if that will happen, but I can see that path being very realistic.

00:29:55 Andrew Keen: You talk a little bit about race, but of course when people look back at Biden, two women in particular come to mind. His wife, Jill, who got blamed — I think perhaps unfairly — for encouraging him to run, or not telling him the truth about his capability for office. And, of course, Kamala Harris. Anything in terms of gender — I know you have one or two essays on this in the book. What's the Biden legacy not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of these two highly divisive and controversial women, Jill Biden and Kamala Harris?

00:30:38 Julian Zelizer: That's a good question. Vis-à-vis the First Lady, Jill Biden, I don't know exactly what the impact will be, but I think there's going to be a bigger political impact from how this unfolded with gender and certainly within the Democratic Party. Because of how this unfolded — because Vice President Harris lost, and because she lost to President Trump — there is already a real fear and reluctance about running another female presidential candidate. And if you look at who's being discussed for 2028, with the exception of her — whom many Democrats are not excited about — it's a pretty male field. The irony of having her as Vice President, having her as the candidate of 2024 under conditions that were so terrible, might actually lead to backward momentum in terms of elevating female candidates for the presidency. We will see. But I do think that's a fair concern that many people have expressed.

00:32:00 Andrew Keen: And of course, when we think of Biden, we also think of his son, Hunter Biden — all the obsession, the paranoia around him from the right — and then, of course, Biden's pardon of Hunter. Do you get the sense — I mean, it certainly strikes me that the current Trump administration is enormously corrupt. We've had historians on the show arguing that it's the most corrupt administration since the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding era. But was the Biden administration honest? Was Joe Biden "Honest Joe"?

00:32:36 Julian Zelizer: Well, there's an essay by Professor Noah Rosenblum that's very good, and it shows that until the final year, the administration actually made great progress in trying to rebuild the Department of Justice — which had already been broken under Trump One — and trying to reestablish some of those post-Watergate guardrails and limitations on communications between the Oval Office and questions of who was or wasn't going to be prosecuted. It's a pretty persuasive essay that those efforts were genuine, that Attorney General Merrick Garland was committed and was doing a lot of work that right now is being undone — "rapidly" is not even the right word — by the Trump administration. The most controversial act is the pardon of Hunter Biden. How much did Biden think through this? How honest were his advisers about how it would look? I don't know. But I do think it was more damaging given that he was doing quite significant work in trying to undo all the damage that President Trump had done to the DOJ — and which the current administration is now doing even more aggressively.

00:33:59 Andrew Keen: Biden's strength was seen as foreign policy — he always had some degree of credibility there. We speak in the midst of another Middle Eastern war. You have a number of essays on Biden's foreign policy. It strikes me again — and I'm not hostile to Biden, I'm just not particularly impressed with him — that on the Ukraine front, on the Middle East and Gaza front, Biden wasn't particularly successful. I don't see that many successes; maybe on China. What are the conclusions from the essays on Biden's foreign policy?

00:34:38 Julian Zelizer: I think that's fair. And there's an irony in that, of course, because here is someone for whom foreign relations was his focus in the Senate, and even as Vice President he spent a lot of time on it. But the essays really point to some big problems. The Ukraine essay and the Russia essay put Biden in a long trajectory of not really understanding the threat coming from the post-Soviet Russian leadership, and in many ways mishandling the situation leading into the war in Ukraine. With the Middle East, our author Dan Kurtzer looks at some of the real struggles Biden had trying to figure out how to handle the situation and the mistakes that were made both politically and in terms of foreign policy. China is the one more nuanced area that our authors discuss — some of the investments he was making in the economy were in fact very important to dealing with the growing threat from China, and that's one area where the record of success is a little stronger. And of course Afghanistan, where he was dealing with policy set into motion by President Trump — ultimately, the withdrawal was not successful at all. So I think you're right, and if there are areas where you see more success, it's in domestic rather than foreign policy.

00:36:21 Andrew Keen: You write an excellent section called "The Long View," which goes without saying for a historian. Is there a nineteenth-century quality to Biden as a president? I mean, you made the comparison with Carter —

00:36:47 Julian Zelizer: Yeah.

00:36:47 Andrew Keen: And most people don't consider Carter a particularly successful president. And with Goldwater's failure — are there twentieth-century presidents that are comparable, or might we want to go back to the nineteenth century to get a sense of this peculiar — I don't know if it's the demise of an institution, because the office remains strong, and of course Trump has used that office to create his own challenge to the system. What historical equivalence would you make in terms of the presidency, Julian?

00:37:17 Julian Zelizer: I think of him not as a nineteenth-century president, but very much as a product of the twentieth century — in two ways. One is the rapid and massive expansion of presidential power, which he himself uses and is part of. And secondly, he is part of the era where big government and big federal programs were integral to democratic politics, which is obviously not part of the nineteenth century. So I don't place him in the nineteenth century; I place him in the twentieth. I don't tend to think in terms of individual comparisons — I think of trajectories. And again, as I said earlier, I put him in the trajectory of that mid-twentieth-century era. If you listen to him, that's the period he really looks back to. That was his formative period. And what he liked about President Obama was, in some ways, Obama's ability to rekindle some of that spirit about what Washington could accomplish for the country.

00:38:25 Andrew Keen: What about the comparison with Hoover? Hoover being this bridge between the twenties and the New Deal — a new way of doing politics. You keep going back to the fact that he's a New Deal politician. But America in the 2020s is not a New Deal country, and the ideology of the New Deal doesn't seem to be particularly attractive to the population — or maybe even viable. Is there an equivalence with Hoover in the sense that Biden represents the end of a chapter in American history?

00:38:57 Julian Zelizer: It could be. He certainly could be the last of an era of Democratic politics — and not just the agenda, but the style of politics. It's hard to imagine that the next round of Democrats are going to make some of the mistakes he did: how he saw the Republican Party, how he dealt with communication in the media, how he responded to the younger generation of Democrats who are often much more vocal on different kinds of questions than his generation had been. So I think that is fair. That's the kind of question we will have to see play out. But it's not hard to make the case that he might be transitional — certainly for the Democratic Party, if not for all of politics as a whole.

00:39:52 Andrew Keen: Well, finally, Julian, we have to come to a certain Donald J. Trump. You were on the show — seems a long time ago now, back in 2021. You had a book out then called The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment. We talked about the first Trump era. Of course, Biden is bookended by Trump One and Trump Two. Is there any way of talking about Biden without really talking about Trump?

00:40:26 Julian Zelizer: No. Impossible. He will be defined in large part by what happened before and what happened after. His candidacy was not simply about what he was going to do for America, but what he was not going to allow to define America — and that was not simply President Trump himself. I think it was both the coalition and the ideas that President Trump put into place. And the fact not only that he withdraws and his successor loses, but that his administration is followed not only by a second Trump term, but by a much more radical and, many would argue, destructive administration that undoes much of what he was able to put on the books and goes much further — this will always be at the center of the conversation. That's certainly how I frame the book. Those bookends are very much antithetical to what he said he was going to do. There is no way, even as you get a bigger and more complicated picture, to ignore that basic part of this era. President Trump, I think, will really be the defining voice of this entire period, and we'll understand Biden in terms of his effort to change that — and what was ultimately at the heart of the country.

00:42:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. It's like the World Cup, Julian — we meet every four years to talk about these presidencies. Four years from now, in 2030, astonishingly enough, when we meet to talk about the presidency, I guess it would be called the second presidency of Donald J. Trump. Is this presidency anything to do with Biden? One of the things that always strikes me about Trump is that he obsessed over Biden for a while, but now he seems to have forgotten about him. Was Trump too a reaction to Biden, or would we have got Trump whoever had been president?

00:42:45 Julian Zelizer: I think it is a reaction — it's not only a reaction, but it is. And I mentioned this essay about equity and how equity was integrated into public policy. Part of the point of that essay, which I think is very astute, is that Khalil Muhammad argues that while many progressives were dismissing Biden, and many in the media were saying he wasn't really doing much, the people who were actually paying attention were the people surrounding the second Trump campaign — the people who were writing Project 2025. A lot of that is directly a response to the policies that Biden had put on the books, which they wanted to undo right away because they saw them as a real threat to a very different vision of what this country should be. And I think the ferocity with which the second Trump administration has exhibited in destroying and taking apart regulations, programs, and federal spending does show that they took Biden seriously — seriously enough to try to pick apart everything he had been able to achieve.

00:44:02 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, they treated Biden as if he were a rogue spirit or something. Maybe there was some truth to that. Finally, you've put Biden to bed — and he's probably already been in bed for a while. In terms of this collection of essays, what did you learn from this project, Julian? Everyone has their view of Biden. Most people probably agree that he was a rather pathetic character — he meant well, but didn't really achieve very much. What did you learn about him that you didn't know before?

00:44:43 Julian Zelizer: In terms of his presidency, I did learn that he did much more than I thought. Looking cumulatively at what he had been able to get through Congress made me think differently about this period. And the cost of his losing wasn't simply him losing, and it wasn't simply the Democrats losing the White House. It was an agenda that I believe actually had the potential to be quite significant had it survived. I learned that through the authors. In terms of him personally — I learned that the last few months were politically indicative of problems he had all along. He just didn't understand the world in which he lived in terms of political style, and that became more profound the longer you look at his record. He didn't adjust to the age of podcasts and social media, and he never was going to. And so by the time that debate happened, by the time he was having more trouble articulating his ideas, he had already failed in many ways to sell what he himself could have won more voters through, had he been more effective in that world.

00:45:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, it is astonishing — it's not as if social media and podcasts came along in 2020. They've been around for twenty-five years. So what word might we conclude on when it comes to the Biden presidency? Two words come to mind, borrowed of course from Marx: tragedy or farce. Are they accurate words, or is there a single word to summarize the Biden presidency?

00:46:23 Julian Zelizer: I wouldn't say farce. I would say tragedy — not in terms of was it good or bad, but because there was a huge potential for accomplishment that ultimately went in the exact opposite direction. And he himself was at the heart of how things fell apart. So for me, that's a story of tragedy.

00:46:46 Andrew Keen: The tragic presidency of Joseph R. Biden. He had a tragic life as well, marked by other moments of happiness. Julian, thank you so much. I hope it won't be another four years till we talk again. I'm sure you're doing all sorts of interesting work, so we'll have you back on the show. Thank you — that was really interesting.

00:47:04 Julian Zelizer: Thanks for having me.

00:47:05 Andrew Keen: Bye bye.