Building Back the Bidens

 

The urgent, embarrassing, and occasionally convincing campaign to salvage their legacy.

By Ben Terris, New York’s Washington correspondent

June 13, 2026. 

New York Magazine.

Joe Biden wanted the crowd to know he couldn’t stay long. As he stood at the lectern at the Best Western in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on June 5, he told the audience of some 1,200 Democrats munching on their first course of iceberg lettuce and ranch that he had to leave early to make it to his goddaughter’s wedding. “So when I run off the stage it’s not because I’m afraid to hear the response,” he said. He needn’t have worried about the reception. He spoke quietly, with sudden bursts of yelling, and occasionally lost his train of thought, yet the crowd ate up his attacks on Donald Trump as “the most corrupt president in the history of the United States.” He got a standing ovation, treated not as the man who gave the country Trump but as a kind of conquering hero.

Before the speech, Biden had stood for almost two hours in a back room greeting hundreds of VIP guests and posing for photos. I watched one of them, a slight 81-year-old woman in a glittering green dress, approach the former president and kiss him directly on the lips. “He was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and I was like, ‘I just want to kiss you,’” Sharon Stroschein told me later. “He was willing! He participated! He joined in the kiss.” Her husband, Larry, was standing right beside her. How did he feel about all this? “Well,” he said, twisting his handlebar mustache with a finger, “I’d rather have had Jill there.”

The photo line gave people the chance to see the old Joe Biden — not just the old Joe Biden. When he learned it was one supporter’s birthday, he stopped the line and made everyone sing to him. He put on another fan’s aviators and posed with his arms crossed. He held a toddler and calmed a crying baby. Only one protester had made it to the event, standing outside holding a sign that read, simply, WORST EVER!

The Sioux Falls speech was part of an aggressive effort — ramped up in recent weeks by Biden’s family and inner circle — to remind people that Biden is more than just the loser of the 2024 election. His trip to South Dakota came during a media storm kicked up by the publication of Jill Biden’s memoir View From the East Wing. She told interviewers that her husband would have beaten Trump had he not been pushed out of the race. (Really?) She writes that she’d wondered whether Biden might have been drugged before his disastrous, slack-jawed debate performance in the summer of 2024 and thought he had perhaps had a stroke. (But said nothing at the time?) On June 3, she brought her traveling circus to the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C., where she was asked about former Biden spokesman Andrew Bates, a fierce defender of the president, who had wondered aloud in the New York Post why “that painful conversation for the party needed to be publicly reopened right now.”

“I want to say to Andrew, ‘Call me up and say it to my face,’” she said.

Her stepson, Hunter, a constant side-plot from the last administration, has also reentered the chat. He’s surfaced on X to post about his sobriety and fan the flames of a possible 2028 run. “LFG,” he replied to one fan urging him on. He told me that Washington insiders had thoroughly misread his father. “They never truly understood Joe Biden. They’re saying he was a fixture of D.C.? You clearly know nothing about him and his 50 years of service if you think he was part of the D.C. elite,” he said.

It can often seem like the Bidens are divorced from reality, exemplified by their ability to claim with a straight face that the former president was not a Washington insider. But they believe they can make a case for his legacy — as long as they can somehow disentangle it from Biden’s ruinous decision to run for a second term. “I think it is very hard to ever get over the fact that he is responsible for the hellscape that we live in now,” said one former campaign staffer. “It is undeniable that his hubris cost us. He was an extremely impactful president who was successful in delivering tangible wins for Americans, but all of that is washed away.”

Biden’s team is split between outright denial that his age was an issue and asserting that time has a way of working its magic. “Without a doubt, every day, there is less of a ’24 hangover,” said Rufus Gifford, who was the finance chair of the Biden campaign and now serves as the chairman of the board for Biden’s presidential library. “It’s not solved, but there’s less of a hangover and more of a nostalgia for normal times.” His presidency may have ended ignominiously, but something like 80 percent of Democrats held him in high regard when he left office.

For now, Trump occupies the White House, where he has built a UFC octagon on the lawn to mark the nation’s 250th birthday, while Biden is speaking at a three-star hotel by the airport in an attempt to salvage his reputation. And unfortunately for the 83-year-old Biden, he doesn’t have the luxury of time, which means this is not the last we are going to see of him and his family. At the end of his speech in Sioux Falls, over a swell of applause, Biden said, “Okay. I have to go.” The cheering continued, and when it died down, Biden was still onstage. He lingered a beat longer, waving and saluting. He had to go, but he wasn’t quite ready to leave.

When I told one former administration official that I was planning on writing a story about Joe Biden, they offered a dry reply: “An obituary?” Biden began his post-presidency with prostate cancer that has already spread to his bones. “We’re doing fine,” Jill Biden said at Sixth & I. “But are we doing great? We’re not doing great.” Biden will, she has said, live with the cancer for the rest of his life, a punctuation mark on the notion that he was way too old to be president.

For now, he’s doing things elderly men do: surrounding himself with family and friends, eating ice cream, and burying grievances, which included extending a lunch invitation to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who worked behind and in front of the scenes to push him out of the 2024 race. “He famously, probably to his disservice politically, has never held a grudge,” Hunter told me. “He leaves that to me and my sister.”

He’s also dipping his toes back into the political waters. One Democratic operative working for a potential 2028 contender told me that candidates would be smart not to bash Biden too hard. Yes, they said, there’s plenty of anger about him staying in the race, but in general Democrats think fondly of the job he did in office. You can see evidence of that goodwill in Washington, where lefty think tanks like the Roosevelt Institute are trying to rebrand popular aspects of his policy agenda. Out: “Bidenomics.” In: “The Good Life Agenda.” “They are basically taking a lot of ideas from Build Back Better, things that got negotiated away like child care, union-friendly things like sectoral bargaining, and freshening it up,” the operative said. At least one potential 2028 contender, California governor Gavin Newsom, appears to think Biden could be an asset in the Democratic primary and has praised him as “one of the most successful presidents in the last century.”

Biden received applause when spotted at dinner with Senator Alex Padilla of California, then again when he was dining with Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. “There were literally gasps,” Coons said. He’s been inviting members of his old White House crew to his home in Delaware and to long Zoom bull sessions to help him write his own memoir. In June, Biden surprised everyone — including his publisher — when he made a comment about his own book landing in September, which would have really rattled swing-state Democrats had a spokesman not quickly clarified that the date is still TBD.

Biden recently endorsed two veterans of his administration currently running campaigns. “The response has been universally positive,” said Dan Koh, who got Biden’s endorsement for his congressional run in Massachusetts. “People told me, ‘We really miss this guy. And when someone of that stature endorsed you, it says a lot about you.’” Biden’s endorsement was also apparently helpful in Keisha Lance Bottoms’s run for governor in Georgia. Her internal polling a month before the primary, according to a person familiar, had her running at 43 percent with a large number of undecideds. After Biden weighed in, she ended up winning with nearly 57 percent of the vote. Her campaign says the Biden endorsement was a factor. “Joe Biden will never be sidelined,” Koh told me.

The irony is that Biden in the flesh viscerally evokes his greatest failing. “Putting him front and center will remind people why he was forced to leave the stage,” argued David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s longtime campaign guru. Tommy Vietor, the former Obama spokesman and current co-host of normie Democrats’ favorite podcast, Pod Save America, said he found details from Jill’s memoir “enraging.” “Joe Biden is only a victim of what others did to him,” Vietor told me. “He never views the country as the victim of what he did to us.”

Worse for the Bidens, their return encourages new stories to be told about his health when he was in office. Republican congressman Mike Lawler, for one, recalled the time then-President Biden came to his district in May 2023 to give a speech about ongoing debt-ceiling negotiations. In a private meeting beforehand, Lawler told me, Biden couldn’t hold a conversation about border policy without reading from a note card he’d pulled from his pocket. It wasn’t complicated stuff, Lawler insisted. “He was going, ‘We need more Border Patrol agents. We need more court personnel. I spoke with the president of, um, Mexico.’” Lawler said he found the experience “shocking” and “sad.” “He was reading it to me and losing his train of thought, getting confused in the middle of it,” he told me. “I felt bad; honestly, I felt empathy for him. I thought of him like a grandfather and was like, What the fuck? Why are they putting him out here like that?” (A spokesman for Biden denied this account.)

These days at least, the Bidens don’t have much of a choice. “He’s not getting any younger, he’s ill, and it feels financially driven,” said a Biden alum. Biden has been laying the groundwork for a presidential library foundation. So far, it’s been a slog. Late last year, the New York Times reported that the Biden Foundation had brought in a “small fraction” of what it needed, raising questions about whether a stand-alone library was even viable. According to the report, the team had told the IRS it expected to bring in only $11.3 million by the end of 2027. “We are making slow but good progress on the money front,” said Gifford, the foundation chairman, who swears that things weren’t nearly as dire as the Times suggested. “Everything will be made easier when we have a specific location and programs to discuss. That is all coming in the near future.” In June, he added, the foundation held a luncheon where it was privately announced that two donors had made recent commitments for a total of $10 million.

Obama’s foundation, in contrast, is swimming in cash. His behemoth center in Chicago, known as “the Obamalisk,” threatens to make Biden’s building look like a Little Free Library box in Delaware. It’s an unfair comparison, argues Gifford, because Obama could spend his second term planning for his library. Gifford, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Denmark, recalled being invited to the White House, along with other deep-pocketed diplomats, where the words foundation or library were never uttered but everyone understood the game. Biden got bounced from his second campaign before he got the chance to play. “He didn’t have the same luxury,” Gifford said.

Obama’s alleged role in Biden’s downfall is a particularly sore point in Bidenworld, even if Biden claims to hold no grudges. At an event in November billed as an “informal Biden-Harris White House reunion” at Kelly’s Irish Times, a low-key pub near Capitol Hill, people were grousing that they had to pay for the drinks themselves. “When the Obamas or Clintons have their reunions, it’s like a three-day all-expenses conference,” a Biden alum told me. “And we got a cash happy hour at an Irish bar by the train station.” The event’s organizer, former counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, was “basically frothing at the mouth,” according to the alum, and holding forth on how people close to the Obamas had “betrayed Biden” and cost Democrats the election. “He maybe needed a vacation, or a therapist,” the alum said.

It didn’t help when Jill surprised everyone by showing up with two close aides. “Seeing them was like going back to your hometown Arby’s and seeing your high-school bully working behind the counter,” the Biden alum told me. “I’d moved on in my life, but they hadn’t.”

For some in the Bidenworld diaspora, the post-Biden years have meant reinvention. Rob Flaherty, the former head of digital for the White House and deputy campaign manager on Biden’s second presidential run, has tried to chart a path as a thought leader within the Democratic Party, starting a podcast and writing a viral “autopsy” of what went wrong in the last election. He is neither running away nor leaning into his time as a Biden Guy. “I’m not of the Biden inner sanctum,” he told me. “But I obviously care about the president and loved the work we did, and also we’ve got to figure out how to move forward.”

The office of Michael LaRosa, the former spokesman for the First Lady, is a museum for all things Jill Biden. He has more than a dozen photos of “Dr. B,” as he still calls her, hanging from his walls at Ballard Partners, a top Trump-aligned lobby shop in Washington, D.C. There’s a framed Philadelphia Inquirer front page behind his desk reading BIDEN WINS and a First Lady luggage tag clipped to a bag on the floor. When I met him in late May, he was wearing a forest-green Patagonia sweater with the words CAMP DAVID stitched on the breast. He is not, in other words, a man who has moved on. “She told me she loved me and I told her I loved her the last time I saw her,” LaRosa said. And now? “On a personal level,” he said, “I’m really disappointed in her.” He blamed Bidenworld’s insular bunker mentality: “It boggles my mind that the people they depend on and rely on the most are the same people that have embarrassed them and humiliated them for years.”

Some of the people closest to the Bidens have chosen a permanent state of grievance. “It’s a bunch of people going up to Wilmington just shaking their hands at the clouds,” a former campaign aide said. Mike Donilon, the campaign manager who stood to gain a $4 million bonus if Biden were reelected, made headlines last year when he trashed his party for pushing Biden out of the 2024 election. “I thought the Democratic Party lost its mind,” he said, arguing that Biden could have won had he stayed in. “I think Mike Donilon really loves Biden,” said Axelrod. “He’s as smart as anybody I’ve worked with in politics, but he couldn’t see past that devotion and still can’t, apparently.” He added, “It’s sad. Because of his devotion, he betrayed the guy he loved.”

In May, Flaherty hosted his own version of a Biden reunion party, inviting former colleagues, friends, and journalists to a downtown office building to celebrate the launch of his political podcast, Nobody Knows Anything. The Biden crowd, more mid-level than managerial, mingled in the poorly air-conditioned office, sipping on cans of cheap beer and chilled white wine. Some discussed Hunter Biden’s recent appearance on Candace Owens’s podcast and how glad they were not to have to deal with the fallout.

A weird thing has happened with Hunter’s reemergence: People actually seem to enjoy it. He managed to charm Owens, getting her to apologize for her past comments about his drug addiction. She seemed to praise Hunter’s “normal” relationship with his father. He has proven himself to be an expert troll on X, making jokes about his past drug use and the risqué photos that had been found on his laptop. “I am not posing nude,” he replied to a reporter from Playboy asking to do an interview. “Those days are over.”

When I chatted with him on the phone, his disembodied voice sounded like clips from his father 40 years ago, and he relished going after Trump. “He makes the kind of promises like the cult leader from Heaven’s Gate made: like, ‘On December 18 this year we will all be teleported up to the mother ship,’” he said. “And it doesn’t happen. But the crazy part about it is in a cult, people just double down. They find a rationale for the reason it didn’t happen and reinvest themselves into the cause of that cult leader.”

Hunter also believes his father would have beaten Trump had he only been given the chance. But it’s just like him to double down as well. He is, after all, a Biden.