On Jan. 15, President Joe Biden gave his farewell address from the Oval Office of the White House to the American people and, as is traditional, highlighted what he viewed as his accomplishments and issued warnings about what he sees on the horizon — also a common occurrence from George Washington’s farewell warning against entangling alliances or Dwight Eisenhower’s warning against the military industrial complex — bringing a quiet end to the tenure of the 46th president, who will now give way to the incoming 47th president, Donald Trump.
Gone were Biden’s warnings about Trump, who Biden once declared in 2022 in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pa. that he and his supporters “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”. He dared not. After all, Trump had just won the election including the popular vote with more than 77 million supporters. Probably wouldn’t look good to trash their verdict, which was to throw Biden and Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, out of office.
Instead, Biden chose to pivot to a warning of what he called “oligarchy,” stating, “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” He also included his worries of “the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country” once again harkening back to Eisenhower’s warning. Both were not so subtle shots at Trump’s alliance with business leaders including and especially, Tesla and SpaceX CEO and X owner Elon Musk.
These also stood in part in Biden’s address to account for his party’s defeat at the polls in 2024. Democrats lost, you see, not because of the problems plaguing the country — rest assured, every election is a referendum on the incumbent party, every one of them — but because wealthy elites who clouded the judgment of the American people, with Biden stating, “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power.”
In the process, Biden did not even bother to mention the true reasons for his party’s defeat in November: inflation and the cost of living far outpacing the growth of Americans’ incomes and the border crisis of his own making that allowed millions of illegal immigrants to flood across the border and into cities across the nation. He dared not mention them.
Those were issues — the economy, inflation and immigration — that Trump tended to lead both Biden and Harris by double digits on throughout the entire election cycle, and which proved to be insurmountable for Democrats even after they ditched Biden for Harris.
To be certain, since Jan. 2021, consumer prices were up 21 percent total, but average weekly earnings were only up 17.2 percent. The American people were definitely not better off under Biden and Harris.
As for immigration, there were over 8.3 million border crossings since 2021 reported by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, most of whom tended to stay in the country.
For example, in Fiscal Year 2024, of the 2.75 million southwest border encounters, 1.4 million were Title 8 apprehensions, of which only about 309,000 were subjected to expedited removal, about 109,000 were detained pending proceedings and another 139,000 voluntarily returned, with almost all of the rest given a voluntary “notice to appear” for later immigration proceedings. The rest were just caught and released.
In other words, about 2.2 million stayed.
There were other factors for sure: Biden’s age and inability to unite his party, Harris’ incapacity to restore confidence in the administration after Biden’s late departure from the race, rising violent crime in many communities, foreign policy failures including Afghanistan, national anxiety over the continue war in Ukraine — all combined with the failures on inflation and immigration that told the same story: America was weakening and it was having dangerous consequences.
And so voters said it’s time for a change. And out Biden went, just as Trump did four years earlier after the 2020 election, but this time, Biden almost certainly will not be seeking another term as Trump did. There is no coming back from this presidency, no way to make up for the failures that have occurred. Instead, it will be up to Trump succeeding where Biden could not and just as Biden was measured by inflation and immigration, so will Trump.
For all of Biden’s talk about democracy being threatened — even now in his farewell address after his party was ousted with a popular mandate for the incoming administration — the American people are still sovereign, there will be elections again in 2026, 2028 and beyond, and they will continue to punish failure and reward success. Ultimately, the buck stops with them.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
