The Story of Joe Biden During the D-Day Shock in Omaha Beach, Nebraska: A Model for the Rise and Fall of the United States
The president of the US was looking at the English Channel while on the cliffs of Normandy. It was only six weeks ago, on the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, and President Biden had just finished his remarks at the American cemetery atop Omaha Beach. Guests were thanking him for his speech, but he did not want to talk about himself. The men who had fought and died there were the focus of the moment. “Today feels so large,” he told me. This may sound odd, and I don’t mean to, but when I was out there I felt the honor of it. To speak over those gravesites is a profound thing. He gestured back toward the war dead while turning from the view. “You want to do right by them, by the country.”
Here is the story I believe history will tell of Joe Biden. With American democracy in an hour of maximum danger in Donald Trump’s presidency, Mr. Biden stepped in the breach. He was able to prevent an authoritarian threat at home, rally the world against autocrats abroad, lay the groundwork for decades of prosperity, and manage the end of the once-in-a-century epidemic. History and fate brought him to the pinnacle in a late season in his life, and in the end, he respected fate — and he respected the American people.
It can feel like a person’s mind is being stretched and flattened by what is happening in American politics and the world. One unbelievable event follows another, culminating in Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race.
There is no one who can really make sense of the time that we are here and what this chaos means: Is this a difficult period that precedes more stability?
We can see the fragility in the systems that govern our lives. A man was killed and Donald Trump nearly killed onstage — the latest horrific event in a decade’s worth of grinding, destabilizing political violence and mass shootings. There is an unavoidable tenuousness to everything in this day and age, if a 20-year-old with a gun can get this close to a presidential candidate. And in the aftermath of that shock, there was no firm foundation to fall back on. After a software update crashed systems around the world and the Supreme Court gave the presidency power that isn’t subject to prosecution, people are still trying to figure out how it might affect the future of American politics.