The Last Politician

PROLOGUE 

Joe Biden s inauguration was an image in his mind. It took hold there decades earlier, and it looked something like a brisk winter s day, when the nation s establishment huddled around him, wrapping its arms around the kid from Scranton. It was a triumphalist scene, but also a revenge fantasy, since Washington s liberal elite had long rolled its eyes at him for his loquaciousness, for his stories that were too folksy by half, for his blaring insecurities and he knew it.

The consistent underestimation of Joe Biden was his diesel. It propelled him to keep chasing the image, over the course of three presidential runs. He pursued it into his late seventies, even though diminishingly few of his peers considered it plausible and even though his inability to surrender his ambitions occasionally verged on the undignified.

He believed that fate a word strewn across his monologues sometimes required him to travel the ugly path to success. At every station in his adult life, joy marched in lockstep with trauma. And when the image in his head transposed itself into reality on January 20, 2022, it seemed entirely fitting that the inauguration, which he had so long desired, deviated so wildly from his expectations, and was stalked by death. In the dream version of the day, he solemnly strides onto the stage erected on the west front of the Capitol, through doors held open by marines.

But when that day arrived, the glass in those doors was shattered. Two weeks earlier, right-wing paramilitaries battered them with flag poles and purloined police shields in a violent quest to prevent him from ever taking office. The inaugural dais looked down onto steps, where police officers trying to fight off the surging mob had slipped in pools of blood.

Instead of a democratic extravaganza, his inauguration was surrounded by wire fences and Jersey barriers, guarded by armored vehicles and twenty-six thousand members of the National Guard who descended on Washington

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of World Without Mind and How Soccer Explains the World. For seven years, he edited The New Republic.

How will the history of the Biden administration be written: as the turning point when America began to heal or as a hiatus between moments of deadlock and adversity? Franklin Foer s The Last Politician, an account of Biden s first two years in office, is the first draft of an answer. It has the makings of high drama. Crisis follows crisis . . . Foer s book is above all a psychodrama of America s political class. Adam Tooze, The New York Times Book Review

Journalist Franklin Foer's new book, The Last Politician, tells the story of a presidency 50 years in the making, diving deep into President Biden's life and career. The book also explores the workings of Biden's current administration and searches for answers on who Biden really is behind the scenes. CBS News

We ve read every Biden book, and Foer s is by far the best study of Biden since Richard Ben Cramer s What it Takes. You might love Biden or you might hate Biden, but either way, if you want to understand him, you will want to buy this book. Politico

Outstanding . . . The Biden presidency is a reminder of why politics matters, why political skills matter, including the dark, sometimes ugly arts of getting legislation passed, often through painful compromise. Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian

Finally a hard, honest look at Joe Biden . . . Foer s book is not hagiography, but it s not hate-mongering, either. It s an honest assessment of Biden as politician and president, his strengths and weaknesses, where he has delivered and where he has not. Bill Press, The Hill

Compelling . . . [Foer] offers a more vivid and comprehensive rendering of the scenes we already knew, while introducing a few that we didn t . . . provides plenty of discrete insights into the Biden presidency. New York Magazine

[M]eticulously researched and consistently insightful . . . In Foer s retelling based on nearly 300 interviews rather than cherry-picked