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In his final televised interview before he leaves office and closes the book on more than five decades in American politics, President Joe Biden expressed concern about the state of America’s democracy and lamented his failure to sell his administration’s accomplishments in a way that could have helped him retain enough public approval to have won a second term in the White House.
Speaking to MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell in a pre-taped interview that aired late Thursday, Biden said his decision to use his farewell address to the nation to warn about the rise of a new “oligarchy” fueled by the fortunes of technology barons was driven by “a sense … of serious concern” over the state of American democracy.
“That sounds corny. But I mean, I really, really am concerned, because you’ve heard me say it 100 times, I really think we’re in an inflection point in history here … [when] things are going to change drastically [that] occurs every five or six generations. And it usually is generated by technology,” warned Biden. He emphasized what he’s most worried about losing “the guardrails” that keep democracy “on track.”
“There’s a Supreme Court that’s independent, but accountable. There is a Congress that you speak your mind, but you’re held accountable to basic standards. There’s a presidency that says you have really limited powers. I mean, you’re the top dog, but you can’t dictate everything and … they seem to just be chipping away at all those elements,” he said.
Biden’s comments followed his last address from the Oval Office just over 24 hours earlier when he channeled President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the rise of a powerful “military-industrial complex.” Biden offered his own warning to the American people of a “tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.” He also warned of new age of “robber barons” and tech industry “oligarchs” with tremendous new influence in American politics.
Biden’s successor, President-elect Donald Trump, is set to be sworn in Monday surrounded by some of the richest men in the world, including SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The 46th president defeated Trump four years ago in the 2020 presidential election and has claimed he could have done so again had he not been forced from the race after a disastrous performance against Trump at their sole debate last June.
Instead, Biden ceded the Democratic ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, who went on to be beaten in the electoral college by Trump. despite a succession of criminal charges against him, including federal charges stemming from his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss.
The soon-to-be 47th president was able to capitalize on a combination of high inflation and the lack of credit Biden and Harris were given for the relatively strong performance of the American economy to convince voters to return him to the post they’d fired him from four years earlier.
Anecdotal reports revealed that Americans felt the economy was stronger under Trump, and they credited Trump for stimulus checks sent to them during the Covid-19 pandemic — even when those checks were issued under Biden — in part because Trump had insisted on putting his name on the stimulus payments sent out during his last year in office.
Asked whether he regretted not engaging in the same kind of self-promotion Trump did, Biden told O’Donnell that the idea of putting his name on stimulus checks as Trump had done “did cross my mind.”
But the outgoing president said there was a deeper political failure at play than a set of checks.
“The mistake we made was, I think I made, was not getting our allies to acknowledge that the Democrats did this,” he said.
Biden added that in hindsight, he’d “almost spent too much time on the policy, not enough time on the politics.”
“You have some senators in Congress, Democratic senators in Congress saying, ‘Well, you know, Joe Biden did this, and this is done by so and so and so and so, and this is the new, you know, built by the Democratic Party kind of thing, letting peopl know what was responsible for this happening,” said Biden. “But it just seems — I know it sounds so stupid to say it — almost bad taste,” he added.
