Biden can go down in history as an American hero — but only if Harris can beat Trump

One of our earliest political legends is the story of the ancient Roman leader Cincinnatus. It is believed that in the year 458 B.C. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a former senator—considered an old man by that time—was plowing his small farm when a delegation from Rome begged him to return to the capital and put down a popular uprising and defeat the city-state’s restive neighbors.

Cincinnatus donned a toga, returned to Rome, crushed the various rebellions in just 15 days, and—mission accomplished—happily surrendered power and returned to his farm. His story is still told, 25 centuries later, as a parable of civic virtue and selflessness.

On July 21, 2024, at 1:46 p.m., a languid Sunday afternoon now etched in American history, President Joe Biden made a bid to become America’s Cincinnatus.

The 81-year-old president, who said the sight of tiki-torch racists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, drew him out of retirement to win the White House in 2020, stunned the nation — after three weeks of nonstop speculation about his failing health — by ending his candidacy just 32 days before he was set to claim the nomination for a second term at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He posted a letter ending his candidacy on the social media site X, minutes before a second tweet endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to replace him.

On January 20, 2025, Biden—in a modern echo of the Roman legend—will board Air Force One for the last time and return to Delaware for his second and final retirement. If Harris strikes lightning between now and the November 5 election, she will become America’s 47th and first female president. And Biden will go down in history as an American hero who saved democracy from the chaos of authoritarianism by knowing when to run—and when to walk away.

But it won’t be easy. The reality is that Harris has just 107 days to turn around a clear Democratic deficit in swing states including Pennsylvania and do what her party couldn’t do in 2016: defeat a proudly misogynistic strongman in Donald Trump with a female candidate, in one of the few developed countries that has never been led by a female candidate.

And if Trump wins and implements the draconian Project 2025 plan for a “post-constitutional” America, Biden will not be celebrated in our national lore. He will be criticized and picked apart, as a leader whose ego wouldn’t allow him to step down before the 2024 primaries, who in 2020 promised to be “a bridge” to America’s future but then failed to lower that drawbridge in panic until the ship of autocracy was about to crash into it.

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If the worst-case scenario plays out, Biden will be remembered not as a bridge but as a brief bubble of democracy, framed by the chaos of a Trump first term and the dictatorial retribution of a second. And that would be a shame, because even in just one term, Biden has managed to be the most consistent American president of the past 60 years, since Lyndon Johnson reinstituted our crumbling civil rights laws and created massive social services like Medicare before his own place in American history was tarnished by the deadly mistakes of Vietnam.

In a nanosecond on a quiet Sunday afternoon, the most important presidential election in American history was turned on its head.

Biden — despite a deeply divided Capitol Hill that reflects a bitterly divided America — won Republican votes to pass a massive infrastructure program, shore up chipmakers and pass the first gun control legislation in decades. He had to play hardball to bypass GOP intransigence and pass the largest climate change bill in history. The conservative Supreme Court blocked his ambitious student loan fix, but Team Biden still found ways to reduce $167 billion in student debt.

Foreign policy was mixed, but his plan to aggressively support Ukraine after the Russian invasion was a convenient defense of democracy abroad, even as the struggle to preserve freedom abroad became increasingly dangerous.

And yet political myth-making is often just that. If you and I had lived in the age of Cincinnatus, we might have painted him as an anti-plebeian elitist who abused power, if only for two weeks.

Biden’s promise to voters to restore the values ​​and wisdom of a career in national politics that began in 1972 included a massive blind spot regarding Israel’s slide toward far-right extremism. We cringed when his administration offered Benjamin Netanyahu carrots instead of a stick during his Gaza massacre. The revulsion among many Americans over the flood of images of dead Palestinian children cannot be underestimated as a factor in Biden’s 1:46 pm announcement.

But the real tragedy of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is an almost Shakespearean tale of arrogance. The president’s remarkable life story of overcoming family tragedy and political humiliation seemed to blind Biden and his closest family members and advisers to the reality that the octogenarian had finally encountered the one opponent he can’t defeat: Father Time.

” READ MORE: The Far Right’s Project 2025 Also Dodged a Bullet, and They Know It | Will Bunch

The initial feeling Sunday afternoon was largely why this decision took so long. Democrats, for the most part, seemed electrified by the idea of ​​Harris — who has scourged issues like reproductive rights and student debt to gain respect after a rocky start in the utterly thankless job of vice president — at the top of the ticket. If a prominent Democrat has been planning to challenge Harris in Chicago, they’ve been too timid to step forward.

In a nanosecond on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, the most important presidential election in American history has been turned on its head. Suddenly, it’s the 78-year-old, often incoherently rambling Trump who is the oldest person ever to win his party’s nomination, and who is the one who has to answer some tough health questions.

Suddenly, in early September, a convicted felon is on the ballot to debate the former California attorney general who gained national fame by questioning Supreme Court nominees.

The Republican candidate whose convention in Milwaukee reeked of stale testosterone, who entered the arena arrogantly to the sounds of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” is scrambling to regroup to take on an energetic 59-year-old woman.

And if Harris turns this election on its head and becomes the 47th president of the United States, she will also forever save the legacy of the 46th. But ultimately, the American plebeians who vote in November will decide whether Biden will be a hero of our democratic mythology, or merely a tragic figure.