Joe Biden Has a Very Bleak View of the Fall

He’ll win the presidency, he thinks, and survive Tara Reade’s accusations. But suddenly, the country needs a lot more than an average-Joe president. He knows it.

- By Gabriel Debenedetti

WHEN FOURTH-TERM SENATOR Joe Biden built his Wilmington, Delaware, home in 1996, he had no plans to turn it into a backup office, let alone a presidential campaign isolation bunker from which to plan a crisis presidency an order of magnitude more expansive than anything in the past half-century. Now, nearly every morning, Biden spins through an early Peloton ride in the upstairs weight room, dresses (formally, no sweatpants), drinks his breakfast shake, and sits at the phone in his study awaiting the latest updates on the world’s misery. Then, sometimes looking at the small lake abutting his backyard that bulges out from Little Mill Creek, the self-conscious man in the Democratic middle—mocked by the activist left throughout the primary campaign as hopelessly retrograde— considers the present calamity and plots a presidency that, by awful necessity, he believes must be more ambitious than FDR’s.