CNN reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere predicted that President Biden’s legacy would be largely forgotten if he lost to President-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
“I think it’s a really difficult thing for Joe Biden to know that he came into the presidency as a rejection of Donald Trump,” Dovere told the crowd. “And here he is being replaced by Donald Trump.”
Biden’s approval ratings have declined since October, with the president receiving 34% approval and 66% disapproval in a Marquette Law School national poll conducted December 2-11. Biden has the lowest approval rating in Marquette Law School polling since entering the White House four years ago.
“I do think that what you’ve seen is a slow receding into the bushes from Joe Biden here,” said the former president.
“That is not the approach that Joe Biden has been taking, at least publicly since the election, certainly, and even since he conceded the nomination to Kamala Harris,” Dovere said, citing “The West Wing” as an example of a hard-charging political leader. “But there are things he could do with executive authority.
Many of the things he could be doing would most likely make them a target for Donald Trump to pursue first.”
“It does not seem like taking another vacation now is the kind of running through the tape mentality that White House staff has said he and the whole building is approaching things with,” Dovere informed reporters.
This month, Biden and First Lady Jill Biden left the White House for St. Croix, the United States Virgin Islands, for his final vacation as president.
“I think back to an interview that I did with Joe Biden,” Dovere told the audience. “He’d been president for about three weeks, and I was interviewing him for a book I was writing. And part of what I took away from it was him trying to establish himself as Joe Biden, the guy who was elected president.”
“Not just Barack Obama’s vice president, not just the guy who beat Donald Trump,” he said afterwards. “But now that’s part of who he is, and it might define who he is. A few weeks before the election, I spoke with a senior White House official, and I said, “If Harris loses, Biden will be remembered, at least in the short term, as the guy who was just in between Trump terms.”
“At this moment, that is the way that he is acting,” Dovere told me.
