By Reagan Reese, Daily Caller News Foundation | December 25, 2024
President Joe Biden had an eventful last year in office, from losing track of his Defense Secretary to breaking one last promise and pardoning his son, all while dropping out of the presidential race and saying his final goodbye to the Oval Office.
Biden’s approval rating hit an all-time low, falling to 34% just two weeks before the end of the year. Biden battled low approval ratings before dropping out of the presidential race, but still managed to fight off a special counsel report, make it to the first debate, and overshadow Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing arguments before her loss.
Biden’s 2024 began with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin going MIA as he and the Pentagon forgot to notify the White House about his hospitalization for several days. Austin was hospitalized at Walter Reed Hospital on Jan. 1 and neither his stay, nor his time in the intensive care unit, was reported to the White House. Despite the communication break down, Biden never considered firing Austin, a White House official previously confirmed to the Daily Caller.
Once the Austin scandal died down, ran into Special Counsel Robert Hur. Hur declined to pursue criminal charges against the president, despite finding that Biden willfully retained classified documents, because a jury might see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur noted in his report that during their five hour interview, he forgot when his term as vice president began and ended and when his son Beau had died. The president held an angry press conference responding to the report and blaming his staff for the handling of the classified documents.
“How bad is your memory?” Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked the president.
“My memory is so bad I let you speak,” Biden snapped. “My memory is fine. Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president.”
Whatever chance the White House had of dispelling concerns about Biden’s fitness evaporated when he took the debate stage. Facing off against now-President-elect Donald Trump, Biden mumbled and stumbled through answers and lit a firestorm amid his party. Suddenly, Biden and his campaign staff were facing calls from within the Democratic party for the president to drop out of the race.
The concerns within the party became too much for the campaign to weather and Biden announced via Twitter, about a month after the debate, that he was calling it quits.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote in a twitter statement. Days later he would show his face for the first time since dropping out and vaguely address the nation about his departure.
Biden didn’t fade from the spotlight quite yet. As Harris addressed her supporters just feet away from the White House for her closing argument, Biden made sure to steal the attention, calling Trump supporters “garbage.”
While on a get-out-the-vote call, Biden started to discuss a joke made by comic Tony Hinchcliffe during a Trump rally, saying that the only garbage “floating out there is his supporters.” The White House responded to outrage about the president’s remarks by posting a written transcript of his comments, modifying “supporters” to “supporter’s,” falsely claiming that Biden was addressing Hinchcliffe, not Trump voters.
It was later revealed that the White House stenographers put in their official transcript that Biden had said “supporters,” but the press office had decided to release a modified transcript after they “conferred with the president,” according to an email obtained by The Associated Press.
After months of insisting he would not do so, Biden rounded out 2024 by pardoning his son. A Delaware jury convicted Hunter Biden in June for knowingly possessing a gun while suffering from a drug addiction and making false statements on the purchase document. The president absolved his son of his crimes, arguing that he was targeted by his own Department of Justice because of his identity.
“For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded,” the president wrote.
“Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice — and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
Reagan Reese is a white house correspondent at the Daily Caller News Foundation
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