“This is the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America,” the 46th president of the United States of America was saying about the 47th.
It was Friday night in Sioux Falls, and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had turned up here, of all places, to speak at a dinner put on by the South Dakota Democratic Party in the banquet hall of a Best Western hotel. Hundreds of Democrats applauded as he delivered what amounted to the most political speech of his post-presidency yet.
At times halting and hard to understand, at other times yelling clearly at the top of his voice, he tore into the current occupant of the Oval Office and his “appalling vanity projects.”
“My god,” Mr. Biden scoffed, “tearing down the East Room of the White House to make room for a ballroom more fitting of Versailles?”
The crowd booed.
“Or writing his name on the Kennedy Center,” Mr. Biden said, and they booed some more. He seemed to be enjoying himself now. “Or building an arch that would dwarf the Lincoln Memorial,” he continued, “or turning the Reflecting Pool into something you might see in a theme park!”
The 83-year-old man who spoke in Sioux Falls would be approaching the halfway mark of his second term in office had things turned out the way he wanted. His speech Friday capped off a week that saw Mr. Biden, his wife and his son all start to return with a vengeance to the public stage, very much against the wishes of many Democrats, including some former Biden staff members.
A year and a half has passed since that freezing cold day in Washington when Joe and Jill Biden climbed into a helicopter outside the front steps of the Capitol as Donald and Melania Trump and JD and Usha Vance stood together and waved goodbye. Their legacy and standing within their party blown to smithereens, the Biden clan stayed pretty quiet until now.
The publication of Jill Biden’s book this week and her subsequent publicity tour reopened deep wounds in the party as she presented her Rashomon version of how her husband’s presidency came to its painful end. The discourse turned messy as former Biden staff members contradicted her online and in media reports and she hit back.
At the same time, Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, re-emerged on X, where he has been scribbling prolifically. Treated as a liability to his father his entire term in office, the younger Mr. Biden is finally free to speak his mind, and, interestingly enough, people can’t seem to get enough of it. The self-deprecating tone he has used to describe his crack-addicted past, and the caustic wit he has turned on Biden family foes, Democrat and Republican alike, has earned him a kind of countercultural sheen that has won over even some Trump fans.
The former president also apparently has a lot more to say. He showed up at one of his wife’s book events in New York this week and said his book would be out in September. Was that correct, or did he misspeak? His spokesman TJ Ducklo said that Mr. Biden was “continuing to work on his memoir and the release date has yet to be determined.”
Many Democrats have said that none of this is what anyone should be focusing on now. The battle lines for the coming midterms are being drawn and the party is trying to exult in new faces. Just when President Trump is facing down the first real (if small) signs of rebellion from his party this term, and especially poor poll numbers, here come the ghosts of the Democratic Party’s past. Hey everyone! Remember what happened in 2024?
“When we get pulled back into conversations about age and the election in ’24, it’s never going to be a good place for Democrats,” Meghan Hays, who worked in the Biden administration, said on C-SPAN’s “Ceasefire” show.
Scales fell this week from the eyes of Andrew Bates, the blindly loyal Biden White House spokesman, who told The New York Post: “We had a duty to win and we didn’t. I think about that all the time. But I don’t see why that painful conversation for the party needed to be publicly reopened right now.” (Mr. Bates told The New York Times he had nothing else to add).
Mr. Biden is hardly the first former president who has been treated as an albatross. Jimmy Carter, another one-term president, felt mistreated by Democratic presidents and candidates for decades until Mr. Biden came around and embraced him at the end of his life. Many Democrats didn’t want Bill Clinton popping up on the 2004 campaign trail. He and Hillary Clinton were radioactive in 2018, when the party was trying to move on from her loss to Mr. Trump, even as the Clintons decided to go on a nationwide speaking tour.
But what occurred with Mr. Biden — the way his decline was laid bare on the debate stage for all to see, and the shocking power struggle that followed — was sui generis.
Mr. Biden has since been diagnosed with cancer that has metastasized to his bones. He moved slowly on Friday, and his voice was a rasp. But, as many politicians do, he seemed to get a charge from the crowd. Jill Biden was not there with him. A friend of theirs had died, he explained, “and she had to be at the funeral.”
The room he was speaking in was the size of a small plane hangar. It was in a detached building out back of a sprawling Best Western that was constructed in the 1960s, the hotel’s low-ceiling hallways a maze of worn brown carpeting pungent with the scent of chlorine from the “indoor water park.” Sheets of paper taped to the doors outside the banquet hall in which Mr. Biden spoke read, “Photo ID Required. No Weapons. No Large Bags.” There was little else in the way of security. No magnetometers. No Secret Service agents searching bags or waving wands.
There was no great motorcade out front or a media circus inside. There were almost no reporters there. The former president’s speech was not televised.
He has appeared quietly at similar dinners in Delaware and South Carolina recently to help out Democratic operations in those states. But South Dakota? It’s redder than Mars out here; one local political operative said the last year a Democrat was elected to statewide office was 2008.
The caravan of South Dakotan Democrats who’d driven across the prairie to be there were just thrilled to see a former president up close. And they didn’t much mind that any of the Biden baggage was back out on display this week.
“They’re not bad people,” said Bob Porter, a 73-year-old former beer distributor from Mitchell, S.D. He was there with his wife, Sherry, who used to work for her local radio station. “Joe,” she said fondly as she put her hand over her heart. “I wish Jill was here.”
“That one event they used against him, and look at all the good things he’s done for America,” sighed Frank Kloucek, a 69-year-old former legislator from Scotland, S.D.
A 65-year-old retired local official from Sioux Falls named Arlene Brandt-Jenson was “one of the lucky ones” who got her picture taken with Mr. Biden before his speech, she said, adding: “I told him that we missed him. He said, ‘Thank you for taking the time to be here.’ And then I left with, ‘You’re an honorable man.’”
But how did he seem up close?
“Well,” she winced, “he seemed a little frail.” She hurriedly added, “But my goodness, when I look at Trump, I’m seeing a frail man, too!”
Nobody wanted to say a bad word about Mr. Biden, but almost no one could quite bring themselves to say he was fit to serve as president again — which was of course precisely what he and his wife and son were arguing as they went down swinging.
“He’d probably be pushing the limit” if he were president right now, Mr. Porter allowed. “No matter what party, it’s definitely too old.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ms. Porter said, nodding her head. “He should have quit.”
Mr. Biden’s speech on Friday was the most he has slammed Mr. Trump yet. He talked about the $1.8 billion “slush fund” — “what made me most angry was Trump was going to give that money to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists,” he boomed — and the gobs of crypto loot Mr. Trump has made since returning to office.
“I got criticized a while ago when I was still president for saying our democracy was at stake,” Mr. Biden said. It was the closest he came to a straight-up I-told-you-so.
His pitch for re-election was that because he beat Mr. Trump before, he could prevent his return. He would talk about Mr. Trump like he was an aberrant blip in American history, a fluke of “semi-fascism,” “not who we are.” But the opposite turned out to be true. Mr. Trump is the dominant political figure of our age. Mr. Biden was the blip.
He told the South Dakotans to stay positive.
“That photo line of 20 people I just did,” he said, pausing to make the sign of the cross. “I couldn’t help but walk away incredibly encouraged.”
He was reaching the end of his remarks. “Thank you so much for being so nice to me,” he said. He turned to his right, walked slowly down off the stage and out the back door of the Best Western.
