It seems like an age since Joe Biden occupied the Oval Office, given the upheaval and shift unleashed since he returned to Delaware.
But a single individual in Washington never ceases to be preoccupied with the 46th president — his antecedent and successor.
Donald Trump seldom appears publicly without criticizing Biden’s measures or leveling an invective at his mental or physical fitness.
His fixation reveals profound personal and political aversion and resentment toward a predecessor who has exited the political arena. It is also constructed upon a base of Biden’s shortcomings, particularly regarding a surge of immigrants across the southern frontier and a record of heightened consumer costs.
Yet Trump’s own declining political standing prompts questions about the enduring viability of his singular focus on Biden strategy. After all, the former president has concluded his political run. Trump is presently in power. And electors remain unsatisfied.
“We took over a complete shambles from the Biden administration,” Trump stated on Monday, launching a convention about his $12 billion aid package for farmers. His own tariff conflict with China necessitated the rescue — but Trump held Biden accountable for agriculture’s difficulties.
It is not solely farms. Everything is Biden’s fault, according to Trump.
Difficulty in the automotive sector? Hold Biden responsible, as Trump asserted last week, declaring he was formally rescinding his predecessor’s “excessively restrictive” fuel economy mandates introduced to combat environmental change — a danger the current president overlooks.
What about the conflict in Ukraine that Trump pledged to resolve in 24 hours? That is Biden’s fault too, Trump asserts, as Moscow would never have advanced in 2022 had he remained in office. “It was Joe Biden’s war, not my war,” Trump told “60 Minutes” in November.
The incumbent has taken criticism due to the expense crisis. But he maintains Biden engendered it. “I inherited the worst inflation in memory,” he claimed, inaccurately, last week at a Cabinet conference. “There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.” Biden’s name was mentioned over 30 times, demonstrating that Trump’s deputies recognize one guaranteed method to gratify the chief: accuse his predecessor.
After two National Guard personnel were shot in Washington, DC, last month, allegedly by an Afghan man who aided the CIA during America’s lengthiest engagement, Trump placed the culpability on the disorderly exit from Afghanistan managed by “a flawed president, the worst in our nation’s history.” While the alleged perpetrator arrived in the US under Biden, he secured asylum during Trump’s second term. And Trump disregarded critiques that he endangered National Guard members by deploying them into US cities.
When Trump was assailed for pardoning a former Honduran head of state serving a 45-year federal sentence for narcotics distribution, he alleged the verdict was a “Biden fabrication.”
The president carried his Biden preoccupation into the realm of self-ridicule prior to Thanksgiving. “He employed an autopen last year for the turkeys’ amnesty,” Trump remarked.
One rationale is that he invariably requires an opponent. His pursuit of ascendancy relies on perpetually attacking adversaries. And he cannot let past disputes fade.
Trump’s disdain for his former adversary also appears genuinely personal. Perhaps unsurprising given that he faults the Democrat for engineering the legal charges he encountered following his initial term. (Biden consistently maintained that the Justice Department and local prosecutors acted without consulting the White House).
Trump is also harshly focused on the 83-year-old former president’s physical and cognitive sharpness both while in and out of office.
On Saturday, Trump recounted golfing with nine-time major victor Gary Player. “He’s 90 years old… he shot a 70 with me the other day. We’re playing quite far back too. He’s marvelous. Do you imagine Biden could do that? I doubt it, he cannot raise a club,” Trump remarked at a gathering for Kennedy Center awardees.
At 79, Trump is both proud and conceited about his conviction that he is fitter than Biden. But since he is once again the eldest individual to take the inauguration vow and witnessed Biden visibly age in office, does a flicker of apprehension also enter the president’s reflections? Occasionally, Trump suggests a tinge of regret regarding his mortality, even while asserting he remains in nearly superhuman condition. “I’ll inform you when something is amiss. That will happen someday. That awaits us all. But currently, I believe I am sharper than I was 25 years ago. But who really knows?” he observed during the Cabinet conference last week — at which time he appeared to drift off.
One element Trump cannot lay at Biden’s door
A sailboat sails past cargo containers stacked on a freight vessel at the Port of Los Angeles on June 25, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
A sailboat sails past cargo containers stacked on a freight vessel at the Port of Los Angeles on June 25, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. Mario Tama/Getty Images
There exists an alternative possible root of Trump’s fixation on Biden. Existence is arduous for a sitting president. Biden’s track record is legitimate material for scrutiny. But Trump’s own policies are now generating their own negative effects.
Despite the president’s firm denial, tariffs increase expenses for shoppers. And the president’s reluctance to match Biden’s extensive provisions of weaponry and materiel to Ukraine partly explains why Russia feels it possesses the leisure to persist with its conflict.
Electors are now seeking explanations from Trump, not Biden. After all, he is the one who depicted a grim vision of an America plagued by impoverishment and aggression and promised “I alone can remedy it” in 2016.
Still, Trump’s most extreme pronouncements contain a kernel of reality. If Biden’s tenure had been a stunning triumph, Trump would not now be in office. The former president’s stance of denial regarding an immigration crisis and an inflation surge played a significant role in many voters’ choice to grant Trump a second term in the White House.
And the former president’s decision to campaign again despite his advanced age resulted in a disastrous debate showing that led him to withdraw his candidacy and a series of occurrences that concluded with Trump’s reappointment.
Trump is far from the first president to assign blame to a predecessor. Biden’s whole presidency — especially during its initial grim months amid a pandemic — was an implicit censure of Trump. He blamed the Afghan withdrawal fiasco on his predecessor’s schedule. And he based his ill-fated re-election effort on a warning that Trump’s return would undermine America’s spirit.
President Barack Obama perfected the technique of blaming his predecessor, President George W. Bush, for the fiscal downturn he inherited in 2009. He continued this during his re-election campaign. “We have ensured to undertake everything possible to extricate ourselves from this immense pit I inherited,” Obama commented in 2012.
The contest of blame never concludes.
Vice President JD Vance previewed a potential campaign motif for the administration as it strives to defy political momentum ahead of the legislative elections next year when he attempted to shift culpability for the affordability crisis. “The deception is the notion that it is our fault and not the Democrats’ fault. And I do believe that is a completely bogus storyline,” he told NBC in an interview last week.
But the issue for the administration is that electors — who unlike Trump reside in the current moment — are unconvinced.
In a Fox News poll last month, 62% of Americans stated they held Trump accountable for present economic circumstances while 32% blamed Biden. Trump’s favorability rating rests at 39% in CNN’s poll average.
Surveys are one thing the president has yet to attribute to his predecessor. Though he likely would if he could.
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