রাস্তায় কোন ব্যান্ড দল ঢোল বাজিয়ে গেলে, কোন রাজনৈতিক অনুষ্ঠানের আনন্দ মিছিল, ঈদের আনন্দ। এক কথায় বাড়ীর সামনের এই রাস্তায় কিছু ঘটলেই আমার ছোট বোন ঘড়ের যেখানেই থাকুক, যে অবস্থায়ই থাকুক ছুটে যেত। গেইটের দরজা খোলার মত বুদ্ধি তার ছিলনা। গেইটের সামান্য ফাঁকা জায়গা দিয়ে তাকিয়ে দেখার চেষ্টা করত কি হচ্ছে। ঢোল ও ঝুমঝুমির শব্দ তাকে অত্যন্ত আকর্ষণ করত। শুনলেই ছুটে যেত। এরকম হাজারো স্মৃতি আমার চোখ আজ ছলছল করে দেয়। কিছুক্ষণ আগেই মাইক বাজিয়ে একজন গান গাইতে গাইতে গেল! আমার বোন আর ছুটে গেল না!

Since it's the last day of the Biden presidency, I thought it would be appropriate today to look back at the last four years and do a bit of a retrospective on Biden's term overall. This is the last time I plan to talk about Joe Biden for quite some time, so I'm not going to pull any punches.
It is easy to frame Biden's shortcomings as president as a series of failures and inadequacies, things he wasn't able to do or was prevented from doing by circumstance or Republican opposition. Biden himself has often retreated to this narrative, which helps square how frequently he promised one thing and then failed to deliver. He'd love to cancel all student debt for everyone, but Presidents don't have the power to do that. [1] He promised "Day One" reversals of Trump's immigration and border restrictions, but these things "take time to undo". [2] You know the script.
I believe this framing to be mostly inaccurate, and I think it obscures Biden's own politics quite a bit and relieves him of any responsibility of agency for his own decisions. Biden doesn't pursue more than piecemeal student loan forgiveness because Biden was one of the original architects of the student loan industry as it currently exists, and the system that generates obscene wealth for lenders by locking millions of borrowers in perpetual, generational debt is functioning exactly to his satisfaction. Biden does not stop deportations or halt construction on Trump's border wall because Biden does not want or need these things to stop. My most enduring observation about Joe Biden is that he is a conservative. He does not make things better because he does not want to. This "Aw, shucks" routine where he pays lipservice to progressive causes while being systematically prevented from making progress is a smokescreen. Progressive interests are not his interests. He is not a progressive. He is a conservative, and he governs as a conservative.
I believe that the last few years will be seen in hindsight as the final window during which meaningful action could have been taken on any number of progressive issues before things were made irreparably worse under Trump 2.0. I believe Biden's term will come to be understood as the last opportunity when meaningful steps could have been taken in anticipation or prevention for the coming disasters, and that Biden will be known for near-universally failing to meet that moment. That is what I believe we will come to see as Biden's legacy.
Issues that defined Biden's term include the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, which was began during Trump's first term and was actively going on during the 2020 election, and which continued long after Biden took office; immigration, which had been one of Trump's tentpole issues during his first term; policing, which had come to the forefront for a lot of Americans during the summer 2020 protests after the murder of George Floyd; climate change, which wreaked environmental disaster throughout Biden's term and which likely reached a new tipping point by the time he left office; queer and transgender rights, which have been under steady onslaught by conservative legislators in dozens of states throughout the country over the past several years; and the finally, the bloody and catastrophic war which has been waged Gaza over the last year of Biden's administration. Let's take a look back at some highlights from Biden's term and examine his legacy on each of these issues.
On the pandemic: Biden took office 1 year into the Covid-19 pandemic, inheriting a national and global crisis of unprecedented kind and scale. Throughout his 2020 campaign, Biden had hammered Trump for his insufficient response to the pandemic [3], which no doubt played a large role in his defeating Trump in the election. Yet from the start, Biden's pandemic policy closely matched Trump's. On his first day, Biden announced plans to reopen schools in his first 100 days [4], even as the first Covid vaccine was still under review by the FDA, and it would be June 2022 before CDC guidance would allow vaccines for children under 5 [5]. In this way, it was immediately apparent that Biden's priority as president would be a reopening of institutions and the economy and a return to "business as usual", even if such moves contradicted public safety or "trusting science". When the administration did take action to protect the public, it was slow to do so: For example, while Covid self-tests had existed and were approved by the FDA by the end of 2020, it would be 2022 before the first wave of free tests would be made available to households (Biden's Press Secretary, Jen Psaki famously scoffed at the idea of offering free tests when it was posed as an option by a journalist in the press room, and it was likely the backlash against her which prompted the shift in policy) [6]. When Biden took office in 2021, the CDC had tallied between 350,000 and 400,000 Covid deaths so far; more than 450,000 more would die in the first year of Biden's term [7]. By mid-2022, the total death toll in the U.S. would be over 1 million [8], with an estimated 1.2 million more disabled [9]. The Biden administration formally ended the declared national health emergency for Covid in 2023 [10], ending a range of benefits and temporary protections for Americans including free at-home Covid tests, expanded Medicare coverage to pay for vaccine boosters, and temporary forbearance on student debt collection [11]. At the time of the announcement, in January 2023, the U.S. was still averaging over 3,000 weekly deaths from Covid.
On immigration: Despite campaigning against Trump's inhumane border policies and riding a wave of pro-immigration sympathy into office, Biden's administration was largely defined by a continuation and expansion of Trump's own immigration policies. In February 2021, shortly after taking office, Biden's DHS issued new ICE guidance which expanded ICE's powers and made it easier for ICE to detain and deport immigrants [12] [13]. At the same time, ICE opened its first new migrant facility specifically for detained children [14]. Photos from the facility would be released in March 2021 showing children huddled under foil blankets, sleeping on thin mattresses the floor. [15] (All this, despite Biden's earlier campaign promises to halt all deportations for his first 100 days in office, and the frequent calls to free the "kids in cages" and stop separating families at the border.) Major media outlets reported that the number of children detained along the southern border tripled in the subsequent two weeks, although Biden's CBP commissioner and the White House Press Secretary both refused to confirm the number of unaccompanied children in custody [16] [17]. Throughout Biden's term, his administration has also continued construction of Trump's widely-maligned border wall [18], and has continued deporting immigrants at record rates, surpassing even Trump to reach a ten-year high of 271,000 deportations in 2024 alone [19].
On policing, the story is similar: Biden rode into office on a wave of anti-police sentiment and a groundswell of advocacy, which peaked in summer 2020 during his presidential campaign following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police [20]. Once in office, however, he has continually offered more money and resources, not just to ICE and border control but to police generally. In his 2022 State of the Union address, Biden famously quipped: "The answer is not to defund the police, it's the fund the police! Fund them! Fund them!"[21] In May 2022, Biden encouraged states and cities to spend their Covid relief and stimulus funds to hire more police officers. In 2023, the Biden administration announced an additional 334 million dollars in Justice Department grants to law enforcement agencies to use for hiring [22]. In fact, Biden's term has over seen an all-time high in federal subsidies for police [23], with sobering results: According to police violence watchdog groups, police in the U.S. killed more people in 2024 than in any other year on record, surpassing more than 3 killings by police officers per day nationwide [24].
On climate: In 2021, Biden's administration announced the opening of 80 million acres for new oil & gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Over 1 billion barrels of oil are estimated to be produced from the sale over the next 50 years [25]. Biden's administration would later open up even more additional drilling in Alaska [26] and the Gulf [27], and would approve oil and gas drilling permits at a faster rate than Trump [28]. Biden's willingness to keep expanding new drilling during his term is the capstone to more than a century of destructive industrialization, the effects of which we are all witnessing on a near-daily basis now. Wildfires of unprecedented destructive strength [29], hundred- and thousand-year storms [30], brutal cold snaps [31], and so on are only becoming more common, not only in the seasons and parts of the country where they have always occurred, but across bigger and bigger regions and at more and more times of the year [32]. And of course these effects are not limited to the U.S.: environmental devastation from man-made climate change is producing "heat domes" that exacerbate air pollution and other health dangers in areas throughout Asia, Africa, North and South America, and Europe [33]. 2024 was the not only the hottest recorded year in human history, but it crossed the crucial threshold of 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures [34], signaling that opportunity to avoid irreparable climate disaster may now be past. Things from here will only get more and more severe as climate disasters continue to escalate - although future policies may still be able to influence just how bad things get.
On trans rights: Anti-trans legislation has exploded all over the country during Biden's term, primarily (though not exclusively) in Republican state legislatures. The targets for these efforts have been ever-shifting, from "parental rights" (i.e. rights to abuse your trans child), to restricting access to trans healthcare and puberty blockers, to banning trans athletes from participating in gendered sports, to bathroom bans, to "cross-dressing" and drag bans (in practice: bans on trans people wearing gender-affirming clothing). Every year of Biden's administration has been a record year in terms of number of anti-trans bills introduced nationwide [35], with more than six hundred such bills in 2024 alone. The response to this rising tide of anti-trans legislation from the Biden administration has been practically non-existent: It has introduced no bills and issued no executive actions to protect trans minors or adults from these discriminatory laws; nothing to enshrine access to HRT for trans adults or puberty blockers for trans youth; nothing to ban conversion therapy or prevent states from forcibly detransitioning people; nothing to protect trans athletes' ability to play on their teams; nothing to limit the drag and bathroom laws that threaten to make existing as a trans person in public a criminal offense. The few times that Biden has been seen taking action on LGBT issues during his term, it has been to compromise on trans rights and find common cause with Republicans [36]. With Trump's return nigh, the anti-trans wave has now reached the federal level, with legislation targeting trans adults and children already being advanced in just the first month of 2025 [37].
On the Israel-Gaza war: There are no words to describe the horror that has unfolded in Gaza since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks. The wanton destruction we've seen predicated on that attack has seen a densely-populated urban center made largely uninhabitable; nearly 50,000 people killed [38], primarily noncombatants; and 9 in every 10 surviving Gazans displaced from their homes by the Israeli war machine [39]. Joe Biden's role in facilitating and abetting this massacre cannot be understated: As the most powerful geopolitical force in the world, Israel's closest and most supportive ally, and the producer of much of its arsenal, the United States has unique influence over Israel's ability to wage war. The American President, more than any other person on earth, save the Israeli Prime Minister, has the opportunity to directly shape Israeli policy and decide what level of destructive capability it is allowed to hold and unleash on populated civilian centers such as Gaza. Not to mince words: That the United States has continued to support the mass murder of civilians in Gaza, has continued supplying bombs and planes and guns and drones to the Israeli military, and has failed to apply sufficient pressure to reach a ceasefire before now makes the American government, and Joe Biden personally, directly culpable in the overwhelming death toll.
On these issues and a range of others, Joe Biden's legacy is that he has had a unique opportunity to apply his will and the powers of his office towards making things better, towards protecting people's lives, towards preventing or mitigating impending disaster, and yet he has chosen at virtually every turn to abdicate that power and instead continue "business as usual". Even when it meant people dying. Even when it meant people dying.
Trump's reelection is a disaster. His presence at the helm will in all likelihood, make every one of the above issues worse. The world the next Democratic President - if there is one - will inherit will no doubt be far worse than the one we have today. But make no mistake: Things will get worse under Trump in large part because of actions taken, or not taken, by Joe Biden. Biden's failures at confronting the pandemic, at mitigating climate change, at standing up for marginalized peoples have left us more vulnerable to the damage Trump will do on each of these fronts. Trans people are worse off in the face of an ascendant Trump presidency because Joe Biden didn't help us first. The climate is going to continue to worsen under Trump because Biden didn't use his chance - perhaps all of our last chance - to radically shift climate policy towards a more sustainable future. And to be really reductive: If Biden had put up more of a fight on any of these fronts, done more to protect and benefit all of us in the face of these varied disasters, we might not be looking down the barrel of a second Trump term in the first place.
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