By Hugo East
January 22, 2025

The administration of President Joseph R. Biden in its waning days had the lowest approval rating of any outgoing president since Jimmy Carter. The U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza and several other disastrous policies put a stain on the legacy of the outgoing administration that it dearly hopes to whitewash for the sake of posterity and perhaps ego.

As Biden’s term comes to an end, he has attempted to accomplish this rehabilitation as so many bourgeois politicians have before him: by staging attention-grabbing political stunts that contradict the conservative and genocidal policy priorities his administration demonstrated throughout his one and only term.

Between the launching of a deadly NATO war in Ukraine, the escalation of the U.S.-enabled genocide in Palestine, historic economic inflation, the increased precarity of the working class and the failed 2024 presidential campaign that he was forced to end, followed by the decisive loss to Donald Trump of his anointed successor, Kamala Harris, there is much to rehabilitate. The Democratic Party has shown it’s an imperialist pro-war party and is unresponsive to the needs of the multinational working class right here.

Taking credit for a ceasefire that Biden never wanted

After 470 days of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, a ceasefire began on Jan. 19, the last full day of the Biden term. Though the outgoing president said in a Jan. 15 statement that the ceasefire is a result of “dogged and painstaking American diplomacy” and that his administration “never ceased in their efforts to get this done,” that is a lie. That victory was due to the steadfastness of the Palestinian resistance and their allies, who had worldwide support.

The Biden administration never had that political will. Their attempt now to take credit for a ceasefire they have ardently opposed is crass political cover for a legacy disgraced by its perpetration of genocide.

An empty gesture for the Cuban people

Biden removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on Jan. 14 in an executive act that was rescinded upon Trump’s inauguration. Trump, after all, at the start of his first term, reversed President Barack Obama’s attempts to normalize relations with Cuba, and Trump’s attitude toward Cuba has not changed.

A 2015 Chicago Council poll found that 67% of Americans supported the United States ending the trade embargo with Cuba. The United Nations General Assembly voted again in October 2024 to end the blockade, 187 in favor, two against (Israel and the U.S.). By appearing to support the overwhelmingly popular cause of the Cuban people at a time when there will be no political consequences, Biden hopes to soften his indelible image as an enthusiastic caretaker of U.S. imperialism.

A hollow apology to Indigenous victims of genocide

Two weeks before the election, in October 2024, President Biden formally apologized for the federal government’s role in running boarding schools in the U.S. where thousands of Indigenous children endured abuse, neglect and eradication of their tribal identities, calling it “a blot on American history.”

This apology does nothing to assuage the devastation and genocide of Indigenous people, in light of the U.S.’s continued pursuit of substantially similar policies in its colonies, against other people of color and incarcerated people in the U.S. and against migrants (to name a few).

A concrete step Biden should have taken as soon as he took office, and one with real meaning, would have been to pardon ailing Indigenous 80-year-old political prisoner Leonard Peltier. Instead Biden waited until his last day in office to commute Peltier’s sentence to compassionate release, forcing him to now live under home confinement.

Honoring the victims of U.S. oppression

On Jan. 2 Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to 20 U.S. citizens who “have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.” Among the awardees was Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi, who was incarcerated in a United States concentration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. She filed a habeas corpus petition to the Supreme Court that led to the release of thousands of her fellow detainees as well as herself.

The award is another example of an attempt to sanitize the legacy of the United States’ attitude of contempt toward oppressed and marginalized populations. Official U.S. domestic and foreign policy has always been to oppress whoever suits U.S. actors as much as possible within the bounds of “respectable” liberal politics and only to relent when those who resist this oppression force its hand. Tsutsumi was one such resister, and Joe Biden redoubled U.S. hypocrisy by honoring her while the government continues to treat others in her position the same way it treated her.