Joe Biden, Temporary King

President Joe Biden may be pushed aside in Washington, D.C., but, as far as he is concerned, in Wilmington, he is still on top of the world. And why not? His name is on the city’s Amtrak station, the nearest highway rest stop, and a slew of other civic landmarks. Local restaurants for decades have claimed to be his “favorite” lunch spot. Ice cream parlors all over the state proudly feature photos of him sampling their wares. He has spent about 40 percent of his term out of the White House, mostly on vacation in Delaware. And since he announced that he would not be seeking the Oval Office again, Biden has been at home more than ever, forsaking the bitter present to sink into sepia-toned reminiscences of past glory. 

Whenever possible, Biden uses his remaining powers to compel others to share in these reveries. Recently he invited the heads of state for India, Japan, and Australia to Wilmington to discuss their alliance with the United States against China. It was the first time the president had brought any foreign leaders to Delaware—also probably the last time—and Biden invested the affair with all the “personal touches” of an old man reorganizing his curio cabinet. He personally led the three on a tour of his house, a stately DuPont mansion in the Wilmington suburbs built on a manmade lake—“the kind of place a thousand Italian guys died building,” Richard Ben Cramer once remarked. There, he regaled them with tales of how he bought the estate and fixed it up. Since his days in the Senate, the house has been Biden’s obsession: He famously rode the Amtrak home every day just so he could wake up under its roof. On those trips, he would often study architectural magazines or dream up new improvements to his property. Soon he will have all the time in the world for it. 

But a tour of the house alone wasn’t enough. Biden also dragged his visiting dignitaries down memory lane at his old high school, where for two days they discussed foreign policy—and how far Uncle Joe has come since his teenaged stutter. In high school, as Biden frequently reminds his audiences, he was a real dud: the poor kid, not exactly popular, until he overcame his speech impediment. Just like Demosthenes, who recited aloud for hours on end with pebbles in his mouth, he trained himself out of it. And now look at me, Biden declared to his captive audience: “I don’t think the headmaster of this school thought I’d be presiding over a meeting like this!” The respective heads of India, Japan, and Australia politely applauded the senescent in the president’s chair, perhaps smiling inwardly at his impending departure from global politics. 

Biden’s communications advisor John Kirby glossed the president’s antics that weekend as public-mindedness—“showing a place and a community that shaped so much of the public servant and the leader that he became”—but the truth behind Biden’s odd behavior is something stranger. It isn’t just that the addled president, newly cut loose by his own party and free from the scrutiny of the other, is running victory laps in his head. It is that because the president’s time is limited, it is his prerogative to run as wild as he pleases until at the appointed hour his handlers lead him away from sight. What I mean is that Joe Biden is the American incarnation of the temporary king, that ancient, savage office so vividly described in J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough. 

The origins of the temporary king are obscure, but its practice more or less runs along these lines. Every year during a public festival in ancient Babylon, Frazer writes, the true king temporarily abdicated his office to an imposter. During that time, “a prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king’s concubines.” His brief rule always ended in execution: “At the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled.” Why? Hard to say. Frazer theorizes that the temporary king was a salvific figure, a fool who died in the robes of royalty to redeem the world, prefiguring, and, by the hard-headed Scotsman’s lights, discrediting, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. 

In any case, I have found it useful, especially in recent months, to think of Biden’s presidency as in the tradition of temporary kingship. The United States is not Babylon. But the analogy is compelling nonetheless. No one, not even within Biden’s party, has ever considered him a real president. Rather, he was a sacrifice offered up in the hopes that a real president might be found. His nomination in 2020 was a stopgap solution, a fix put in place until the Democratic Party could find a more suitable leader among the also-rans. (The same could be said of the electorate’s thoughts in November.) His term was similarly unreal, marked by the continuation and resurrection of both his predecessors’ policies, a holding pattern from which the future real president would emerge. And his downfall, if Biden’s premature ejection from power could be dignified with that grand term, was in actuality only the end of the dream, for, at last, the true president had been discovered, at the side of the temporary king all along.  

Of course, there are other elements of the temporary king which do not pertain to Biden at all. (In some traditions, Frazer tells us, he is required to stand on one foot for his entire short reign.) But others are striking. Frazer writes that in 16th-century Persia the Shah Abbas the Great was once warned by his astrologers that a serious danger hung over the person of the king. Remembering the custom of temporary kingship, Abbas abdicated the throne, giving it over to a Christian, hoping that the danger might fall upon him instead. “The substitute was accordingly crowned, and for three days,” Frazer writes, “he enjoyed not only the name and the state but the power of the king. At the end of his brief reign he was put to death: the decree of the stars was fulfilled by this sacrifice; and Abbas, who reascended his throne in a most propitious hour, was promised by his astrologers a long and glorious reign.”   

This, if we can substitute a literal for political execution, is more or less the story of Joe Biden, that unfortunate man who, during a period of turmoil, was placed in the role of the presidency to absorb the shocks and blows of national distress until the time came that he could be safely removed. Now that time is fast coming—actually, it is arriving in slow motion—and Biden is spending his remaining days doing as any other temporary king would: eating, drinking, and making merry. He knows his time is limited, so he’s going out on top, even if only in Delaware.