You May Not Agree

At Least Consider These Thoughts

Year-end recaps are a seasonal feature. I want to write about two subjects I have dealt with before, adding comments reflecting how I think these issues have continued to evolve:

(1) The ignominious end of Joe Biden’s presidency.

After Joe Biden’s campaign for a second term collapsed and Donald Trump’s subsequent re-election as president, I wrote a piece headlined “So Long, Joe,” making the point that presidential legacies tend to change over time and that Biden was not necessarily destined to be remembered primarily for the way his presidency ended. More recently, I published a piece called “Our Vulnerable Presidents,” noting that every president since John F. Kennedy has, one way or another, left office dead, defeated, or diminished.

The political and personal consensus on Biden has been especially harsh, not including a diagnosis of aggressive cancer. Vituperation has been consistent across the media spectrum, and bipartisan, including Kamala Harris’s memoir of her election defeat, in which she assails the way she was treated as vice president.

Biden’s worst perceived offense was his insistence on running against Donald Trump when he was demonstrably incapable of fulfilling the demands of another term.

So, here’s an additional comment. Despite having received the largest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history, from literally the day of his inauguration Joe Biden was on a downward curve of respect. I considered it the universal Biden “shrug.” Legislative accomplishments, surprising midterm election results, parrying Trump’s relentless campaign of lies and insults — none of these ever gave him a popular lift.

A man proud and ambitious enough to have been in national politics for fifty years plainly chose to defy the narrative of his failings rather than acquiesce and announce his retirement. He was probably also hearing from his advisers that the naysayers were wrong about him. There was a tug of war between Team Biden, which thought it deserved a second term, and virtually the entire media and political establishment. By the time of his disastrous debate performance, Biden was exhausted, physically and I suspect spiritually.

Biden definitely was a loser in the end. By now there is no doubt that with the reelection of Donald Trump, so was the country. (Trump is now falling asleep in meetings, listening to his cabinet tell him what an amazing man he is.)

(2) The Washington Post in the Bezos era has lost its way, so cancel it.

Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, when it was in financial freefall, resurrected it for some years, and then for a variety of business and personal reasons has let it slide, while he concentrates on his passions for space exploration and his new wife.

There was particular criticism when Bezos revamped the Post’s opinion section to better align with what he said were his own beliefs and joined the tech elites in their obeisances to Trump.

On the matter of the Post’s editorial page positions, here are two things to remember about the Post during what is now considered its ascent to national prominence. In the 1960s, as the Vietnam war escalated, under the executive editorship of J. Russell Wiggins, the newspaper was such a staunch a supporter of Lyndon Johnson’s ultimately tragic pursuit of victory that in 1968 Johnson named Wiggins as his last ambassador to the United Nations.

And as the 1972 presidential election approached, and months after the Post began its historic coverage of Watergate — arguably its greatest achievement — the Post endorsed Richard Nixon for reelection, one of 668 newspapers across the country to do so. Only 38 newspapers endorsed the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, who lost in a forty-nine-state landslide victory for Nixon.

I have written about the Post twice this year. In “Jeff, You Own the Post. Pay For It.” ( I argued that as the owner and with his enormous resources Bezos should be doing everything possible to support the Post as a business and to maintain its indispensable role in delivering the news so essential to our democracy.

I also wrote “You Too Can Be a ‘Star,” making the point that the “stars” now leaving the Post for what they considered better options meant that there is room for newcomers to achieve stardom, by doing great work as their predecessors did.

I have never judged news organizations by their editorial-page opinions, or else I would have stopped reading the Wall Street Journal years ago. I rarely agree with its editorials, but I have always admired its news sections — and by the way, the Journal’s weekend book review pages are excellent.

The Washington Post’s news coverage is impressive in depth, range, and quality. To cancel a subscription, as so many readers have done because of their antagonism to Bezos, is a mistake when news of consequence is, let’s agree, not all that easy to find on social media and television news programming, which are now dominant as sources of infotainment. The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all holding their own, and I contend so is the Post, which appears in full 365 times a year.

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Ubiquitous criticism made Joe Biden more defensive than he might otherwise have been.

And disparaging the Washington Post in my view encourages Jeff Bezos’s indifference.

In both cases, the more I thought about these subjects, the more I believe certain public attitudes and actions have been corrosive, contributing significantly to the overall sense of living in extremely troubled times as we close out 2025.

Back in January.