WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden used his farewell address to the nation Wednesday to warn of an “oligarchy” of the ultra-wealthy taking root in the country and of a “tech-industrial complex” that is infringing on Americans’ rights and the future of democracy.
Speaking from the Oval Office as he prepares to hand over power Monday to President-elect Donald Trump, Biden sounded the alarm over the accumulation of power and wealth among a small few.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said, drawing attention to “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people. Dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”
Invoking President Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex when he left office, Biden added, “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to our country as well.”
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Biden sounded the alarm as some of the world’s richest individuals and titans of its technology industry flocked to Trump’s side in recent months, particularly after his November victory. Billionaire Elon Musk spent more than $100 million to help Trump get elected, and executives like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos donated to Trump’s inaugural committee and made pilgrimages to Trump’s private club in Florida for an audience with the president-elect.
Biden also called for a constitutional amendment to end immunity for sitting presidents, after the Supreme Court granted Trump sweeping protections last year from criminal liability over his role in trying to undermine his 2020 defeat to Biden.
Biden used his 15-minute address to offer a model for a peaceful transfer of power and — without mentioning Trump by name — raise concerns about his successor.
It marked a striking admonition by Biden, who is departing the national stage after more than 50 years in public life, as he has struggled to define his legacy against the return of Trump to the Oval Office. The president warned Americans to be on guard for their freedoms and their institutions during a turbulent era of rapid technological and economic change.
Biden isn’t leaving the White House in the way that he hoped. He originally tried to run for reelection, brushing aside voters’ concerns that he would be 86 years old at the end of a second term. After stumbling in a debate with Republican Donald Trump, Biden dropped out of the race under pressure from his own party.
He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November. Now Biden is preparing to cede power to someone he’s described as an existential threat to the country’s democratic institutions.
50 years in politics
The speech Wednesday night capped not only Biden’s presidency but his five decades in politics. He was once the country’s youngest senator at 30 years old after being elected to represent his home state of Delaware in 1972.
Biden pursued the presidency in 1988 and 2008 before becoming Barack Obama’s vice president. After serving two terms, Biden was considered to be retired from politics but he returned to center stage as the unlikely Democratic nominee in 2020, successfully ousting Trump from the White House.
“Nowhere else on Earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, one day sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as President of the United States,” Biden wrote in an open letter to the American public released Wednesday morning. “I have given my heart and my soul to our nation. And I have been blessed a million times in return with the love and support of the American people.”
Upon assuming the presidency, Biden promised nothing short of a national exorcism when he took office. He wanted to “restore the soul” of the country and prove that Trump was only a footnote in the American story, not its next chapter.
The pitch was “let’s try to get things back to normal as best we can,” said Sean Wilentz, a historian who met twice with Biden in the White House.
It didn’t work out that way. Despite exceeding expectations when it came to cutting bipartisan deals and rallying foreign allies, Biden was unable to turn the page on Trump. Four years after voters chose Biden over Trump, they picked Trump to replace Biden. It’s an immutable and crushing outcome for an aging politician in the last act of his long career, one that will likely become the prism for how Biden is viewed through history.
“The fact is, the abnormality did not end,” said Wilentz, a professor at Princeton University. “He may not have appreciated what he was up against.”
Trump’s impending return underscores the limits of Biden’s ability to reshape the country’s trajectory as his celebrated predecessors were able to do. With the end of his single term only days away, it’s unclear how Biden will reconcile his hopes for his presidency with the results.
Unfulfilled promise
In his open letter released earlier in the day, Biden alluded to the fact that a central promise of his 2020 campaign remains unfulfilled.
“I ran for president because I believed that the soul of America was at stake. The very nature of who we are was at stake,” Biden wrote, adding, “And, that’s still the case.”
The country isn’t waiting for his assessment. Only a quarter of Americans said Biden, a Democrat, was a good or great president, according to the latest poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s lower than the views of the twice-impeached Trump, a Republican, when he left office soon after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and during the deadly depths of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden’s friends and supporters insist that views will shift over time.
“We lost a close election under closely contested, hard fought issues, but that doesn’t mean that what we did and how we did it hasn’t helped change the country for the better,” said Steve Ricchetti, a longtime adviser to Biden who served as White House counselor.
Ricchetti argued that Biden provided a model for repairing damage caused by Trump, one that will help another president down the line.
“There is no question that this is a strategy that will enable a successful presidency into the future,” he insisted.
Trump will enter office Monday promising an even more aggressive effort to reshape the country than his turbulent first term. His comeback is calling into question — even among Biden loyalists — whether the outgoing president was only a fleeting reminder of a fading political era.
“Which one is the aberration, Biden or Trump?” said Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Biden’s home state of Delaware. “Has the United States permanently moved in a populist and right-wing direction, and Biden was just a temporary interruption?”
Coons isn’t sure yet.
“I think it is an open question,” he said.
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