On Tuesday’s PBS News Hour, they spent six minutes playing a fraction of their “Settle In” podcast interview with Democrat historian (and former Newsweek editor) Jon Meacham. Anchor Amna Nawaz and Meacham would explore the “state of our democracy,” which somehow always comes back around to how democracy and the Democrats are treated as the same thing. If the Democrats suffer, democracy suffers.
Meacham was explicit on Morning Joe in November of 2023: “It’s not just President Biden who is on the ballot and being judged, it’s really the entire constitutional order.... President Biden is a kind of stand-in for the American system.” So Nawaz awkwardly asked about the 2024 debacle:
PBS anchor Amna Nawaz gently asks lefty historian/Biden speechwriter Jon Meacham about Biden's place in history (and if made a misstep or two). Meacham calls it a "classic tragedy" and wishes Biden had taken a different path. BUT in the weeks before the debate debacle, Meacham… pic.twitter.com/EptYop4SBS
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) May 28, 2026
AMNA NAWAZ: It's worth noting you're close to President Biden. You have called him a friend. You have called him an American hero. You have advised him on his speeches. Understanding there were a lot of other forces at play, the pandemic as you mentioned, and a lot of other things happening in the country bubbling up for a generation at least, how do you look back now on what President Biden as a leader and his administration did or didn't do that also helped to get us where we are today?
And not just the decision to run again, right, which has been called into question and examined a dozen different ways, but also maybe not going after some of the officials from the first Trump administration the way some Democrats wanted them to. How do you look at that now?
Nawaz downplayed how Meacham was a Biden speechwriter -- not full-time, but the New York Times wrote in 2020 that he was "both writing drafts of speeches and offering edits on many of Mr. Biden’s big addresses." This makes him invested in adjusting Biden's place in history
JON MEACHAM: So the first answer before I blather on is, I'm not sure. My friend Michael Beschloss, our friend Michael Beschloss likes to say it takes 20, 25 years to be able to assess a presidency in historical terms, as opposed to journalistic ones. And I think that's true. It was true for Truman. It was true for George Herbert Walker Bush. And it's going to be true for President Biden.
Fact check: In the fall of 2021, we noted Beschloss and Meacham were already comparing Biden to FDR and Eisenhower just for passing an infrastructure bill. But let's continue:
MEACHAM: What happened with President Biden and choosing to run again was in many ways a classic tragedy. And I mean it this way. The personal characteristics that enabled Joe Biden from 1972 until 2020 to survive and even ultimately thrive amid immense personal tragedy and remarkable political setback and stasis, right, those characteristics prevented him from stepping away.
I do not think -- I would bet the mortgage on this. I don't think President Biden was clinging to power because he wanted an airplane or because he loved power so much. It was a result of his resilience, his determination to keep moving no matter what, and not ever surrendering.
And he believed that he was the person who was the catcher in the rye, if you will, between the country and Trump, President Trump. And he was wrong. But this is -- from Greek tragedy through Shakespeare, this is a fundamental human drama. The characteristics that propelled him to the pinnacle of power prevented him from doing what he needed to do to step away from it.
Do I wish that history had turned in a different way? Do I wish President Biden had made different decisions in his last two years? Absolutely. What in one season was admirable resilience became in a different season a blindness to reality.
Who was blind? Meacham was demanding that voters re-elect the mentally failing president right up until the debate debacle. In April, he insisted “there is a patriotic duty to support President Biden against Donald Trump,” and in May, he fussed that some people might not like Trump, but vote for him: “there is no but. It's got to be, 'Yeah, Trump is that, and, I'm going to vote against him.'”
When Biden finally folded in July, Meacham switched to ring-kissing the other way: "one of the most remarkable acts of leadership in our history. An act of self-sacrifice that places him in the company of George Washington, who also stepped away from the presidency."
