President Joe Biden has been making a flurry of last-minute moves before ending his 50-year political career, and a former White House aide believes that betrays a lack of confidence in his legacy.
The outgoing president has issued orders to limit offshore drilling, speed up the construction of data centers for artificial intelligence and promote cybersecurity, in addition to reaffirming his legacy as the president who has issued the most pardons and commutations in history by commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 nonviolent drug offenders, and former White House spokesperson Pete Seat offered an analysis of those moves on CNN.
"A lot of presidents do this on their way out the door," said Seat, who served under George W. Bush. "Certainly a flurry, and unique and unprecedented in ways – you know, Hunter Biden, we can put that aside. But the sense that I've gotten just watching Joe Biden in these final weeks is this is not someone who is at peace with his legacy and the way his presidency is ending, and I think some of these decisions are maybe hail Marys to leave some kind of legacy that is more positive than it has been up to this point."
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The president's relative absence from the public stage in the final weeks of his term is also telling, according to Seat.
"Even the fact that he's only done a couple of interviews on the way out, only one television interview last night, only one print interview with USA Today – usually a president would be doing a flurry of interviews in addition to those executive orders," Seat said.
Meghan Hays, a former White House director of message planning under Biden, agreed that the president hadn't done enough to claim credit for the ceasefire-for-hostages deal between Israel and Hamas, which Trump has boasted was his doing.
"You can't judge a legacy here in just the last couple of days of what he's doing," Hays said. "He's had 50 years of public service, so his legacy will be long past some of these executive actions that he's doing in the last couple of days. On the issue of the ceasefire, I do think that that Joe Biden is being more gracious to Donald Trump and giving them credit, saying they were being brought in. But the fact of the matter is, this was their framework from May, as the president announced, so they should get the lion's share of the credit. They've been over there trying to deal with this negotiation, but also Donald Trump's team was was impactful here, and so they can split credit."
"I'm not sure that these two men can figure out how to do that," Hays added. "I think there's some other things at play here, but I do think that both both of these teams deserve credit to get these hostages home."
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