‘The invisible man’: Joe Biden has disappeared in almost every way – except in Trump’s daily commentary

In bitter cold beneath the US Capitol dome, he walked to a marine helicopter and shared parting words with Donald Trump. Then, arriving at Joint Base Andrews, Joe Biden offered farewell remarks to his loyal staff. “We’re leaving office,” he said, “We’re not leaving the fight.”

But, one year later, Washington, and the world, have mostly moved on from the 46th president. Biden, 83, has been writing a lucrative memoir, planning a presidential library and fighting prostate cancer. He was once the most powerful man on the planet, but now Biden’s public appearances have been scarce and his influence has palpably diminished.

Chris Whipple, an author of books including The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House, said: “He’s been the invisible man. He’s been very smart to stay under the radar because the last thing the Democratic party needs is any reminders of his final year in office, his ill-starred 11th-hour abdication and the resulting defeat of Kamala Harris.”

Former presidents have by tradition tended to keep a low profile out of respect for the office, giving their successors time and space to find their feet and make the Oval Office their own. Trump, as ever, was an outlier as he continued to lambast Biden and falsely claim the 2020 election had been stolen during his political exile.

Biden, who surprised many with the scale and ambition of his legislative agenda during the first two years of his presidency, saw his opinion poll numbers sag as he neared the end of his term. A disastrous debate performance against Trump fuelled concerns about his age and forced him to abandon his bid for re-election.

A year ago this week he cut a forlorn figure sitting beside his wife, Jill, in the US Capitol Rotunda in Washington as Trump delivered an inaugural address that spelled out his determination to erase the Biden legacy.

Whereas Biden had cast 6 January 2021 as a dark day for US democracy, Trump used his first day to issue sweeping pardons to more than 1,500 rioters, installed 2020 election deniers in senior posts and used state machinery to reframe the assault as an episode of patriotic protest.

While Biden signed the biggest climate spending bill in history, Trump has mounted an unrestrained assault on clean-energy initiatives and championed fossil fuels as the engine of cheaper energy and the burgeoning AI sector.

Trump has rejected Biden’s faith in professionalism and expertise, dismissing thousands of career officials, imposing loyalty tests and hollowing out agencies previously insulated from political interference. He elevated Robert F Kennedy Jr and other fringe voices to influential positions in healthcare.

The president has purged diversity, equity and inclusion frameworks from government and mounted a broad offensive on universities and public bodies he blames for the Biden-era “woke” agenda. It comes alongside an aggressive hardening of immigration policy, both illegal and legal.

And on the global stage, Trump is sketching a new world order based on power, strength and self-interest, straining relations with allies through threats of seizing land and imposing tariffs and economic coercion. It is a far cry from Biden’s commitment to postwar structures such as Nato and support for Ukraine.

In the face of such an onslaught it is Barack Obama, 64, who has been more politically active, taking part in dozens of public engagements including campaign rallies during last November’s elections.

Biden’s forays into public life, by contrast, have been few and far between. In May his post-presidential office announced that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones.

In July he spoke at the Society for Human Resource Management’s convention in San Diego, California, and said he was receiving calls “from a number of European leaders asking me to get engaged”. Biden also revealed he was “working like hell” to write a 500-page memoir, which he reportedly sold for $10m to Little, Brown & Co, an imprint within Hachette.

However, NBC News reported that Biden was struggling to raise money for a presidential library from donors who feel fatigued and let down. Obama’s presidential library is due to open in Chicago this spring.

In October, Biden addressed an audience in Boston after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Edward M Kennedy Institute. “Friends, I can’t sugar-coat any of this. These are dark days,” Biden said. He then predicted the country would “find our true compass again” and “emerge as we always have – stronger, wiser and more resilient, more just, so long as we keep the faith”.

But Democrats have shown little appetite for such interventions. Many still blame Biden for stubbornly clinging on to the 2024 presidential nomination until it was too late, giving Harris only 107 days to forge a campaign of her own. His failure to prevent Trump’s return to the Oval Office is seen as an indelible stain on his legacy.

Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, said: “He left office on a low and even Democrats feel like they were misled, so it’s gonna take a while for his reputation to return. He had a good one for the first couple of years but that’s not what people remember of his presidency. They remember how he went out, not how he came in.”

Now regarded as yesterday’s news, Biden is fading more quickly from the collective consciousness than most ex-presidents. But if anyone is keeping his memory alive, it is Trump and his fellow Republicans. The 79-year-old incumbent constantly references his predecessor in speeches and at press conferences, often with insults such as “Crooked Joe” and “Sleepy Joe”.

Trump installed a “presidential walk of fame” along the White House’s west colonnade, featuring portraits of past presidents, replacing Biden’s portrait with an autopen image to mock his age and legitimacy. An accompanying plaque calls him “by far, the worst President in American History”.

Luntz added: “It feels like the election isn’t over. It feels like it’s being rerun. It’s Groundhog Day. The election’s being run again and again and again.”

The White House has opened an investigation into the Biden administration’s use of the presidential autopen, which Trump has called “one of the biggest scandals in the history of our country”. Republicans in the House of Representatives launched investigations asserting that Biden’s closest advisers covered up a physical and mental decline during his presidency. The Senate started a series of hearings focused on his mental fitness.

But political commentators are sceptical that, more than a year into Trump’s presidency, efforts to make the electorate look back in anger at the 46th president will have much purchase.

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “Based on survey evidence, Trump’s effort to blame Biden for the current state of the economy is falling flat with the American people. By a margin of better than two to one, they say it’s Trump’s economy, not Biden’s, so from that standpoint rattling on about Biden on the most important issue facing the country is manifestly not helping him.”