Steven Beschloss: What Will You Miss about the Last Four Years? [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

Steven Beschloss - What Will You Miss about the Last Four Years?

A Saturday prompt

Steven Beschloss
Jan 18, 2025



Whatever you think about the presidency of Joe Biden and his policy choices, accomplishments and failures, no one can deny that he is a real and empathic human being. He’s an emotional man, one who’s not afraid to express his tender feelings. That particularly includes his love for his wife, Jill, with whom he’s been married for 47 years. Just as he was departing Delaware in 2021 to head to the White House, the president-elect said, “She makes me strong, as Ernest Hemingway wrote, ‘in all the broken places.’”

We have regularly seen that expression of love not just in words, but in his deeds. The way he would hold her hand, touch her cheek and pause to look at her as if she were still his blushing young bride. In those early months, when they’d be on the White House lawn and playing with their dog, Champ, you could see the easy exchange between them. It was a welcome relief from the cold, frustrated and unhappy dynamic that we witnessed from Trump and his wife.

And when Champ passed away in June that first year, President Biden and the First Lady released a statement that you didn’t doubt was a genuine expression of their sorrow: “In our most joyful moments and in our most grief-stricken days, he was there with us, sensitive to our every unspoken feeling and emotion. We love our sweet, good boy and will miss him always."

In a couple of days, we will be careening into a second Trump regime. That means enduring an abundance of cruelty and hate, both in terms of policies and in the attitudes and expressions of the man who will occupy our White House. We already know that there’s little love to be found between the couple that the American electorate has chosen to reinstall. We already know that this man despises acts of kindness, doesn’t like dogs and prefers to surround himself with abusive predators. Love and decency—two ingredients in the package that defines authentic leadership and are sorely needed in powerful, high-visibility role models—will be absent for the next four years. That is just one of many tragedies that we will have to endure as we look forward toward better times.

/snip