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President Joe Biden still imagines that he could have won. Asked by USA Today’s Susan Page whether he could have beaten Donald Trump if he had stayed in the race, Biden responded: “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes.”

Reality thinks not.

Of course, we’ll never know for sure, but the evidence (including polling) suggests that he would have been crushed by an even larger margin than Kamala Harris was. Biden’s answer is a reminder that his legacy will be tarnished by his fundamental misreading of the moment and his own role in it.

To be sure, Biden can point to some impressive successes. He leaves behind a healthy and growing economy, a record of legislative accomplishment, and more than 230 judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice. And then there were the failures: the chaotic exit from Afghanistan; a massive surge of migrants at the border in 2023. Although Biden was not solely to blame for inflation—factors included the Federal Reserve’s low-interest-rate policy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—his spending policies contributed to the problem. And even though he rallied Europe to the defense of Ukraine, critics suggest that he also misread that moment—Phillips Payson O’Brien argued in The Atlantic in November that the Biden administration “treated the conflict like a crisis to be managed, not a war to be won.” Ukraine’s uncertain fate is now left to Biden’s successor.

A charismatic and energetic president might have been able to overcome these failures and win a run for reelection. Some presidents seize the public’s imagination; Biden barely even got its attention. He presumed that he could return to a Before Times style of politics, where the president was a backroom bipartisan dealmaker. Whereas Trump dominated the news, Biden seemed to fade into the background almost from the beginning, seldom using his bully pulpit to rally public support or explain his vision for the country. Trump was always in our faces, but it often felt like Biden was … elsewhere.

Biden also misread the trajectory of Trumpism. Like so many others, he thought that the problem of Trump had taken care of itself and that his election meant a return to normalcy. So he chose as his attorney general Merrick Garland, who seems to have seen his role as restoring the Department of Justice rather than pursuing accountability for the man who’d tried to overturn the election. Eventually, Garland turned the cases over to Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought indictments. But it was too late. With time running out and a Supreme Court ruling in favor of broad presidential immunity, Trump emerged unscathed. And then came the sad final chapter of Biden’s presidency, which may well overshadow everything else.

When he ran for president in 2020, Biden described himself as a “transition candidate” and a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders. But instead of stepping aside for those younger leaders, Biden chose to seek another term, despite the growing evidence of his decline. With the future of democracy at stake, Biden’s inner circle appeared to shield the octogenarian president. His team didn’t just insist that voters ignore what was in front of their eyes; it also maintained that the aging president could serve out another four-year term. Some Democrats clung to denial—and shouted down internal critics—until Biden’s disastrous debate performance put an end to the charade.

Even then, Biden stubbornly tried to hang on, before intense pressure from his own party forced him to drop out of the race in July. Now he is shuffling to the end of his presidency, already shunted aside by his successor and still in denial.

As the passing of Jimmy Carter reminds us, presidential legacies are complicated matters, and it is difficult to predict the verdict of history. But as Biden leaves office, he is less a transformational figure than a historical parenthesis. He failed to grasp both the political moment and the essential mission of his presidency.

Other presidents have misunderstood their mandate. But in Biden’s case, the consequences were existential: By his own logic, the Prime Directive of his presidency was to preserve democracy by preventing Donald Trump’s return to power. His failure to do so will likely be the lasting legacy of his four years in office.

Related:

Biden’s unpardonable hypocrisy How Biden made a mess of Ukraine

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The army of God comes out of the shadows. “The Palisades Fire is destroying places that I’ve loved.” Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Today’s News

Former President Jimmy Carter’s state funeral took place in Washington, D.C. Carter’s casket was flown to Georgia after; he will be buried in his hometown of Plains. At least five people are dead in the wildfires that have spread across parts of the Los Angeles area. More than 2,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed. New York’s highest court denied Donald Trump’s request to halt the sentencing hearing in his criminal hush-money case.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Early-career poetry often poses a tantalizing question: How did this poet start off so terrible—and end up so good? But a writer’s final works are compelling for a different reason, Walt Hunter writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

You’re Going to Die. That’s a Good Thing.

By Arthur C. Brooks

Death is inevitable, of course; the most ordinary aspect of life is that it ends. And yet, the prospect of that ending feels so foreign and frightening to us. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker explored this strangeness in his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, which led to the development by other scholars of “terror management theory.” This theory argues that we fill our lives with pastimes and distractions precisely to avoid dealing with death …

If we could resolve this dissonance and accept reality, wouldn’t life be better? The answer is most definitely yes.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Has anyone described the fear of dying more vividly than the 19th-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich? In that novella, published in 1886, the protagonist lives the conventional, prosperous life of a Russian bourgeois. With little thought about life’s deeper meanings, he fills his days with the preoccupations of his family’s social position, his professional success, and his personal amusements.

But then Ivan Ilyich develops a mysterious ailment, which gradually worsens, confining him to bed. When it becomes apparent that he is dying, he is thrown into a profound existential crisis. “He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of an executioner, knowing there is no escape,” writes Tolstoy. “And he felt that with every minute, despite his efforts to resist, he was coming closer and closer to what terrified him.” The story describes the horror and sadness of Ivan’s predicament with astonishing precision.

Death is inevitable, of course; the most ordinary aspect of life is that it ends. And yet, the prospect of that ending feels so foreign and frightening to us. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker explored this strangeness in his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, which led to the development by other scholars of “terror management theory.” This theory argues that we fill our lives with pastimes and distractions precisely to avoid dealing with death. As Tolstoy’s novella chronicles, this phenomenon is one of the most paradoxical facets of human behavior—that we go to such lengths to avoid attending to a certainty that affects literally every single person, and that we regard this mundane certainty as an extraordinary tragedy.

If we could resolve this dissonance and accept reality, wouldn’t life be better? The answer is most definitely yes. We know this because of the example of people who have accepted death and, in so doing, have become fully alive. With knowledge, practice, and courage, you can do this too.

[From the November 1891 issue: Count Tolstoy at home]

A commonly held belief is that if and when someone learns that they are going to die, psychologically they deal with the grief involved in a series of clear, ordered steps: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This sequence comes from the famous work of the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who devised this model for her 1969 best seller, On Death and Dying. This study had such extensive impact that the New York Public Library named it one of its “Books of the Century” in the mid-1990s.

As influential as it was, Kübler-Ross’s formula for coming to terms with dying did not actually make death easier for people to accept. One problem was that her model was interpreted in overly mechanistic and prescriptive ways by popularizers who suggested that you had to march through these stages in the fixed order. Another problem is that the experience, in her telling, is a progression of pretty much unrelieved negativity: It’s all grief, and even the final acceptance sounds essentially like a grim kind of resignation. From this, you might well conclude that distraction is indeed the best strategy—why face death unless and until you have to?

More recent work does not support the “fixed order” interpretation of the Kübler-Ross model. To begin with, researchers have shown that not everyone passes through all of her stages, and that people frequently regress in them and jump around—a point that Kübler-Ross herself made later in her career. In a paper published in 2007 in the journal JAMA, scholars found that denial or disbelief occurred only rarely, and that acceptance was where most dying people spent most of their time.

These findings also hold true for those who experience grief after losing a loved one, according to researchers writing in The British Journal of Psychiatry in 2008 who conducted a 23-month study of “bereaved individuals.” Initially after a bereavement, an individual experienced a higher level of yearning, depression, and anger, but after four months on average, these feelings declined steadily. From the start, however, the participants also displayed a level of acceptance that was higher than any of these negative emotions, and this rose continuously as well. By the study’s end, peaceful acceptance far outweighed all other feelings.

Other research confirms that many people facing death are far more positive about the prospect than almost anyone would expect. In a 2017 study titled “Dying Is Unexpectedly Positive,” my Harvard colleague Michael I. Norton and his co-authors showed that people with a terminal illness or on death row wrote about their predicament in more positive terms and using fewer negative words than people who were not in that situation but were asked to write about it as if they were.

Several factors explain why a positive acceptance of impending death may be so common. One 2013 Spanish study found that terminally ill patients tended to reevaluate their life and experiences in a positive light while also embracing acceptance. Many of these patients enjoyed new forms of personal growth in their final months, through placing greater value on simple things and focusing on the present.

Interestingly, the potential benefits of facing death directly can also be found among a very different group of people: those who have had near-death experiences. As a rule, these survivors had no chance to arrive at a calm acceptance of death—typically because, unlike terminal-cancer patients, they had no time to do so in a sudden life-threatening emergency. What they had in common, though, was being confronted with their mortality—and finding that paradoxically positive. One study from 1998 showed that after a near-death experience, people became less materialistic and more concerned for others, were less anxious about their own death whenever that time would come, and enjoyed greater self-worth.

[Read: Doctors don’t know how to talk about death]

One irony about death, then, is that it remains most fearsome when most remote: When we are not forced to confront it in the immediate future, mortality is a menacing phantasm we try not to think about. But such avoidance brings no benefits, only costs. When the prospect of dying is concrete and imminent, most people are able to make the fact life-enhancing through acceptance. The real problem with death is that it messes up our being alive until it’s right in front of us.

So what if we were able to realize the benefit of facing death without it actually being imminent? Or, put another way: How can we use a positive acceptance of death to help us be more alive while we still have the most life left?

In theory, we should all be able to do this, because we’re all in a terminal state. We are all going to die; we just don’t yet know when. Lacking this precise knowledge is probably what makes it hard for us to focus on the reality of our ultimate nonbeing, and we have a good idea as to why: Neuroscientists have shown that abstract worry about something tends to mute the parts of the brain responsible for evoking vivid imagery. When your demise seems in some far-off future, you can’t easily grasp the granular fact of it, so you don’t.

The secret to benefiting from your death right now, therefore, is to make it vivid and concrete. This is exactly what Buddhist monks do when they undertake the maranasati (“mindfulness of death”) meditation. In this practice, the monks imagine their corporeal self in various states of decline and decomposition while repeating the mantra “This body, too, such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate.”

The Stoic philosophers had a similar memento mori exercise, as Seneca urged: “The person who devotes every second of his time to his own needs and who organizes each day as if it were a complete life neither longs for nor is afraid of the next day.” Catholics hear a comparable spiritual injunction when they receive a mark made with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

No matter what religious or philosophical tradition you adhere to, a practice like one of these is worth incorporating into your own routine. You can write your own maranasati or memento mori, say. Or, as an easier way to start, on your birthday or an annual holiday, work out roughly how many you may have left and ask yourself whether you’re really spending your scarce time the way you want.

Being mindful of mortality in this more vivid, concrete way will help you find a greater measure of that positive acceptance—and use that to be more fully alive right now. And this will help you make choices that affect other people besides yourself: At your next family gathering, consider how many more such reunions you’d want to spend with your parents or other aging relatives. Think of an actual number. Then think of what you would need to do to increase that number—by making more of an effort to travel, or by moving to live closer, or by hosting the occasion yourself?

[Read: Death has two timelines]

Tolstoy’s genius was not just in his ability to depict the terror of Ivan Ilyich’s death; he was also able to make real the bliss of his ultimate acceptance of death. As the weeks of his decline went by, Ivan began to see his wife’s efforts to keep up with society’s proprieties and conventions as trivial and tiresome, and he no longer regretted missing any of that. Finally, “he searched for his accustomed fear of death and could not find it,” writes Tolstoy. Ivan’s death is no tragedy at all, but the most natural thing in the world.

Even then, though, Tolstoy is not done; he ends with a true coup de grâce. At the very moment of his death, Ivan has an epiphany that might be the most consequential insight of all. As he is fading, he hears someone say, “It is finished.” In this last flickering moment of consciousness, Ivan considers what exactly is finished. Not his life, he decides, for it dawns on him: “Death is finished … It is no more!” And then, in peace, he slips away.