Older readers will recall that a few weeks ago Joe Biden was imperilling American democracy. Sleepy Joe’s refusal to quit the presidential race risked letting Donald Trump back in for a second administration, during which he would replace the republic with a fascist dictatorship (see Project 2025 for further details).

A week is of course a long time in politics. And where once Biden’s legacy was to have been the midwife to a live enactment of The Handmaid’s Tale, his exit from the race has transformed his reputation. If you believe the average American politico, at least on the Democrat side, Biden is now a heroic figure.

The gushing from many in the American press would embarrass a Soviet apparatchik

Take it from his former boss Barack Obama. While many credit Obama with playing a leading role in pressuring Biden to quit, the former president spared little in his praises, claiming unconvincingly that the incumbent is “one of America’s most consequential presidents”.

That sentiment was echoed by Nancy Pelosi, a former House of Representatives speaker and current Democrat grandee who agreed that the newly lame duck’s “legacy of vision, values and leadership make him one of the most consequential presidents in American history”.

Even Gavin Newsom, the Californian governor who might well have replaced Biden as presidential candidate had the latter dropped out sooner, was suitably obsequious. “President Biden has been an extraordinary, history-making president – a leader who has fought hard for working people and delivered astonishing results for all Americans,” he said.

One expects this humbug from politicians, of course. But the gushing from many in the American press would embarrass a Soviet apparatchik.

Having called for Biden to quit before it was fashionable, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein was quick to commend his former mark. Biden is “an actual hero”, Klein wrote on Twitter. “This is what America First looks like when it’s a lived ethos, rather than a mask for narcissism and ambition.”

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic also used the h-word in his response to Biden’s exit, as did political podcaster Keith Olbermann and Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark. Others were similarly effusive even if they avoided the word. “Biden has made the rarest of choices in the desiccated, demoralised politics of our time: he has sacrificed his own ambition for the sake of the country,” wrote Evan Osnos in The New Yorker.

Even comedians, who might be relied upon to spoil the party, were at it. The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert compared Biden to George Washington, who famously quit the presidency after two terms, saying that Biden had showed “courage”, “grace”, “humility” and “true patriotism”.  

Big Brother could hardly have done better. In fact, Biden’s political assassins were more accurate the first time: he is a power-hungry, ambitious narcissist who clung on longer than he should have, his Democratic colleagues only conceding under duress that the man’s aged brain had rendered him unfit for the Oval Office.

If there is a comparison to Washington, it is not with the first president’s bowing out after two terms against the wishes of many allies, but with Washington’s surrender at Fort Necessity as a officer in the British Army, his makeshift defence flooded by rainwater and pelted from all sides by the surrounding French and their Indian allies.

Indeed, had Biden not been ganged up on by the men and women now singing his praises, he would still be running for re-election. And one suspects that Democratic sorts in Congress, the fourth estate or the entertainment industry would be talking up his virtues almost as keenly as they are doing so now.

What is needed in American journalism is a healthy contempt for the ruling class seen in the British press

This is the trouble with Americans: they are either taking shots at their politicians or scrambling over one another to pay homage. The republican insouciance that led to the country’s founding has mutated into an ingratiating subservience that could fill Private Eye’s Order of the Brown Nose many times over.

What is needed in American journalism is a healthy contempt for the ruling class seen in the British press, what a recent New York Times piece described as “a reader-pleasing willingness to scorch sacred cows”. And perhaps a recent influx of British hacks to the US may well introduce some much-needed scurrility. 

Last year The Wall Street Journal appointed Emma Tucker, formerly of The Sunday Times, to head up its news coverage. The ex-BBC director-general Mark Thompson became CNN’s chief executive in October, while Keith Poole of The Sun and The Daily Mail has been editing The New York Post since 2021.

More contentious has been the appointment of Will Lewis as publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post. His arrival at the start of this year led to the exit of executive editor Sally Buzbee shortly after, among other rancour.

Critics of such appointments point to British journalism’s reputation for flexible ethics. And to be fair, it is not for nothing that Humbert Wolfe wrote a century ago: “You cannot hope to bribe or twist/ thank God! the British journalist/ But, seeing what the man will do/ unbribed, there’s no occasion to.”

American hacks consider themselves above skullduggery, preferring the heroic myth of journalism embodied in the depiction of the Watergate scandal from All the President’s Men. But what exactly are the ethics of pretending a president is a saint when it’s taken so long to convince him of his own ineptitude?

Because for all that Obama claimed Biden “pointed us away from the four years of chaos, falsehood, and division” of Trump, his late decision not to run again has prevented the Democrats from choosing their candidate to defeat Trump this November. Perhaps Kamala Harris will win, but few reckon she is best-placed to do so.

You would expect, given Democrats’ dire warnings of a second Trump presidency, that more might have been done to prevent this outcome. But in making a monarch of their chief executive, Americans have forfeited the disrespect necessary to keep such power in check.