The Bidens Return to the Stage: Online, in Bookstores and at a Best Western in South Dakota

The 46th President of the United States recently gave a speech at a Best Western. Not a convention center. Not a university auditorium. A Best Western hotel, in South Dakota — one of the reddest states in the country, a place where Joe Biden lost to Donald Trump by 26 percentage points in 2020. If that image doesn’t tell you something profound about where the Bidens stand right now, nothing will.

The stakes here are not trivial, even if the venue was. What Joe and Jill Biden do with their post-presidential years matters enormously — for the Democratic Party’s fractured identity, for how history will remember a presidency defined by its bookends of crisis and retreat, and for the millions of Americans who either revere or resent what the Biden years represented. The question isn’t whether the Bidens deserve a second act. The question is whether anyone is ready to watch it.

From the Rose Garden to Room 114: How the Biden Post-Presidency Defies Every Political Playbook

Post-presidential comebacks follow a recognizable script. Barack Obama retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, re-emerged with a Netflix deal and a Spotify podcast, and waited for the right moment to re-enter the conversation with calibrated elegance. George W. Bush picked up a paintbrush and deliberately stayed silent, understanding that his presence was more liability than asset for his party. Bill Clinton launched the Clinton Global Initiative and charged $500,000 per speech on the international circuit within eighteen months of leaving office. Each of these men had a lane. Each worked it.

The Bidens don’t fit any of those molds. Joe Biden left office on January 20, 2025, under circumstances that were, to put it charitably, complicated. His July 2024 withdrawal from the presidential race — after a catastrophic debate performance against Trump on June 27, 2024 — was not a graceful exit. It was a shove dressed up as a bow. The party that had spent four years praising his steady hand essentially told him, with varying degrees of diplomatic packaging, that he needed to go. He went. And then, unlike Obama or Bush, he didn’t disappear.

What has emerged instead is a post-presidency that is small-scale, slightly defiant, and oddly human. Social media posts. Bookstore appearances. Speeches at mid-tier hotel conference rooms in states that were never Biden country to begin with. It is simultaneously less than what a former president typically commands and more politically loaded than it probably should be.

The contrast is stark. And it raises a genuinely interesting question: is this humility, or is this the beginning of something more deliberate?

Biden’s Social Media Comeback, Jill’s Book Tour, and a Conference Room in Sioux Falls: What Is Actually Happening Right Now

The Biden return to public life is happening across multiple fronts simultaneously, and the cumulative picture is worth examining carefully.

On social media, Joe Biden’s accounts have reactivated with a purpose that feels pointed. Posts referencing the consequences of current policy decisions, oblique defenses of his administration’s record on infrastructure, veterans’ care, and climate investment — these are not the musings of a man who has made peace with irrelevance. They are the dispatches of someone who feels, correctly or not, that the record needs defending in real time. The Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of Biden-era programs has given the former president ample material to work with.

Here is what the Biden re-emergence looks like, broken down by channel:

• Social media: Regular posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, focusing on legacy defense, policy contrasts with the current administration, and personal moments designed to remind audiences of the Biden brand’s warmth and accessibility
• Bookstore appearances: Jill Biden has been the more visible presence in the bookstore circuit, with appearances tied to ongoing literary projects — a continuation of her long-standing identity as an educator and author, distinct from but connected to her White House years
• Speaking engagements: Joe Biden has accepted speaking invitations that are conspicuously modest by former-president standards — including the now-famous Best Western event in South Dakota, which drew genuine crowds in a state with no strategic political logic for a Biden appearance whatsoever
• Behind-the-scenes Democratic outreach: Reports indicate quiet conversations with party donors and operatives, though nothing resembling the kind of kingmaker positioning Obama has occasionally deployed

The South Dakota moment deserves more attention than it has received. Going to a deep-red state and speaking in a budget hotel chain is either an act of remarkable populist authenticity or a logistical failure by whoever is booking his schedule. Possibly both. Either way, it generated more genuine conversation about what Biden stands for than a dozen carefully staged appearances at Democratic Party fundraisers would have.

Joe Biden, Jill Biden, and the Ghost of the 2024 Withdrawal: Three Forces Shaping This Second Act

Joe Biden

Joe Biden is 82 years old and acutely aware that the historical verdict on his presidency is being written right now, while he is still alive to contest it. That matters more than people give it credit for. His decision to re-engage publicly — gently, incrementally, without the infrastructure of a campaign or the resources of an Obama-style foundation — reflects a man who is not trying to reclaim power. He is trying to reclaim narrative. There is a difference, and it matters. His administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act — a legislative record that, on paper, rivals any single-term president in modern history. He wants you to remember that, especially as those programs face dismantling.

Jill Biden

Jill Biden is doing something subtler and arguably more effective. By maintaining a public presence rooted in her identity as an educator, author, and advocate — rather than as a political spouse — she is building a lane for the Biden legacy that is less polarizing and more durable. Her bookstore appearances are not neutral acts. They are soft-power deployments. She knows exactly what she is doing. The question the party should be asking is whether it is willing to let her do it, or whether the residual bitterness over the 2024 withdrawal will continue to poison whatever relationship the Bidens have left with Democratic leadership.

The 2024 Withdrawal and Its Unresolved Resentments

The third force shaping this comeback is not a person — it is an event. Biden’s July 2024 decision to exit the race, and the circumstances surrounding it, left a wound in the Democratic Party that has not healed. Supporters feel he was pushed out unfairly after a lifetime of service. Critics believe he stayed too long, cost the party the election, and still doesn’t fully acknowledge the damage. Both positions contain real truth. The Biden return to public life happens against this backdrop every single day, whether he mentions it or not. Every tweet, every bookstore signing, every Best Western speech is read through that lens by someone.

Why Both the Democrats Who Miss Biden and the Democrats Who Don’t Are Getting This Wrong

There are two camps in the Democratic Party right now when it comes to Joe Biden, and both are making the same fundamental error: they are treating his post-presidential presence as a political problem to be managed rather than a human and historical reality to be reckoned with honestly.

The Biden loyalists — and there are many, particularly among older African American voters, labor union households, and working-class Catholics in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — want to rehabilitate his presidency immediately and completely. They read every social media post as vindication, every policy reversal by the Trump administration as proof that Biden was right all along. This is emotionally understandable. It is also analytically lazy. Biden’s administration made real mistakes: the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021, the delayed response to inflation in 2021-2022, and — most damaging of all — the stubborn refusal to acknowledge his own diminishment until it became impossible to deny. Loyalty is not the same as accuracy.

The Biden critics within the party, meanwhile, are making their own blunder. They want him to disappear. They are embarrassed by the South Dakota Best Western. They wish he would stop posting. This instinct is politically shortsighted in ways that should alarm anyone paying attention to what the Democratic Party actually needs right now. Biden’s working-class credibility, his Catholic identity, his genuine personal connection with union workers and military families — these are not liabilities the party can afford to discard while it struggles to understand why it keeps losing voters without college degrees.

The party needs a post-presidency model for Biden that neither lionizes nor buries him. Good luck finding anyone with the courage to design one. For the kind of sharp political accountability that distinguishes real leadership from performative posturing, compare the Biden situation to Mitch McConnell’s willingness to publicly name unfit nominees — a reminder that political courage and institutional honesty don’t always come from the expected corners.

Here is the uncomfortable truth both camps are avoiding:

• Biden’s legislative record is genuinely significant and genuinely undersold
• Biden’s cognitive decline in his final year of office was genuinely concerning and genuinely covered up
• Both things are true simultaneously, and pretending otherwise serves no one
• The party’s inability to hold both truths at once is itself a symptom of the same dishonesty that got it into trouble in 2024

Four Scenarios for Where the Biden Post-Presidency Goes From Here — and What Each Means for Democrats in 2026 and Beyond

Post-presidential trajectories are not destiny. They are choices, constrained by circumstance. Here is what the realistic range of outcomes looks like for the Biden second act, and what each one means for the broader political landscape.

• Scenario 1 — The Quiet Institutionalist: Biden pulls back from provocative social media, focuses on a presidential center at the University of Delaware, and becomes a backstage validator for moderate Democratic candidates in 2026 midterms. Low drama, moderate influence. The party accepts this graciously. Legacy stabilizes over time as infrastructure investments become visible and popular.
• Scenario 2 — The Active Critic: Biden leans harder into public commentary, sharpens his contrast with the current administration, and becomes a more prominent voice on democratic norms and policy reversals. This energizes his base but re-opens every conversation about age, capacity, and the 2024 exit. High risk, potentially high reward if he is disciplined.
• Scenario 3 — The Jill-Led Legacy Project: Jill Biden becomes the more visible and effective steward of the Biden legacy — through books, education advocacy, and carefully selected public appearances — while Joe recedes. This is already partially underway. It may be the smartest play available to them.
• Scenario 4 — The Fracture: Continued resentment within the Democratic Party over the 2024 withdrawal metastasizes. Biden’s public presence becomes a lightning rod in competitive primaries. Candidates are forced to choose sides. The legacy becomes a wedge rather than an asset in the very races Democrats need to win in 2026.

The most instructive comparison here is not Obama or Clinton. It is Jimmy Carter. Carter left office in 1981 as a political failure, broadly mocked and genuinely unpopular. He then spent four decades building Habitat for Humanity, monitoring elections globally, and demonstrating the kind of moral consistency that his presidency had often lacked. By the time he died in December 2024, he was regarded as one of the finest human beings to have held the office, even if not one of its finest presidents. The lesson is not that Biden needs to build houses. It is that post-presidential reputation is built over years, not months, and almost always through actions rather than arguments. For broader context on how Democratic figures are navigating political reinvention in this climate, our US Political News coverage tracks these developments in real time.

Joe Biden spoke at a Best Western in South Dakota. His wife is signing books. He is posting on the internet. None of this looks like a man staging a triumphant return — it looks like a man who isn’t finished yet, working with the tools he has, in the rooms that will have him. Whether that becomes something meaningful, or simply fades into the background noise of a political era that has already moved violently on without him, depends entirely on whether he is willing to be honest about both what he achieved and what he cost the country. So far, that accounting remains incomplete. And until it isn’t, the Bidens will keep turning up — at bookstores, online, and in conference rooms at budget hotels in states that were never theirs — waiting for the moment when the party decides what to do with them.

About The Author

Sophie Gesture

Political writer and analyst focused on global affairs, public policy, and emerging political trends.

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