Abstract
By mid-May of 2020, the United States surpassed 100,000 lives lost to COVID-19. The nation was scrambling to make sense of the global pandemic amid the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Focusing on Biden’s pandemic-related speaking moments throughout the 2020 election, I attend to the way Biden lingers in the felt intensities of grief. With this, I illustrate how Biden’s articulations of grief rely on affective intensities which situate a personal grief in open relation to an invisible other, a reaching out, the towardness of which moves away from the particular and toward the singular collective—national grief. Utilizing affect theory, public feelings scholarship, and precedential expectations for presidential speech, I argue that Biden’s grief rhetoric, against the absence of any similar grief-related public address from Trump during this time, defines the emergence of an affective national body—a grieving public. This analysis weaves between notions of individual and collective loss and prompts wider questions of presidential responsibility in response to shared trauma.
Introduction
Number one, he says that we’re learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it. You folks at home will have an empty chair at the kitchen table this morning. That man or wife going to bed tonight and reaching over to try to touch there out of habit, where their wife or husband was, is gone. Learning to live with it. Come on. We’re dying with it.
In our nation’s history, there have been moments of collective sentiment, tragedies felt on a wide scale. These moments draw out and delineate our relations to ourselves and each other in ways that illuminate the possibility of shared or collective experiences. As Judith Butler (2014) states, “A loss might seem utterly personal, private, isolating. But it also may furnish an unexpected concept of political community.” The COVID-19 pandemic greatly affected the world, upending plans, expectations, and norms. To date, over 1 million people have died from the coronavirus in the United States, over 6 million people worldwide (The New York Times, 2022). In the years following the outbreak of the pandemic, communities all over the world have had to grapple with the felt intensities of loss, an ongoing grief compounded by geopolitical response internationally as well as the intersecting injustices of communities whose experiences of trauma and violence have largely gone underrepresented. As we continue to make sense of the impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is necessary to understand the role of political leadership throughout this time in naming and framing ongoing global tragedy.
While political leaders all over the world attempted to make sense of the pandemic for the communities they were speaking to, this article looks specifically at the speaking moments of Joseph R. Biden during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Occurring amid public health-based, racial, and political crises, the rhetorical moments throughout this particular election were highly publicized and mark a distinct tension in expectations for presidential address. As Emily Winderman (2021, p. 465) states of this time, “the coronavirus cruelly prevented communities from engaging in deathbed and funerary practices, which generated messy grief and amplified the need for presidential eulogy.” Amid widespread denial and refusal to meet the expectations of the presidency in response to national tragedy from Donald Trump, the incumbent, Biden utilized an affective approach to collective grief at the national level. Presidents help publics verbalize feelings by naming and defining them, functioning as exemplars of how to process emotion. As Campbell and Jamieson (2008) argue, presidents help publics make sense of catastrophe, they speak to tragedy and guide the nation through these events, often explaining where, when, and how healing takes place. While U.S. presidents have addressed numerous individual and collective tragedies in our nation’s history, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique challenge for presidential address for several reasons. First, it resulted in prolonged widespread loss throughout the nation which consistently demands national attention. Second, the pandemic came during a contentious and highly publicized presidential election year. Finally, COVID-19 presented a challenge to presidential rhetoric that the sitting president was unwilling to meet, opening the possibility for a new rhetor to assume the rhetorical position of empathizer or mourner-in-chief. As a major party presidential candidate, previous vice president of the United States, and current sitting president, Biden attempted to articulate collective feelings of loss and uncertainty in front of the American public during the 2020 presidential election.
This article grapples with affective intimacies in the making sense of grief. In many ways, grief is understood as loss—a wide, expansive notion that relates to the physical-material reality of losing someone or something. While grief is often figured in a U.S. context as individual, lonely, or isolating, the pandemic presents an interesting case for theorizing grief precisely in its inherent sociality. Neither local nor national, the pandemic represents a global relatedness that continues to prove difficult to grasp, especially in Western political response. Operating within this context is an ongoing collective experience of loss more generally as well as the intense intimacies of grief felt personally—in our own homes or families, in relations to each other, and in our communities. While not entirely aimed at theorizing the affective textures of grief, I focus on Biden’s speaking moments as an example of the personal experience of grief meeting the collective in what Sara Ahmed calls a “towardsness”—toward defining a national experience as homogeneous and defining the nation itself as grieving.
What might it mean for a presidential candidate to meet the expectations of the presidency in place of the sitting president’s refusal? How might we read Biden’s pandemic-related, grief-based public address in relation to a precedent of presidential response to national tragedy? Building off Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s and Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s (2008) work on the genre of national eulogy, I trace how Biden names and responds to a public affect in the ongoing crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic demanded expectations of the U.S. president to address the collective grieving of the American public. In the face of this expectation, President Trump regularly deflected public attention away from experiences of collective grieving, shifted symbolic framing away from national tragedy, and strategically refused to engage with widespread feelings of grief. This left an absence which denotes a denial of the reality of that loss, further contributing to such desensitization toward the growing number of deaths throughout the pandemic as well as toward the dangers of COVID-19. In this rhetorical absence, Biden, as a major party candidate in the U.S. 2020 election, assumed presidential expectations by speaking for and to the American public, naming and defining a shared experience of grief, and attempting to unify the national audience by speaking from individual experience as well as invoking institutional norms of the presidency. Foregrounding analysis of affective language as Jamie Landau and Bethany Keeley-Jonker (2018) illustrate in their work, “Conductor of public feelings: An affective-emotional rhetorical analysis of Obama’s national eulogy in Tucson,” I explore how Biden uses metaphor, emotion words, and personal experience throughout his 2020 election speaking moments to tap into the affective energies of national grief. In focusing more closely on Biden’s rhetoric grief-based pandemic-related speaking moments throughout the 2020 election, and into his presidency, I attend specifically to the way Biden lingers in the felt intensities of grief as a response to the sitting president’s refusal to publicly recognize tragedy as well as to the emergence of the feeling nation. Given Biden’s description of the nation as grieving, how might we make sense of political rhetoric amid what Sara Ahmed describes as the affective emergence of bodies? Ultimately, I aim to show how Biden’s articulations of grief rely on affective intensities which situate a personal grief in open relation to an invisible other, a reaching out, the towardness of which moves away from the particular and toward the singular collective—national grief. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s “Cultural Politics of Emotion,” I argue this affective reaching toward an invisible other defines the emergence of an affective national body through discursive contradictions between absence/presence and intimate/public.
Theorizing affective presidential address
Murray Edelman (1988) defines political language as that which makes political reality. When the president speaks, they name, define, and shape national conscience, crafting widely felt experiences as shared. Thus, the president is already wrapped up in and should be concerned with public affect. Presidents have a powerful role in that they are arguably the most widely heard respondents to shared or collective experiences of grief. The national eulogy is a commonplace, a precedent for U.S. presidents throughout history. In public address scholarship, the national eulogy presents the predominant site for rhetorics of grief from a national, political leadership standpoint. For example, Ronald Reagan’s Challenger disaster speech in 1986 while attending to grief—“We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss”—never sits in the felt sense of grief. Mary Stuckey (2006, p. 14) argues of Reagan’s speech that it had two immediate needs, “the expectation that the president would speak and the belief that, in speaking, he would address the nation’s shock and grief.” The nation is figured here as experiencing pain, and the tragedy is described as a “national loss,” though the specific attention moves away from grief itself to space exploration.
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2008, p. 73) argue that there is an expectation of the U.S. president to respond to instances of national trauma, a genre of presidential address which they term the national eulogy. They state, “The national eulogy emerges only when someone must make sense of a catastrophic event that unexpectedly kills U.S. civilians while also assaulting a national symbol.” In this sense, while the pandemic is a catastrophic event that has killed many people, there has been no clear assault on a national symbol and unexpectedness of death is troubled due to the prolonged length of the catastrophe. Despite this specific form of address not clearly falling under the genre of national eulogies, the expectations placed on the president to respond to collective tragedy remain. These include speaking for and to the nation, creating meaning which prompts national identification, beginning a healing process, and responding to a perceived communal need due to the disruption of national life by a traumatic event (Campbell & Jamieson, 2008, p. 73).
More contemporary than Reagan, George W. Bush addressing the American public after 9/11 and Barack Obama addressing the nation after the Sandy Hook shooting both establish precedent for the norm and expectation of presidential response to a grieving public. While both Bush’s and Obama’s speeches contain many elements of response to grief, Bush (2001) quickly turns toward descriptors like “evil” and “terrorist” rather than focusing more extendedly on the experience of tragedy and mourning. Similarly, Obama (2012) while acknowledging the grief of the families immediately effected by the Sandy Hook shooting—even going so far as to describe a national “we” in “grieving with” stating, I can only hope it helps for you to know that you’re not alone in your grief; that our world too has been torn apart; that all across this land of ours, we have wept with you and we’ve pulled our children tight
Obama quickly turns toward political action on gun violence. While this political shift, even in eulogistic address, is customary to presidential rhetoric, and can be seen in examples from Biden in garnering campaign support during the 2020 election, none of these examples illustrate a president who lingers with the affective textures of grief on a national stage.
Many scholars have analyzed specific and/or isolated instances of presidential response to national grief (Campbell & Jamieson, 2008; Landau & Keeley-Jonker, 2018; Rood, 2018), but part of what makes this case unique is the prolongedness of the crisis and Biden’s personal articulations of grief based on intimate experience. While Biden’s pandemic response throughout the U.S. 2020 presidential election differs from the genre of national eulogy, in that Biden was not the sitting president at the time and the tragedy had no clear end in sight, it demonstrates political speech that mediates for the audience the felt realities of national traumas that are messy, undefined, and slow. Furthermore, into his presidency, Biden continues to grapple with national tragedy that remains messy and unending, presenting an opportunity to make sense of the affective intensities of the ongoing pandemic.
Focusing more specifically on affect in public address, some scholars have focused on presidential response to national trauma and crisis by attending to public feelings. Jamie Landau and Bethany Keeley-Jonker (2018) build on work by public feelings scholars to articulate the ways in which presidents affectively influence audiences. They argue that the president is a conductor of public feelings, influencing or guiding national response and memory through rhetorical strategies that create and sustain chosen claims on reality. Looking more spe-cifically at affect, Jenny Edbauer-Rice (2004) analyzes George W. Bush’s speech by attending specifically to the body. Building off Brian Massumi’s notion that there is no current cultural vocabulary to talk about affect, Edbauer-Rice (2004, p. 4) offers three key terms for analysis: relational intensity, the sensation of involvement, and thought-impingement. These theorizations are useful in theorizing amid the unbounded playfield of affect studies in public address scholarship. Keeley-Jonker’s and Landau’s public feelings approach aims to understand the rhetorical dimensions between speaker and audience in the circulation of affect and Edbauer-Rice’s analysis takes special focus on the body.
Teresa Brennan’s (2015) work on the transmission of affect accounts for the ways in which affects move and influence others, creating atmospheres or environments saturated with affect. Brennan (2015, p. 1) states, The transmission of affect, whether its grief, anxiety, or anger, is social or psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsible for bodily changes; some are brief changes, as in a whiff of the room’s atmosphere, some longer lasting.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, loss and fear defined our everyday experiences, especially in the early months. There was loss in a sense of normalcy, loss of jobs, loss of relationships, and especially loss of life. When thinking about the backdrop out of which the precedent for presidential response to times of collective tragedy arises, theorizing affect in its transmissions allows for the national environment to come into focus as one saturated by grief.
Drawing from affect theory, public feeling scholarship, and public address, I argue that part of what makes Biden’s articulations of grief interesting is the way he lingers in the affective experience of grief. Throughout this article, I will first introduce Joseph R. Biden as a politician whose career has been continually marked by public experiences of loss, making him, as some might say, “‘uniquely equipped’ to lead the nation through such overwhelming loss (Winderman, 2021, p. 466). Then, I will analyze Biden’s most prominent grief-related speaking moments from the 2020 election: a Twitter response to the first 100,000 deaths milestone in the United States in May 2020, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) speech, the first and third presidential debates, and Biden’s Thanksgiving address. Illustrating a markedly different response to the pandemic once in office, I also attend to Biden’s national address following the 500,000 deaths milestone in February 2021 and the 900,000 deaths milestone in February 2022.
Toward a national grief
The Biden campaign
As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden (Heer, 2020) ran on the promise to “heal the soul of our nation.” In many respects, Biden used language inflected with personal experience, faith, and political charm. As the 2020 election came into full national view, a common theme emerged—the articulations of grief in Biden’s public address. In a profile published in June 2020, the New York Times (Glueck & Flegenheimer, 2020) labeled Biden an “Emissary of Grief,” noting how much experience Biden had with speaking about and experiencing loss firsthand. In 1972, Biden lost his wife, Neilia, and young daughter, Naomi, in a car crash. While his two sons were recovering, Biden was sworn in from the hospital as a United States senator (Heer, 2020). This personal loss not only marked his life as an individual person, but it continues to be a stamp of his political career. More recently, in 2015, Biden lost his son Beau to cancer at the age of 46. According to one journalistic account, the overarching sense of grief—or more specifically the constant presence of death—throughout Biden’s career defined his very essence, especially his public persona. As one intimately acquainted with grief, Biden was uniquely equipped to “comfort” or “heal” a hurting nation (Glueck & Flegenheimer, 2020). “Emissary” literally means a diplomatic representative of something, someone sent on a mission, a diplomat whose (im)material presence as saturated by experiences of grief move through his political career in relation to local, national, and international bodies (Glueck & Flegenheimer, 2020). The Biden campaign was in part built around a narrative of grief. Any discussion of Biden’s rhetorical use of grief must acknowledge Biden’s own experience of loss. Dan McAdams (2023) argues that Biden’s expriences with death, “forged an empathic sensibility that enables him to connect deeply with other Americans through shared grief and pain.” McAdams labels President Biden a “Comforter-in-Chief” because of how effective his grief-related speech is and how this “empathetic sensibility” affords a certain kind of knowing relationship with the U.S. public. As I demonstrate below, Biden often began his public acknowledgements of grief by featuring his own individual experience. This offered personal, affective evidence for his larger attempt to contextualize and articulate a sense of shared collective grief.
Defining grief as a national feeling
On May 27, 2020, the United States reached, and surpassed, 100,000 deaths from COVID-19. This statistic illustrates the physical loss of people, but the public statements from Biden and Trump reveal starkly different responses. On May 26, 2020, President Trump (2020) posted two tweets that addressed this milestone. They stated, “For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1½ to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number. That’s 15 to 20 times more than we will lose. I shut down entry from china very early!” Trump (2020) responded to his own tweet stating, “. . . One person lost to this invisible virus is too much, it should have been stopped at its source, China, but I acted very quickly, and made the right decisions. Many of the current political complainers thought, at the time, that I was moving far to fast, like Crazy Nancy!” In the first tweet, Trump referred to the 100,000 deaths in the United States but immediately shifted the focus to suggest that a higher number of deaths might have occurred without his swift action to limit travel from China to the United States. In this framing, a jarring statistic of COVID-19 deaths was described as much better than it could have been apart from Trump’s action. In the second tweet, Trump acknowledged that “one person lost to this invisible virus is too much,” which could arguably be seen as addressing a sense of loss or grief for the American people. However, he follows by saying, “it should have been stopped at its source, China, but I acted very quickly, and made the right decisions.” Trump again frame shifts from the reality of death experienced by American citizens to blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic. The movement from national affect to discourses on China functions as a patterned deflective response for Trump throughout his pandemic-related public address.
Trump had the opportunity to describe this milestone in terms of a national feeling of loss, especially by recognizing “One person lost . . . is too much” in his May tweets. This may be an attempt to place meaning on the experience of loss; that we, as U.S. Americans, should also think one person lost is too much. Instead of addressing public affect, Trump defined this moment in the pandemic’s trajectory for the United States as not as bad as it could have been, “. . . we would have lost 1 ½ to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 . . .,” and as not America’s fault, “. . . it should have been stopped at its source, China . . .” (Trump, 2020). Trump defined loss not in terms of a collective sense of grief but in comparison to China and other countries around the world. By giving the impression that 100,000 is not as bad as it could have been, Trump’s tweets downplayed the importance and severity of COVID-19 deaths and contributed to a growing desensitization of the U.S. public to the reality of loss.
In stark contrast, Biden explicitly defined a sense of national shared grief in a written tweet and verbal video message by appealing to the individual on behalf of the collective—a pattern of address he returned to often throughout the rest of the presidential campaign and early into his presidency. Biden (2020a) states, “There are moments in our history so grim, so heart-rending, that they’re forever fixed in each of our hearts as shared grief.” While not the sitting president, Biden’s physicality in the video denotes the expectations of presidential address—from the American flags pictured in the background to his red, white, and blue suit and tie. Biden utilized the power of presidential rhetoric, as a notable presidential candidate and former Vice President of the United States, to name and address the state of the nation as grieving. David Zarefsky (2004) argues the most important aspect of presidential address is this ability to define political reality, shaping the narrative and collective feeling of the national audience. Biden defined political reality as a nation grieving. He defined the collective as grieving with—not just some individuals experiencing grief, but a shared experience of grieving together.
Turning toward his individual experience, Biden (2020a) states, “I think I know what you’re feeling. You feel like you’re being sucked into a black hole in the middle of your chest. It’s suffocating. Your heart is broken, and there’s nothing but a feeling of emptiness right now.” These phrases, “heart is broken,” “feeling of emptiness,” and “black hole in the middle of your chest,” appear regularly throughout Biden’s 2020 rhetoric. These visceral expressions function as definitional as well as explicative. Drawing on Brian Massumi’s (2021, p. 27) work on affect, we might think here of these explanatory definitions as articulating some of the intensities of grief. Rather than simplifying grief into a variety of emotions, which may also prove helpful at times for understanding and communicating affective experience, drawing one’s attention more specifically to intensity may illuminate grief in relation to self, other, and collective. Massumi (2021, p. 27) argues that intensity is “immediately embodied . . . at the surface of the body, at its interface with things.” Furthermore, intensity, for Massumi (2021, p. 27), is the “best word for a complicating immediacy of self-relation.” Through this understanding of intensity, Biden’s use of poetic and metaphoric language in his national address’ throughout the 2020 Presidential Election functions both as description of the self-immediate intensity of his own grief as well as appealing to a larger, more collective affective experience. As someone who has experienced the ebbs and flows of grief’s intensities, Biden’s “black hole in the middle of your chest” reaches out to me as an other and as implicated in the collective “nation grieving.”
Biden’s use of “you” illustrates a personal or individual audience, intentionally addressing a singular “you” while simultaneously speaking to a broader collective, that is, nation. He states, “This nation grieves with you. Take some solace from the fact we all grieve with you.” Biden is both speaking on behalf of the nation by stating, “This nation grieves with you” while also implying the multiplicity of the “you.” The multitude is expressed in both the numbers addressed near the beginning (“100,000 lives lost”) and near the middle, “To all of you who are hurting so badly . . .” This implies both a national audience and a speaker of the nation. The descriptive intensities of personal experience here move toward a national collective in this turn. The political tensions between the viscerality of individual loss and the intentional engagement with a national audience fulfill the constitutive functions of rhetoric by creating this multi-layered audience and responding to it.
Biden’s movement from personal experience to a wider audience—an audience which both implicates and defines the nation—articulates a unifying collective understanding of grief amid ongoing crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic. Sarah Ahmed (2004, p. 8) states, “Emotions are relational; they involve (re)actions or relations of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to such objects.” Ahmed defines affect as moving and objectifying, impressing and sticking and defining all along the way participating in the emergence of objects as such. This movement is illustrated in Biden’s grieving rhetoric and further in his descriptions of the nation—the nation grieves, the nation mourns, the nation smiles. Thus, we might think of this rhetoric as participation in the circulation and objectification of nationhood—specifically, as a nation grieving or national grief.
Although Biden’s tweets from this time do not illustrate a national audience to the same extent as his later public speeches, this statistical milestone of 100,000 people dying of COVID-19 in the United States was highly publicized. That both Biden, the presidential candidate, and Trump, the incumbent, posted on Twitter to commemorate this milestone, illustrates the norm, expectation, and responsibility of presidential response in times of national crisis and a commitment to the power of public address to define political reality. In addition, when viewed together, these tweets illustrate the massive difference in rhetorical address concerning loss of life in the United States during the pandemic.
Establishing a pattern of response
In his speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Biden articulated a shared sense of grief through a wider definition of loss. Biden (2020b) stated, “5 million Americans infected with COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth. More than 50 million people have filed for unemployment this year. More than 10 million people are going to lose their health insurance this year. Nearly one in six small business have closed this year.” Although here Biden does not explicitly name or define grief, it is a clear portrayal of the same reasoning behind his earlier rhetoric. While over one million people have lost their lives in the United States to COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic in January 2020, the nation is figured here in feeling the effects of a loss of normalcy, opportunity, or certainty, many too the loss of a job (The New York Times, 2022). By extending what counts as loss, Biden expands away from narrower definitions of grief as loss of life and toward grief as encompassing many forms of loss. In making this move, Biden’s notion of grief participates in the towardness of a national affect, and in the objectifying emergence of nationhood. Seen against the backdrop of Trump’s demagogic in-group versus out-group rhetorical strategies throughout the 2020 election, Biden’s approach of appealing to a singular national identity through affective intensities proved distinctly enticing.
In the first presidential debate, moderated by Chris Wallace, both presidential candidates were asked to discuss their approaches to the public health crisis arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, Biden (Biden et al., 2020a) stated, “. . . you folks at home. How many of you got up this morning and had an empty chair at the kitchen table because someone died of COVID? How many of you are in a situation where you lost your mom or dad and you couldn’t even speak to them, you had a nurse holding a phone up so you could in fact say goodbye?” Following his now established pattern, Biden spoke directly to a personal, individual, audience toward recognition of a whole nation. Instead of using explicit emotion words, Biden painted a picture to elicit emotion. Phrases such as “an empty chair at the kitchen table” or “couldn’t even speak to them . . . [to] say goodbye” describe the loss of life in an affect-inducing way. David Eng (2010) illustrates the impact of affect in language and memory in “The Feeling of Kinship.” Although Eng’s focus is markedly different, the overarching ideas of affect as (un)settling memory and history applies here. Powerfully embedded in rhetorical political leadership is the definitional capacity of public address.
In response to Biden, Trump (Biden et al., 2020b) stated, “We would have lost far more people, far more people. You would have been months late. You’re months behind me, Joe.” Trump uses the notion of loss of life in response to Biden’s commentary on the “empty chair,” as frame shifting from the actuality of the loss to the implication of governmental response. This deflective pattern further establishes a desensitized response to widespread experience of grief. Biden, however, evokes the affective dimensions of the grieving nation, modulating between intimate publics and individual experience, and simultaneously disrupts the messy mediated messages of the ongoing crises to assert a particular emergent affective nation.
In the final presidential debate, moderated by Kristen Welker, Trump had a similar response to Welker’s first question regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Welker (Biden et al., 2020b) asked, “. . . since the two of you last shared a stage, 16,000 Americans have died from COVID. So please be specific. How would you lead the country during this next stage of the coronavirus crisis?” In response, Trump stated, “So as you know, 2.2. Million people modeled out, were expected to die . . . And there were some spikes and surges and other places, they will soon be gone.” He then went on to say, “I can tell you from personal experience, I was in the hospital. I had it and I got better . . . More and more people are getting better . . . We’re rounding the corner. It’s going away” (Biden et al., 2020b). In addition to his patterned response to the actuality of deaths resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump shifted the frame from the actual lives lost to the potential lives lost from the original model. Ultimately, he refused to grapple with the felt affective intensity of grief and loss throughout the nation.
When asked about the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic in the United States, Biden (Biden et al., 2020b) stated, Number one, he says that we’re learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it. You folks at home will have an empty chair at the kitchen table this morning. That man or wife going to bed tonight and reaching over to try to touch there out of habit, where their wife or husband was, is gone. Learning to live with it. Come on. We’re dying with it.
Following Landau & Keeley-Jonker (2018), use of one’s own emotional reaction to rhetorical situations can be a useful and engaging act. When I first watched this debate and heard Biden say, “we are learning to die with it,” I immediately teared up. I had a very emotional reaction, which at least partially illustrates the affective intensity in Biden’s speech. Also exemplified in this statement is Biden’s patterned use of poetic language in detailing the “empty chair” to describe an experience of grief. In addition, in his response to collective grief, Biden is not explicitly speaking to an individual listener, he utilizes a “we” and describing collective grief in terms of “learning to die with it.” His personal experience may have influenced the choice of metaphor, but Biden’s use of “learning” with “death,” invokes “learning to die with it,” as a national response to the pandemic.
The presidential debates served as unprecedented examples of presidential rhetoric due to unique pandemic-related circumstances and a refusal to follow the norms of debate by the sitting president. Every time Trump strategically refused to address public affect and the widespread experience of loss, the nation was confronted with a paradox in which they were forced to make sense of these experiences of collective loss for themselves up against the implicit denial of this grief by the president of the United States. This denial falls in line with the massive desensitization of the American public in response to the growing number of deaths from COVID-19. Due to this refusal, Trump left open a space for Biden, as a presidential candidate, to better attend to the expectations for presidential public address that the situation demanded in response to a collective national grief. Where Trump, as the incumbent president, unsurprisingly deflected, interrupted, and resisted norms of presidential address, Biden, as the presidential candidate, utilized familiarity and empathy to “step in” to the expectations for presidential speech. Robin Wagner-Pacifici argues that this difference in political address can be read as charismatic and anticharismatic authority. Drawing attention toward himself in most if not all speaking engagements, Trump’s political leadership may be characterized as charismatic. In stark contrast, Wagner-Pacifici argues that Biden’s anticharismatic leadership shifts attention away from himself using humility and empathy. “The unexpected revelation is that his electoral success and, arguably, governing success can be partially attributed to his ability and willingness to deflect attention away from himself as a fundamental commitment of his anticharismatic authority” (Wagner-Pacifici, 2024). Biden’s concerted effort to acknowledge a collective notion of national grief functions within this framework of anticharismatic authority which strengthens a felt sense of familiarity within the listening public, ultimately pulling attention away from his own experience of grief to situate a more widespread collective. While Trump’s use of denial and reframing appeal to some, Biden’s ability to utilize felt experience as an empathic connection point with the national audience marks a rich rhetorical strength during what was a campaign period marked by widespread loss and instability.
Part of what makes Biden’s rhetoric so interesting and unique is this explicit description of the affective dimensions of grief. That it is from such a high position of political power and in direct opposition to the rhetorical strategies that Trump utilized, as the incumbent, during the same time, only served to strengthen the affective appeal toward nationhood. While Biden demonstrated a concerted effort to describe and respond to saturated national grief throughout the 2020 U.S. presidential election, his presidency tells a slightly different story.
The Biden presidency
On January 20, 2021, Joseph R. Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. The day before his inauguration, Biden held a memorial at the National Mall for the over 400,000 people, at the time, who had died from COVID-19. Biden spoke, “To heal, we must remember. It’s hard. But that’s how we heal. It is important we do that as a nation. That’s why we are here today” (Scott, 2021). Campbell and Jamieson (2008) argue that this concerted use of healing can be expected by a presidential rhetor. By starting his presidency with a national memorial which recognizes individual loss as collective, Biden sought to unite the nation in grief, invoking both expected norms of the president to address public affect as well as the place and language of the presidency. Biden names the nation as grieving, a collective experience the recognition of which is shared, national, affective—it is “how we heal.” Rather than lingering on the felt intensities of grief as an affective experience, Biden focuses on the movement from grieving to healing. In some ways this also marks his political rhetorical strategy of responding to a presidential precedent that which the incumbent was refusing. As Emily Winderman (2021, p. 467) states of Biden’s early pandemic response, “Biden channeled grief into anger toward supporting his candidacy and acknowledged the mass casualties associated with the coronavirus” as juxtaposed by the denial of mass tragedy from the Trump administration at the time. Part of the effectiveness of Biden’s grief rhetoric comes from this marked difference in pandemic response. In addition, Biden used this space for a long silence. In the video, after Biden speaks, there is silence. Where there is absence in Trump’s rhetoric regarding public affect, there is intentional silence which functions here as presence—a felt presencing of grief.
After assuming the presidency, Biden gave a speech called “Remarks on Remembering the 500,000 Americans Lost to COVID-19” in which he again lingered on the affective intensities of grief. Appealing from personal experience, Biden (2021) states, “I know all too well . . . I know what it’s like when you are there, holding their hands. There’s a look in your eye, and they slip away. That black hole in your chest, you feel like you’re being sucked into it.” Grief is figured not simply as an emotion or feeling, but in descriptions of living against the loss of a loved one. Biden relies heavily on metaphor and repetition, “the black hole in your chest” is repeated often in his public address throughout the pandemic. This figuration of grief also appeals to an intimacy between two people, an interpersonal experience of grief which lends itself to the presencing of the felt loss of the other—the loved one, the empty seat, “their hands,” “they slip away.” Furthermore, Biden points to interpersonal moments that presence the felt sense of loss, the “everyday things—the small things, the tiny things—that you miss the most.” Biden (2021) states, “that scent when you open the closet. The part you go by that you used to stroll in. That movie theater where you met. The morning coffee you shared together. The bend in his smile. The perfect pitch to her laugh.” In Kathleen Stewart’s “Ordinary Affects” (2007, p. 4) she demonstrates the affective textures of everyday life, illustrating “a problem or question, emergent in disparate scenes and incommensurate forms and register; a tangle of potential connections.” She reads these scenes of the everyday in ways that paint an affective picture for the reader, openly allowing for a multitude of readings and engagement with her work. She (Stewart, 2007, p. 6) sites Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum, “the wounding, personally touching detail that establishes a direct contact.” It is this approach to describing the affective textures of lived experience that Biden demonstrates in his speech. The morning coffee, the movie theater, opening the closet, looking at your loved one as they smile. These are all intimate encounters of the everyday that become touchpoints of affective contact in the presence of loss. The public nature of this personalizing discourse reaches out to an intimate audience in defining the contours of an emergent feeling nation. Later in the same speech, Biden (2021) states, “This Nation will smile again. This Nation will know sunny days again. This nation will know joy again.” How might the nation smile? Know? Experience joy? Biden figures this emergence of a national body through affective intimacies of grief. Personal experiences are figured collectively and subsumed into a nation itself capable of affect. As one grieves, the “nation grieves with you,” (Biden, 2020a).
In February 2022, Biden made a statement on the loss of 900,000 lives in the United States to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of his presidency thus far, the discourse related to grief and lingering in felt intensities of grief has greatly subsided. In following his established patterns, one might expect Biden to provide an extended appeal toward a grieving public, an intimate other, and a feeling nation. Instead, Biden’s remarks in this speech are noticeably shorter and aim at both a job well done for the Biden administration in pandemic response as well as a call to U.S. Americans to get vaccinated. When Biden mentions grief in this speech, it is something that can and must be overcome. Biden (2022) states, “After nearly 2 years, I know that the emotional, physical, and psychological weight of this pandemic has been incredibly difficult to bear. [. . .] But I also know that we carry an incredible capacity within ourselves: not only to come through our grief stronger, but to come together to protect one another.” As a scholar intimately familiar with the affective intensities of grief, I struggle to think that one can ever fully “come through” grief. This later response to pandemic-related grief as a sitting president illustrates the political persuasive underbelly of Biden’s grief-based rhetoric throughout the 2020 presidential election.
Complicating the grieving nation
While uniting the nation is an obvious goal of the Biden campaign, especially in response to the demagogic rhetoric of the Trump administration, his affective efforts toward a grieving nation are riddled with the flattening homogenization of disparate feelings of precarity. Emily Winderman (2021, p. 466) argues, “the pandemic’s sanitary rhetorical ecology also permeated Biden’s public grief practices” and is illustrated in “homogenized ethnic, cultural, and racialized experiences of grief.” During his DNC speech, Biden mentioned a conversation he had with Gianna Floyd, George Floyd’s daughter, within the context of finding purpose through grief. Biden (2020b) states, “I met with six-year old Gianna Floyd, a day before her Daddy George Floyd was laid to rest. She is incredibly brave. I’ll never forget. When I leaned down to speak with her, she looked into my eyes and said ‘Daddy, changed the world’.” This story near the end of Biden’s speech utilizes the grieving public and this personal example to spark discussion of racial justice, attempting to articulate grief alongside racial justice in response.
Juliet Hooker (2017) argues that discourses of racial justice in U.S. politics cloud the reality of Black suffering with an overwhelming focus on white loss or white grievance. In this instance, when Biden specifically pivots against a collective notion of loss to a focus on racial justice, it demonstrates that Black loss or suffering is distinct. Rather than articulating any justification alongside this distinction for Black rage or protest, as Hooker (2017) argues is always read against the possibility of white grievance, this speaking moment reiterates Wagner-Pacifici’s (2024) question “as to whether Biden’s familiarity and openness about the reality of loss can be effective in minimizing the force field of white grievance.” Biden (2020b) states, “I found the best way through pain and loss and grief is to find purpose.” Quoting Gianna Floyd, “Daddy, changed the world,” Biden draws in racial justice through the lens of a homogenizing purpose again toward a singular national experience of grief. Biden’s speech posits a purposefulness shown in response to suffering and rage. While this positivity is expected for a campaign speech, it demonstrates Hooker’s (2017, p. 500) argument that “To be good democratic citizens they must peacefully acquiesce to political loss without mobilizing white grievance.” Winderman (2021, p. 468) states of this approach, “Biden’s doubled metaphors of national recovery—calling for healing from the racialized violence of policing and healing from pandemic loss—delivered another social pathogen for Black communities to face: the expectation of Black forgiveness amid ongoing and unaccountable police brutality.” Noting the expectation of forgiveness, Emily Winderman’s take on Biden’s address illustrates the dominating presence of white grievance in both his homogenizing articulations of grief and ongoing lack of accountability for racial injustice.
At the 2020 DNC, Kamala Harris also spoke on grief throughout the pandemic, explicitly stating how racial disparity compounds the affective intensities of loss. Harris (2020) states, “And while this virus touches all, let’s be honest, it is not an equal opportunity offender. Black, Latino, and Indigenous people are suffering and dying disproportionality.” While Harris does not speak for Biden, I wonder to what extent this effort might hint at the “need for nuanced grief practices” that Winderman (2021, p. 469) calls for. If the United States is figured through Biden’s rhetoric as an emergent affective nation without the nuance and particularity of socio-political disparities which compound the very experiences he attempts to describe, who actually makes up this grieving nation?
Conclusion
TIME Magazine (Abrams, 2020) argues that the pandemic has “catalyzed a nationwide politics of grief.” Whether or not there is clarity in definition from the seat of the presidency, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 1,129,434 lives have been lost in the United States, and counting (The New York Times, 2022). This means that at the very least, more than 1 million people are grieving the loss of a loved one. Often, discourse aimed at describing the experience of loss gets housed under the umbrella of grief. This is not necessarily right or wrong, but points to the inability of singularly defining grief. William Mazzarella (2009) cites Brian Massumi on emotion as “a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal.” While leaning on emotion to help make sense of and communicate the intensities of affective experience, the escapability in defining grief points to its affective stickiness; its intuitive impressions resist singularity. Yet, as Ahmed (2004, p. 10) reminds us, objects and bodies emerge, surface, in the messiness of experience.
Biden’s articulations of grief rely on affective intensities which situate a personal grief in open relation to an invisible other, a reaching out, the towardness of which moves away from the particular and toward the singular collective—national grief. I argue this affective reaching toward an invisible other defines the emergence of an affective national body through discursive contradictions between absence and presence, intimate and public. Attending specifically to the how Biden lingers in the felt intensities of grief, amid the backdrop of Trump’s refusal to publicly acknowledge tragedy throughout the 2020 presidential election, illustrates the rhetorical emergence of the feeling nation—a grieving nation.
While Biden’s grief-based rhetoric has significantly decreased since taking office, the intense impressions of his affective discourse in response to the COVID-19 pandemic linger in between self and nation. As we continue to navigate the disparate grieving intensities of a COVID-19 pandemic era, the call for responsibility—particularly responsibility in reckoning with the compounded and increasingly precarious vulnerabilities present throughout our nation—in rhetorical political leadership is ever more urgent. While Biden articulates the emergence of a grieving nation, he also flattens and homogenizes compounded intensities of grief experienced due to nation-wide long-standing structural failures that affect people disproportionately depending on their intersecting—raced, sexed, classed—social positions. Amid an ongoing pandemic, increasing global geopolitical instability, and ever-increasing calls for national reckoning with state violence, scholars of political rhetoric and public address are tasked with the need to incorporate complex interrogations of affective rhetorical strategies—particularly those that construct and define emergent individual, collective, and national bodies. Questions of grief, grieving publics, and grieving nations are increasingly common in public discourse—How do we reckon with past and present state violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities? How do we grapple with gun violence when the weekly rates of mass shootings demand political response that simultaneously recognizes resulting grief? Now 4 years into the COVID-19 pandemic, how do we continue to make sense of grief experienced daily—individually, collectively, nationally, internationally, globally? As scholars interested in the intersections of livability and the entanglements of political speech, further examination into the contours of affective intensities and emergent meaningful bodies—particularly those grieving bodies and those grappling with violence and trauma—in public culture and address is necessary.
