Who Is America’s Bigger Loser, Joe Biden or Drake?

Over the past year, the American mainstream has developed two favored punching bags. The first came from the Oval Office, as what everyone communicated to Democrats in 2020–that they thought Joe Biden was too old to be a two-term president–burst out into the open again in 2024, as majorities of Americans similar to those who say they like ice cream agreed that the president should not run for president again. The second one emerged after a pop star picked a fight with an immensely petty man who had spent years planning for this moment.

Drake just filed a lawsuit against his own label because Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us is too mean to him and way too popular. Drake is suing Universal Music Group, who produces both him and Lamar, for defamation and harassment, saying the label prioritized “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists” by making the hit of the summer. Drake alleged in his lawsuit that the shooting which left his security guard wounded “with blood everywhere” was connected to the feud, and while the timing of it and the ugly history of how many hip-hop feuds have ended certainly back up Drake’s assertion, no motive was assigned to the crime by investigators at the time, and there has been no update to the public since. Universal called the lawsuit “illogical,” and pointed to the fact that if they are prioritizing corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists, how come Drake never made this complaint while he spent all those years taking money from Universal and pumping his net worth up to what Forbes estimated in 2020 was $49 million?

In a way, Joe Biden should probably be thanking Drake for taking the cultural heat off of him during the last week of his presidency. The outgoing president’s final weeks have been filled with some genuine good news. His chilling final speech from this week warning America of an oligarchy threatening democracy will only get truer with time. Israel and Hamas just agreed to a ceasefire he claims was the one he was fighting for last spring (although in true loser fashion, all available reporting says that Trump’s ultimatum to Netanyahu to end the war had a big hand in the agreement). Biden even wound up appointing more judges than Trump did. All while Biden makes lesser-hyped moves with big impacts like removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people while pardoning 39 others, some of whom Trump would have put to death. Few things make our broken democracy more obvious than the fact that the “lame-duck” session for presidents can actually be really productive, especially the further away an issue is from the spotlight, and after a year of constant negativity, Biden must be enjoying this reprieve of positive developments on his way out to the big politics farm upstate.

Last year was defined by losers, as Biden spent the first half of it consistently stumbling in public and proving everyone right as the Democrats did increasingly hopeless damage control, and the second half gave us a world much more focused on Drake’s unprecedented public humiliation and coconuts, which led to a staggeringly bleak bit of news for the sitting president slipping under the radar, as I noted in my short list of people and things who would have beat Joe Biden. Barack Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau said on Pod Save America that when the Harris campaign took over, they found internal Biden polling that had Trump winning 400 electoral votes after the disastrous debate, which more or less would look like this.

Loser! Biden spent all of 2024 losing to everyone he came into contact with. He became so isolated that he appointed Hunter Biden as an actual senior presidential adviser who sat in on important policy meetings. Biden is such a massive loser he was forced to admit it in a nationally televised speech stepping down from a race he lost for Kamala Harris more than anyone, despite the fact that he bitterly holds on to his fake news polls delusion that he was winning and still could have won the election. His legacy, his reputation, his ability to be in the same room with the Democratic elite and not set it ablaze with his and Jill Biden’s smoldering resentment–he lost all of it in the final year of his presidency.

The only person who could be a bigger loser on the scale of a sitting president forced to admit that he would get boat raced by a racist game show host whose brain is also melting out of his ears would have to come from America’s rabid celebrity culture. Someone else famous on the scale of a president…like a pedophilic mega-pop star who makes some admittedly good beats that many of America’s frat bros confuse for hip-hop.

But being creepy with underage girls on video in public was never enough to sink the careers of people like Drake or Joe Biden in a country that just voted for misogyny in human form. Nor were longstanding allegations of unwanted advances on women in their orbit enough to stop them from getting to the top of their respective professions. Hell, Biden even joked about it and still won the Democratic primary afterwards. It took one of America’s most eloquent and famous people to make Drake’s years of misogynistic and potentially criminal behavior actually stick, albeit in hypocritical fashion. Hip-hop is defined by its flawed messengers, and Kendrick Lamar is no saint as Drake pointed out in Family Matters that mattered for a total of fifteen minutes before Kendrick nuked him straight to cultural hell with Meet the Grahams, sending us down the path we find ourselves on today where Drake is filing a lawsuit because he lost a rap battle worse than any living rapper ever has.

If Drake doesn’t want a talented artist making the hit of the summer all about his proven pedophilic desires, then he shouldn’t have spent years doing things like kissing teenage girls up on stage at concerts and saying, “I can’t go to jail yet, man!” Donning the Meet the Grahams cover with a photo proving that Drake had a mole reinforced the overall point Kendrick was making throughout their rap battle: Drake’s creepy, fraudulent and self-serving Trumpian behavior has been widely known for years, and it’s time for everyone to acknowledge it. Kendrick Lamar did the culture a favor by proving that world peace is possible through people’s mutual hatred of Drake, and etching “tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minorrrrrr” into the cultural lexicon established a moral hazard for sexual crimes that America’s criminal justice system has difficulty matching.

The answer to my title is Drake. The answer to any biggest loser question in any subject anywhere in the world is Drake. Filing a lawsuit because he lost a rap battle that he instigated established Drake as the biggest loser in human history. Joe Biden endured the biggest and most high-profile public humiliation any politician has seen since a pretzel nearly assassinated George W. Bush, but Biden’s 2024 was a deep tissue massage compared to what happened to Drake. Joe Biden did a lot of embarrassing things over the past year to establish himself among the all-time great losers in American political history, but he joins a precedented place alongside other world-historic losers like Hillary Clinton. Drake spent all of 2024 innovating new ways to lose, and he has kick-started the impending Trump era by establishing a humiliating mark that no other human is even capable of matching at this point.