The triumph and tragedy of Joe Biden’s life is that he got exactly what he wanted.

It’s not true that he ran in 2020 because he felt duty-bound to do so after seeing white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, though the president has made the claim so many times he may now truly believe it. According to multiple accounts, Biden and his team originally filmed an announcement video outside his childhood home in Scranton stressing his working-class roots, before scrapping it and seizing on Charlottesville as a rationale.

The White House was a boyhood dream; he wrote about it in the sixth grade. He was talking about the presidency before he was elected to anything, and as early as 1976, four years into his first Senate term, after he had shocked the state of Delaware with an insurgent, youth-driven campaign that no one, not even he himself, expected to have the legs it did. But sometimes dreams come with a price.