A defiant Benjamin Netanyahu, in an address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, dismissed as “utter nonsense” criticisms by the United Nations, human rights groups and others that his government has committed war crimes in Gaza and derided protesters as “idiots” and tools of Iran.

The embattled Israeli prime minister told U.S. lawmakers that Israel will settle for “nothing less” than total victory over Hamas, and described a vision for a postwar Gaza seemingly at odds with the terms of a peace deal being pursued by the Biden administration. The fate of Israel and the United States are inextricably linked, he claimed, making the case that U.S. investments in Israel’s war aims also serve to defend the United States and “all democracies.”

“We help keep Americans’ boots off the ground,” Netanyahu thundered, claiming that “Israel fights on the front line of civilization.” He praised the United States’ extensive annual military assistance, but implored Congress to deliver more. “Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster,” he said.

“This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life,” Netanyahu said to cheers and applause in the House chamber, as outside the Capitol throngs of police deployed pepper spray to keep protesters at a distance.

Netanyahu’s address, spanning about an hour, comes as his far-right government nears the start of its tenth month of war in Gaza, where local authorities say 39,000 Palestinians have been killed amid daily bombardment and famine, and as a majority of Israelis say they want him to leave office.

He arrived on Capitol Hill in a bulletproof motorcade, passing through a phalanx of security as protesters marched through downtown Washington, condemning the Israeli leader as an accused war criminal and calling on the Biden administration to end its weapons shipments to Netanyahu’s government.

In his remarks, Netanyahu accused pro-Palestinian demonstrators of standing with the Hamas militants who staged October’s savage attack on Israel, triggering the Gaza war.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” he bellowed, alleging that Iran, Israel’s sworn enemy in the Middle East, is funding such protests throughout the United States and chiding their participants “useful idiots” and antisemites.

Although more than 50 lawmakers said they were boycotting the speech, there were only a few empty seats in the House chamber. Some had been filled by guests, including a group of Israeli soldiers highlighted by Netanyahu in his speech. One, who responded heroically during the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 “killed many terrorists, and saved many lives,” he said.

“I am past pissed off. I am past upset. I am absolutely ashamed of what is happening,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) told reporters on a conference call alongside other Democrats and former government officials who resigned from their jobs in protest of the administration’s Israel policy. “Our government has been actively complicit in genocide every step of the way,” Bush added.

Many of the Democrats who did attend did so with resignation. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) was one, saying earlier this week that he had chosen to show up out of respect for Israel but that he considers Netanyahu to be “the worst leader in Jewish history.”

More than anything, however, Netanyahu’s fourth speech before a joint session of Congress — a privilege afforded to few foreign leaders, and to Netanyahu more than any other in U.S. history — underscored Israel’s staying power as a fixture of American foreign policy and as the largest recipient of U.S. military aid. If Democrats have wavered in their support, Republicans, led by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), have welcomed Netanyahu with open arms, praising his leadership since Hamas launched its cross-border attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people and saw upward of 250 taken hostage.

The Biden administration and many congressional Democrats, who have grown increasingly vocal in their displeasure with Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, have nevertheless shied away from inflicting consequences on a key U.S. ally, leaving unimpeded the flow of billions of dollars in weapons, intelligence, and diplomatic commitments central to the two nations’ security relationship.

The administration has also been at pains in recent weeks to stress the fervent, months-long efforts by senior officials to negotiate a lasting cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that would see the return of the remaining hostages and pave the way toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. Officials have claimed repeatedly that a deal is within reach, with a State Department spokesman, Matt Miller, telling reporters earlier Wednesday that Washington is working “to bridge the final differences.”

But behind closed doors, officials and even some former Israeli officials, have acknowledged that Netanyahu and his cabinet have shown little interest in ending the war. Families of Israeli and American hostages in Gaza also have increasingly criticized Netanyahu for failing to deliver their loved ones from captivity.

“This administration has been pretty clear with us consistently where they thought the pressure needed to be,” Jon Polin, the father of American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, told The Washington Post in an interview. “They have told us when they thought it needed to be Hamas — and right now their belief is it’s more in Israel’s court.”

Netanyahu’s former Army chief of staff-turned-opposition leader, Benny Gantz, also on Wednesday accused Netanyahu of intentionally delaying a cease-fire deal by months, and leaving more Israeli hostages to die.

Netanyahu told his audience Wednesday that his government was engaged in efforts to bring home the hostages, and that when he spoke to the hostages’ families earlier this week he “promised them this: I will not rest until all their loved ones are home.”

As Netanyahu spoke to American lawmakers, doctors in the Gaza Strip said the ongoing carnage from Israeli bombardment and severe shortages in critical medical supplies had rendered them unable to save those they might have been able to under normal circumstances.

Almost 200 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Monday, when Israeli forces launched a fresh operation in the city of Khan Younis, targeting Hamas militants whom it accused of launching rockets from the area. Doctors in the largest remaining hospital in southern Gaza have said in recent days that their wards have been deluged with civilian casualties, leaving blood banks near dry and an emergency room filled with children.

“I pulled a curtain back and there was just a small girl alone, dying,” Javid Abdelmoneim, a medical team leader with Doctors Without Borders, told The Post this week by phone from Gaza. “In a system where there were staff and supplies, and she was the one trauma case, we could have saved her,” he added. But they couldn’t. “She looked like she was eight.”

Although Vice President Harris, who has replaced President Biden atop the Democratic presidential ticket, declined to preside over the address, an aide emphasized her “unwavering commitment to the security of Israel.” Both she and Biden will meet with Netanyahu on Thursday instead.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Netanyahu would travel to meet with him at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, their first meeting since Trump expressed his fury toward the Israeli leader for recognizing Biden’s electoral victory in 2020.

Republicans have sought to capitalize on deepening liberal opposition to the U.S.-Israel relationship, particularly on college campuses, and have framed Democratic criticisms as nothing short of anti-Semitic betrayal in Israel’s hour of need. The GOP, Republican leaders have argued, is Israel’s only true ally.

“This is a moment for moral clarity, and it is unconscionable to us that the president of the United States and some of the leaders in the Senate are unable or unwilling to stand and say what is good and what is evil,” Johnson said last week.

Netanyahu also is no stranger to flame-throwing in U.S. politics. He used his last address to Congress, in 2015, to blast the Obama administration’s efforts toward an Iran nuclear deal, infuriating the White House.

While he sought to tread a more bipartisan line on Wednesday, praising the Capitol as a “citadel of democracy,” and avoiding partisan distinctions, he has made little effort in recent years to disguise his preference for the GOP, which has abstained from questioning Israel’s human rights record and its treatment of the Palestinians.

Steve Hendrix in Tel Aviv, Louisa Loveluck in Jerusalem, Marianna Sotomayor, Mariana Alfaro and Ellie Silverman contributed to this report.

When President Biden announced he was suspending his campaign for president, Donald Trump and some of his supporters stitched together a series of conspiracy theories about Biden’s health, his motives for dropping out, and even whether he was still alive.

Those false assertions built on years of reality-bending messages from Trump and others on the right that have helped polarize the electorate and shaken Americans’ belief in a shared set of facts. While political conspiracy theories have long been a feature of American life, today’s diffuse army of conspiracists are especially able to sow doubt, experts say, and are poised to undermine faith in the coming election less than four years after such false conspiracy theories fomented a violent attack on the Capitol.

Hours after Biden said on Sunday that he was dropping out of the race, which came days after he received his covid diagnosis, Trump set the tone in a social media post. “Does anybody really believe that Crooked Joe had Covid? No,” Trump wrote, challenging the announcement from Biden’s own physician describing his symptoms.

In the same post, Trump claimed, without evidence, that Biden “had wanted to get out” of the presidential race since the night of the debate that sparked concerns nationally over the ability of Biden, 81, to serve a second term in the White House. (Biden acceded to calls that he resign from the race only after weeks of pressure from members of his own party.)

“What happened to Joe Biden,” Trump adviser Chris LaCivita posted on X on Monday. “Where is he? We haven’t seen him since July 17th … around the time he ‘got covid’.”

“When was the last time anyone saw Joe Biden?” asked Charlie Kirk, the founder and CEO of Talking Points USA, a youth-focused conservative advocacy group, who spoke at last week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Trump and his allies provided no evidence for their conjecture, and the false assertions built up to the allegation advanced by some on the far right that Vice President Harris’s elevation to succeed Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate amounted to an illegal government takeover.

“President Trump is merely asking relevant questions — something the media should do after they were exposed for helping Biden cover up his cognitive decline for the past four years,” said Steven Cheung, communications director for Trump’s campaign.

Even before Biden announced he was suspending his campaign, Trump supporters predicted his covid diagnosis would keep him from running. Joey Mannarino, a self-described conservative populist with half a million followers on X, posted that Biden would get long covid, a condition he dismissed as fake, and quit the race. “Just wait,” he wrote.

The day Biden released a letter announcing his decision to leave the race, Laura Loomer, a right-wing anti-Muslim activist with a history of publishing falsehoods, wrote to her more than a million followers on X that she had heard from an unnamed source that Biden had not written the letter. Feminist author turned conspiracist Naomi Wolf reposted Loomer’s message. Another account, Slave to Christ, posted an image of Biden’s signature at the base of the letter, claiming that it did not match previous examples of his penmanship.

Wolf in turn reposted the message, which spurred hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to chime in, questioning the authenticity of Biden’s signature to his 1.3 million X followers. The conspiracy theories persisted even after Biden called in to Harris’s televised appearance Monday at campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., to rally staffers’ support for the vice president — his first public remarks since dropping out of the race.

Kirk on Monday posted on X that he had had “a weird lead” on a story from a source close to the police department in Las Vegas, where Biden visited last week, that contradicted the “official story” that Biden had contracted covid. Kirk’s source, he said, indicated that the U.S. Secret Service had told the local police that an “emergency situation” involving Biden required a “medevac” to transport him to Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. “Apparently the rumor mill in the police department was that Joe Biden was dying or possibly already dead,” Kirk wrote to his more than 3 million followers. Kirk did not specify why his unnamed source asserted that Biden would travel to Johns Hopkins. He arrived later that evening at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Kirk wrote that he had dismissed the tip at the time, but given that Biden had not been seen in public for several days, Kirk wrote that he was curious “if there is more to the official story than what they’re telling us.”

Tucker Carlson read Kirk’s dispatch on his online show hosted on X, and several conservative outlets picked up the report.

When asked about the reports, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department provided a statement that it “was notified that President Joe Biden was sick on July 17th during his visit to Las Vegas” but were not informed of the nature of his illness. “As a precaution, LVMPD proactively began to shut down roads” leading to the local hospital, before the Secret Service told the police that Biden was heading directly to the airport.

“I think it’s clear that there was an undisclosed medical event on July 17th,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Kirk, texted, citing the planned road closures and additional anonymous police sources from another journalist, but no medical evidence. After Kirk received a tip, he shared his information with his audience to try to get more detail, Kolvet added. “Joe Biden either recovered quickly, or they’re not telling us the entire story. It’s also very curious that he dropped out of the race only four days later. We still have a lot of questions, but we followed a lead and have confirmed much of the original story.”

Heading into the last months of the 2024 presidential campaign, which has been upended by extraordinary events including an assassination attempt on Trump and Biden’s decision to step away from the race, researchers are girding for conspiracy theories to take root with every news event.

“It’s a common tactic to take a shred of information that’s in the news and find a way to align it with an existing conspiratorial worldview, which in this case is that the Deep State and the current administration are out to get Trump,” said Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She explained that conspiracy theories about Biden’s ill health serve to demonstrate that the federal government is dishonestly propping up a Trump adversary in order to undermine the former president. “Most of these theories are designed to position Trump as the hero of the story,” she added.

Some figures on the right attempted to tie the attempted assassination to Biden’s stepping out of the race.

“Biden didn’t drop out of the race until after the attempts to imprison and assassinate Donald Trump failed. Do you think that is coincidence?” Sean Davis, co-founder and CEO of the conservative Federalist site, said in a post shared on X.

“All political conspiracy theories seem to eventually converge,” said Melissa Ryan, digital strategist at Card Strategies, where she specializes in studying online hate and conspiracy theories. She added that the close proximity in time between Trump’s shooting and Biden’s withdrawal made it easier for the conspiracy-minded to link the two events.

But investigators have found no evidence connecting Biden or the Democratic Party to the gunman who attempted to kill Trump, nor have they identified a particular ideology or motive driving the shooter, identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old killed at the scene. Crooks had searched online days earlier for information about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and he used a rifle with a collapsible stock that may have made it easier for him to disguise the weapon before climbing onto a roof, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

The current moment has brought conspiratorial thinking, which emerged on the fringes of politics during Trump’s first term, into the center of a major-party platform, experts said.

“The issue isn’t so much the theories themselves,” said Joseph E. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who specializes in conspiracy theories. “The issue is that you have Donald Trump and his allies in the conservative media and the government using a lot of conspiracy theories, and that’s where it becomes a major problem, because they have political elites like presidential candidates and senators and representatives and cable news channels and internet personalities with big audiences … pushing this stuff to audiences who trust them. [And] that’s really bad. And that’s where we need to be focused.”

Before Harris addressed the nation Tuesday from a suburb of Milwaukee in her first rally, Worldnet Daily, the far-right conspiracy theory publication that was a leading voice falsely claiming that former president Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., recirculated online posts about Biden stepping away from the race and asked, “Did we just witness a coup?”

The inability to agree on a set of facts leads to the perception of an information vacuum, said Squire, such that even with more information, the vacuum never fills up. “When you have a lack of information,” she said, “the world we’ve built is going to fill that with garbage.”

Jeremy Merrill contributed research.

A year before J.D. Vance was elected to the Senate, he advocated for a novel way to enhance the political strength of families — by giving parents the ability to cast tens of millions of additional votes on behalf of their children.

Vance, now the Republican nominee for vice president, in a 2021 speech called for encouraging Americans to have more babies and allowing them to more fully advocate for their children.

“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power,” he told the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. “You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

Such a voting system would almost surely face legal challenges, experts in election law said. It would also create logistical hurdles. Election officials would need to track which voters were eligible to cast multiple ballots and regularly update their voter rolls to account for moves, divorces and court decisions in child custody cases.

Vance appears unlikely to push for the idea if he’s elected to the White House alongside GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. Vance has not written legislation on the issue since he was elected to the Senate in 2022. Vance spokesman William Martin called his 2021 proposal “nothing more than a thought experiment on strengthening parents’ rights and not a concrete policy proposal.”

Trump has spent years baselessly calling into doubt mail-in ballots and other parts of the country’s elections system. A Trump spokesman did not say whether he supported Vance’s idea of letting parents cast additional votes for their children.

Vance, the best-selling author of the 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” made his 2021 remarks a few weeks after he launched his Senate bid. In his 35-minute speech, Vance argued the right had lost control of all the nation’s cultural institutions and needed to encourage families to have more children to avert a “civilizational crisis” and reinvigorate the economy. He criticized the media, including The Washington Post, and lauded Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s policy of giving newly married couples loans that are forgiven if they stay together and have children.

Vance derided many Democratic leaders for not having children — including Vice President Harris, who has two stepchildren and is now the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee.

“What is the one thing that unites every single one of them?” Vance said of Harris and three other Democratic leaders. “Not a single one of them has any children. Now why is that? Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have any children?”

The next day, at another event, Vance said the left had built “an entire political movement that is explicitly anti-child and anti-family.”

Harris spokesman Ammar Moussa accused Vance of engaging in “ugly, personal attacks.” “Unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance, Vice President Harris understands that every single American has a stake in this country’s future,” Moussa said. In response, Vance’s campaign released a statement from Vance’s aunt Lori Meibers that called criticism of him “disgusting.”

The idea Vance floated was fleshed out this month in a law review article titled “Give Parents the Vote” by Northwestern University law professor Joshua Kleinfeld and Harvard law professor Stephen Sachs. Giving parents the chance to vote on behalf of their children would “profoundly alter the incentives of American parties and politicians,” they wrote.

Vance has not reviewed the article, according to his campaign, and he has not publicly gone into the level of detail that the authors do.

There are more than 70 million children in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, and they account for nearly a quarter of the population. They have major stakes in climate change, the size of the federal government’s debt and long-term policies, Kleinfeld and Sachs wrote. They wrote that allowing parents to vote for children has to be taken seriously even if it sounds like a “silly provocation” at first.

Under their plan, single parents would get to cast ballots on behalf of their children. Two parents who had shared custody would each effectively cast half a vote for each child. That way, a child’s ballot would be cast even if the parents disagreed on whom to vote for. That part of the plan would complicate the work of election officials, who would be responsible for keeping track of the “fractional votes” cast on behalf of children.

Kleinfeld and Sachs downplayed the potential for fraud, saying election officials could establish systems to identify suspicious activity like ones the Internal Revenue Service uses to find people who falsely claim dependents on their tax returns. In response to questions, Sachs in an email called the logistical considerations of their proposal “a hurdle, but not an insurmountable one.”

Allowing parents to cast votes for children is in line with giving them the power to make educational and medical decisions on their behalf, the pair wrote in their law review article.

Which party would benefit from allowing parents to vote on behalf of their children is unclear, they wrote.

“As to policy, while both parties will surely assemble new coalitions around issues of interest to parents, it’s hard to know what those issues will be,” they wrote, predicting politicians would start to push for “more child tax credits, more focus on school quality, more emphasis on public safety, more environmental protection, and more concern with long-term financial risk.”

In his 2021 speech, Vance didn’t delve into the details of his proposal, such as what to do when parents disagree on how to cast a child’s ballot or whether to allow someone to vote on behalf of orphans who are wards of the state. He also did not address whether noncitizens who are barred from voting would be allowed to cast ballots on behalf of their children who were born in the United States and have citizenship. (Vance recently signed on to legislation meant to prevent granting birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants who are in the county illegally.)

Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky, said he was intrigued by allowing parents to vote for children but questioned whether it would pass muster in court.

“My guess is that a court would more likely strike it down as violating the idea of equal representation because it’s one person getting more technical votes,” he said. “Even though they’re voting almost as a proxy for their children, they’re getting more votes than someone who doesn’t have kids.”

Edward Foley, an election law professor at Ohio State University, agreed such a system would face a tough road in court.

He expressed doubts about the merit of the proposal. Democracy is built on the idea that all voters get an equal say and are responsible for thinking about what’s best for the entire community, not just themselves, he said.

“I applaud the idea of making sure that our political system is well designed to think about the interests of kids,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean giving extra votes to parents. It means everybody as a voter should be thinking about all the interests that are worthy of protection.”

It had the feeling of a fond farewell. There wasn’t a heavy dose of bitterness, and there was more than a hint of pride.

But the man who has probably given more eulogies than any other U.S. politician had a significant amount of wistfulness tucked inside his Oval Office address. A bit like he is starting to reconcile with the idea that he is soon exiting political life, something that has guided him for more than five decades. The man who entered political life as one of the youngest U.S. senators in history is coming to terms with leaving as the nation’s oldest president in history.

“Nowhere else on earth could a kid with a stutter, from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, one day sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States,” Biden said. “But here I am.”

But he’s here for only a little bit longer.

The whole point of the address was to explain to the nation his decision Sunday to abandon his run for reelection and endorse Vice President Harris as his successor. In a way, he didn’t really accomplish that. There wasn’t a heavy dose of introspection in the speech, with emotions no doubt still raw over leaving a race that in his core he still felt he may have been able to win. He didn’t acknowledge the bitterness felt over those he considered friends stating publicly that it was time for him to go.

Instead it was the first of what will be many farewells — and also the first attempt to claim credit for what he hopes will cement his legacy. He has long been frustrated by what he sees as the lack of credit he has received for his accomplishments, feeling that voters should have given him higher marks for steering the country through the pandemic, an economic fallout and entrenched political divisions.

“I’ve come so far since my inauguration,” he said.

During his remarks, he listed his accomplishments and laid out some of his priorities for the final months he has left. He pointed mostly to foreign-policy efforts, including strengthening NATO to fight Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, trying to secure a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages and bringing home Americans who have been detained abroad.

He mentioned a series of domestic accomplishments, including a stronger economy, broader manufacturing base and a burst of computer chips manufacturing and science innovation.

“We finally beat Big Pharma,” Biden said at one point. That was the bungled line he had during a June 27 debate with former president Donald Trump, when he instead confusingly said, “We finally beat Medicare!”

It wasn’t the only problem in his confused, rambling performance during the debate, but it was that line more than any other that led party leaders to raise significant questions about the 81-year-old president, call on him to drop out and cause him to give the Wednesday night address. One reason that the decision was so hard for Biden was that he has genuinely felt that he has had a historically successful presidency, and he didn’t feel like he had completed the tasks he set out to do.

He also hinted in the remarks that he himself felt he deserved a second term but acknowledged that the doubt about him within his party was growing too all-consuming for him to overcome.

“I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future — all merited a second term,” he said. “But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”

“So I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation,” he added.

He spoke from the Oval Office, a place that he called a “sacred space.” He referred to the portraits around him, of Thomas Jefferson (“wrote the immortal words that guide this nation”) of George Washington (“showed us presidents are not kings”) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (“inspired us to reject fear.”)

“I revere this office,” he said. “I love my country more. It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president.”

There was no hint of second-guessing the decision he announced just three days earlier, and he has fully backed Harris.

“I’d like to thank our great vice president, Kamala Harris,” Biden said. “She’s experienced. She’s tough. She’s capable. She’s been an incredible partner to me and a leader for our country. And now the choice is up to you, the American people.”

First lady Jill Biden sent out a handwritten note just after the remarks. She made clear that she was also backing Harris. But as a fierce defender of her husband, she also made clear that she was most appreciative of those who had avoided second-guessing a loyal party stalwart who thought he could still run.

“To those who never wavered, to those who refused to doubt, to those who always believed, my heart is full of gratitude,” she wrote. “Thank you for the trust you put in Joe — now it’s time to put that trust in Kamala. Love, Jill.”

Four years ago, Biden had said that he viewed himself “as a bridge, not as anything else.” He pointed to a new generation of leaders that were the future of the country. For most of his time in office, though, he viewed that bridge as an eight-year one. He saw no need to step aside.

His remarks on Wednesday night illustrated in the starkest of ways that the end of his bridge is in sight, and a new era has arrived.

“There is a time and a place for long years of experience in public life,” Biden said. “There’s also a time and a place for new voices. Fresh voices. Yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.”

He tapped on the Resolute Desk for emphasis.

Toward the end of his remarks, he seemed to take the tone of a man who had finished a race, of a college graduate reviewing an academic career, or of a worker getting ready to leave their station for the final time before retirement.

“I gave my heart and my soul to our nation, like so many others,” he said. “I’ve been blessed a million times in return with the love and support of the American people. I hope you have some idea how grateful I am to all of you.”

It’s still not goodbye exactly. He vowed to stay active for another six months, in what will be one of the longest lame-duck periods in recent memory.

As he spoke, in a portrait just behind him, was a photo of his late son Beau, who died of cancer in 2015. It was Beau who urged his father to stay active in public life. It was Beau who was very much the inspiration to run for office. And it was Beau who still brings a tear to his eyes when he speaks about him. Biden never mentioned him, but his presence was clearly felt as he seemed to feel like he made good on the pledge to his son to remain active.

He was, as he always has been, surrounded by family.

Sitting nearby was his wife and some of his grandchildren. His son Hunter was along the curved oval wall, along with his daughter Ashley and granddaughter Finnegan.

Toward the end of the remarks, Ashley reached for the hand of her mother, Jill Biden.

When his remarks concluded, the family and staff in the room burst into applause.

“This has been the honor of a lifetime,” Biden told the room.

Yasmeen Abutaleb contributed to this report.