“He ran two or three times, he never got above 1%,” Donald Trump said of Joe Biden in 2019. “And then Obama came along and took him off the trash heap, and he became the vice president.”

It was an amusing way to insult the former vice president at the time — perhaps less so after Biden went on to win the Democratic nomination, defeat Trump, and become president. Still, the characterization rang true insofar as Barack Obama’s choice of Biden as running mate in 2008 struck many people, justifiably, as an odd one.