Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
President Joe Biden walks from the stage during a break in the presidential debate with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta.
“We’re able to make every single solitary person … eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, uh, with—with the COVID, or excuse me, with, dealing with, everything we have to do with, uh … Look … If … We finally beat Medicare.” —Joe Biden
There were two good things about last night’s debate debacle. First, it happened early. Second, it wasn’t close; Biden’s collapse was total.
If this had happened in September, the usual month of the first debate, or if Biden had been a little less pathetic and had landed a few punches, we truly would have been screwed. Now, there is still time for Biden to step aside, and little doubt that he must.
Even though no major elected Democrat has yet gone to Biden to tell him he has to step down, that will surely come. Over the next several days, the most senior Democrats in the country will be conferring, and they can only come to one conclusion.
Quite apart from the existential threat of Trump becoming the next president and ending American democracy, there is pure self-interest. The futures of every other Democrat up for re-election are on the line.
With Biden heading the ticket, Democrats will likely lose the House, Senate, state legislatures and governorships, and down-ballot races all the way to school board, as well as the presidency. Chuck Schumer cares more about losing his post as majority leader than he cares about the awkwardness of having to tell his president he needs to go. And to quote Shakespeare, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”
Ironies abound. This early debate was the Biden camp’s idea. It’s evidence of the cluelessness of Biden’s inner circle about the president’s weakness as a candidate that they thought Biden would triumph. They gloated that they prevailed on the terms—no audience, no on-mic cross talk—and still their man got clobbered.
Biden should have won overwhelmingly—on the issues, on Trump’s lying, and on his own coherence compared to Trump’s. Biden’s policies have been superb and consistent. Trump’s policies, both as president and as future president, are a contradictory medley of disasters.
But from the moment he shuffled onto the set, Biden obviously wasn’t up to it. A second irony: Trump, who is widely thought to be demented, came across as stronger, more coherent, and far better able to compose a sentence. Biden, who is probably mentally sounder than Trump, seemed the more impaired, staring blankly and struggling to complete a thought.
Trump’s inventions mostly got a free pass. Trump did cross over into sheer meanness at some points, but he managed to keep his ranting in check. Instead, he turned his tendency to wander into a debating asset. I counted eight times when a moderator asked Trump a hard question—about who he would deport, or what he would do about child care—and each time Trump deftly turned the subject back to Biden. When Trump said repeatedly that other world leaders did not respect Biden, the frail old man on the split screen gave that absurd contention credibility.
Trump looked powerful last night, but he could have been bested by a more competent Democratic candidate and still can.
While a few Biden surrogates have tried to spin the outcome as Biden winning on the issues, or Biden having a bad start but getting stronger as the debate went on, if anything Biden became less articulate over the 90 minutes and even bungled easy winners like the issue of reproductive rights. His attempts to compete on policy successes were laundry lists of obscure details that lost his audience.
If Biden were to stay in, there is simply no way to recoup. Democrats can run TV spot after TV spot, or maximize their efforts to get out the vote, but the problem is not the message; it’s the messenger. The picture that viewers got last night is indelible. You felt embarrassed for him, but pity does not win elections.
Until now, the conventional wisdom has been that only one person might persuade Biden to step aside, his wife Jill. But last night’s debate changes that assumption.
In coming days, the media echo chamber, which for once has it right, will keep reinforcing the depth of Biden’s defeat and the story of utter panic among Democratic officials, strategists, and donors. That will be self-reinforcing.
I’ve been writing for months that Biden’s duty was to be remembered as history’s greatest one-term president and to step aside in favor of a younger and more vigorous nominee. He might have done that in a way that made him look classy and elegant. Now his departure will be messier and less dignified, forced on him by a panicking party.
There is also the awkward matter of Vice President Kamala Harris, the one Democrat who would be even weaker as a candidate than Biden. The way to finesse that is to throw open the convention. Any resentment that a Black woman next in line for the presidency is being passed over can be solved by creating a ticket composed of a stronger woman and a stronger African American.
My own preferred ticket is Whitmer-Warnock. My colleague Harold Meyerson addresses how we might get from here to a stronger ticket. That challenge is tricky but not insurmountable.
Trump looked powerful last night, but he could have been bested by a more competent Democratic candidate and still can. With a younger, more vigorous Democratic nominee, Trump becomes yesterday’s old man, Biden’s baggage is no longer relevant, and Trump’s liabilities become the issue.
In tribute to the great actor Donald Sutherland, who died last week, my wife and I have been watching our own festival of Sutherland movies. One of the greatest is Eye of the Needle, in which Sutherland plays a patriotic Nazi who is deeply embedded in Britain as a fake Englishman during World War II, where his job is to send top secret information back to Berlin. Along the way, he has to unsentimentally kill several innocent people who happen to get in his way.
The movie is also a character study, and the question is whether Sutherland is a sociopath or merely a patriotic Nazi. The answer is that he is both. One of the terrifying things about fascism is that it places sociopaths in power, at every level of government. Hitler murdered millions of Jews both as a racial ideologue and as a sociopath. He invited hysterically loyal sociopaths to run his government and carry out his orders.
From Trump to MAGA acolytes in Congress and MAGA state officials, sociopaths are adept at telling Big Lies, believing those lies, and making those lies sound convincing. Though Biden is a truth-teller, he is a badly impaired one. He needs to step aside so that we are spared being led by a government of sociopaths.
