It took 24 agonizing days after the disastrous debate in Atlanta against Donald Trump for Joe Biden to surrender to the evidence: the President of the United States announced this Sunday via a message on the social network X that, at 81 years of age, he is giving up on his efforts to run for re-election next November.
“To my fellow countrymen,” he begins a text in which he tells them that being president “has been the greatest honor” of his life. “My intention has been to seek reelection, but I believe that the best thing for my party and for the country is for me to retire and concentrate solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”
“Over the last three and a half years, we have made great progress as a nation,” the second sentence of the text says. Biden then sums up some of those achievements: the American economy, he says, is “the strongest in the world”; under his mandate, the price of medicines was lowered and health benefits were increased; the first gun control law in thirty years was passed and the Supreme Court selected the first African-American in its history. None of this ended up being enough for his supporters to ease the pressure exerted since the debate to force his resignation, given that almost all the polls gave Trump a victory at the polls less than four months before the elections.
In a second message, also posted on X, although this time addressed to Democrats, Biden announced within minutes that he supported the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him at the head of the campaign.
Trump, who was officially nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate in Milwaukee last week, reacted to the announcement by saying that he believes it will be “easy” for him to beat Harris at the polls.
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Both communications put an end to half a century of one of the most tenacious political careers in Washington, of whom before becoming president he was vice president and senator, and open a period of uncertainty with unforeseeable consequences for the United States. They also put an end to almost four weeks of doubts about Biden’s physical and mental abilities to win in November, first, and, more importantly, to continue four more years in the White House. Since the debate, the pressures have been in crescendo, in public and in private, from donors, strategists, analysts, the media, senators, congressmen and their leaders in both Houses, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, as well as from leading figures of the Democratic Party such as Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama.
First, there was the “panic” felt by his supporters when they saw him erratic, from lapse to lapse, on the television set that CNN set aside in Atlanta for the first presidential debate. Then came the editorial of The New York Times who was calling for his resignation and the first Democratic legislators to sign up to the list of those who begged him to consider it, which grew in number and prominence of its signatories until it exceeded thirty. On Sunday, a last prominent name was added: that of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who had resigned from the party in May but still represented it on Capitol Hill.
Last Friday, Biden warned of his intention to return to the campaign trail next week. Sick with Covid, he spent the weekend confined to his beach house in Rehoboth (Delaware), taking Paxlovid and keeping a light work schedule that included a call with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The American media reports that Biden, in addition to being sick, is angry with old allies who have been turning their backs on him, especially Barack Obama, hurt by what he considers a betrayal.
Finally, the candidate, who spent all that time defending his ability to carry out the job and beat Trump, despite the evidence against him, gave in to the pressure and made a historic decision that brings the United States into uncharted territory.
The most pressing question is whether the party will agree or not to Harris being the successor. There is not much time for discussions: the Democratic National Convention is being held in Chicago between August 19 and 22. It is not just that we have to go to that meeting with our homework done to avoid a chaotic spectacle like the one in 1968. But there is another deadline before that: the party has set itself the end of the first week of August as the deadline to virtually name the chosen one, whether it is Biden or someone else.
Some Democratic voices, led by Pelosi, have advocated holding mini-primaries. If Harris is chosen by the party for the November ballot by means of this express election or by the logic of Biden’s appointment, the vice president still remains unclear as to who would accompany her.
When Biden chose her as his second-in-command in the 2020 election, he did so for the symbolism of introducing someone who would become the first woman and the first Black person and person of Asian descent to serve as vice president, but also because of her age. Harris is 59, and Biden campaigned in that election as a mere “bridge” to younger generations.
By the time he broke the record as the longest-serving president of the United States, he had already changed his mind, and in April 2023 he launched his candidacy to renew what is perhaps the most difficult job in the world: leader of the world’s leading power. Doubts about whether he was fit to do so go back much further than the June 27 debate, although both his Administration and his allies and the liberal media tended to downplay them. The first serious warning sign came this year, when special prosecutor Robert Hur, in charge of investigating Biden’s handling of confidential papers that he still possessed without permission after leaving his post as Obama’s vice president (2009-2017), said in his report that the president was unable to remember the name of his son, Beau, who died in 2015, and described him as “an old man with a bad memory.”
At the end of the bombshell message that has turned the United States and the world upside down on this placid Sunday, Biden resorted to one of his favorite arguments. “I continue to think what I always thought: there is nothing that America is not capable of, as long as we do it together. We have to remember that we are the United States of America.”
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