US President Joe Biden is spending the weekend with Covid, confined to his beach house in Rehoboth, Delaware. He is taking Paxlovid and keeping a light work schedule that included a call with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. 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.
Meanwhile, in the outside world, like those relatives who speak to a seriously ill person thinking that they are not being heard, Democrats have opened an internal debate on how to proceed if Biden finally resigns, given that the pressures for him to do so do not ease and despite the fact that the president shared on Friday his intention to return to the electoral campaign this week.
If he were to step aside, it would be up to him to name a logical successor: Vice President Kamala Harris. But there are those who believe, and are manoeuvring, to ensure that what follows an announcement that many take for granted will be the holding of express primaries to find the ideal candidate, Harris or someone else. There is not much time: the Democratic National Convention is being held in Chicago between 19 and 22 August. It is not just that we have to arrive at that meeting with our homework done to avoid a chaotic spectacle like the one in 1968. It is that there is another deadline first: the party set itself the end of the first week of August as the deadline to virtually name the chosen one, be it Biden or someone else.
The most authoritative voice advocating for a mini-primary is Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House of Representatives. Those who think otherwise argue that when Democratic supporters voted massively for Biden in the primaries earlier this year, they were actually voting for the Biden-Harris duo. There are no historical precedents that assume that the resignation of a president automatically opens the door to the second in command. This was not the case, for example, with Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in 1968. And, Biden knows this better than anyone, Obama did not bet on his vice president in 2016 either, but on Hillary Clinton.
In terms of defections, Biden’s loyalist army suffered another significant loss on Sunday. Joe Manchin, a senator from West Virginia and one of Washington’s most influential politicians, became the 37th member of the Capitol to publicly call on the president to give up his efforts to run in the November elections. “It’s time for me to make way for a new generation,” he said on CNN’s Sunday talk show.
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Manchin, who announced in May that he was leaving the Democratic Party but still represents it in the Senate, is the fifth senator to take the step and perhaps the most powerful name on Capitol Hill to do so. He also expressed his support for an open process to choose a successor.
What began as a hum of unrest in the party, a muted “panic” after the disastrous debate on June 27 in Atlanta between Biden and his opponent, Donald Trump, has ended up becoming a robust chorus of voices that have not been moved by the attempts of the 81-year-old president to show that everything is fine and that he is ready to win in November.

The first step was taken by Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett on July 5. Little by little, more joined in. Many of these legislators are united, in addition to their interest in the future of the party and the country, by their concern for their own future. Those who are playing for their seats in November, when in addition to electing a president, the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for renewal, fear that Biden’s bad luck at the polls will affect his chances of winning in disputed districts, and even in those that were taken for granted.
A bad day for the candidate
The day when faith in the candidate’s mental and physical abilities fell the most was last Friday: 11 people came forward, led by veteran Senator Sherrod Brown. His home state of Ohio, home of Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance, has suddenly become a symbolic battleground.
Friday was also the day the president announced that he would return to the campaign trail next week after leaving the door open to considering resigning. Despite that announcement, analysts in Washington are more or less assuming, as they continue to discover new uses of the conditional tense, that he will leave: so now the when is the what. And the theory that is gaining strength is that it will be after this week’s trip to the United States by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is scheduled to visit the White House on Tuesday and appear before Congress on Wednesday.
During his convalescence, Biden is accompanied by his wife, First Lady Jill Biden, his main support in weathering the storm of those calling for him to retire. According to his account The Washington Post, The family, a close-knit unit in which the son, Hunter, has taken on a special role in recent weeks, is “angry” at seeing what they consider “a war in the style of Game of Thrones between various factions of the party.” They are also bothered by “the tone that some members of the party are adopting in their pressure.”
In the Biden household, they can always count on those who still stand by the president in trouble. This Sunday, Democrats Ro Khanna (Rep. from California) and one of his most loyal supporters, Rep. James E. Clyburn (South Carolina), have strolled through the news channels. Others who have not abandoned him are Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both members of the most progressive wing of the party.
The tug-of-war over the candidate’s future takes on greater urgency in light of the triumphalism that has spread through the Republican Party following the Milwaukee convention, from which Trump emerged hailed as the absolute leader. Despite polls indicating that two-thirds of Democratic voters are in favour of a change, Biden seems, for the moment, clinging to the mast of a ship in the middle of a shipwreck.
Even the money has turned against him. In addition to the pressure from big donors, who are threatening to withdraw their funds until the candidate thinks better of it, there are the figures released this Saturday on the fundraising during the month of June for both campaigns. According to these figures, the Republican National Committee has recorded its best month in years. To know the real extent of Biden’s debate disaster for the party’s coffers, we will have to wait for the August report. But by then, perhaps, the problem will no longer be Biden’s.
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