A Candidate, Not a Cult Leader

Joe Biden, the president of the United States, has decided not to run for his office in 2024. He joins a small but honorable fraternity of men who, for various reasons, declined to seek reelection. This club was founded by George Washington, whose refusal to stand for the presidency again in 1796 was particularly important, because he was walking away from a virtually guaranteed victory.

Biden, by contrast, was facing the serious prospect of a loss, but his decision is similarly admirable. The president sees Donald Trump as a threat to American democracy, and he must know that he has been trailing Trump for months, even before the debate in June that sealed his fate. Biden tried to recover, but in every public outing, he raised more doubts than he dispelled. Anxious Democrats tried to get the message through to him, in private at first and then in public, that he was losing ground in swing states and that his continued presence in the race could even doom downballot candidates.

Many Democrats at the national level believed that Biden was leading his party to a repeat of 2016, in which Trump would again grind out an Electoral College victory while the Republicans would take the House and Senate. Biden would be defeated, and Trump would control the entire government. This time, there would be none of the supposed adults in the room who guided Trump during his tenure. His next administration would be staffed by bottom-feeding opportunists and cranks. The courts are positioned to support this new era of Trumpism: The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has already invited Trump to rule as a king—or worse.

Faced with what he sees as a nightmare scenario both for his party and his nation, President Biden decided to end his candidacy.

My colleague Franklin Foer (who has written a biography of Biden) noted today that the Biden of the past few weeks was a less than admirable figure: He was a defensive, brittle old man who didn’t want to be told he could no longer lead the party on the field of political battle. Like many Americans, I have had the experience of tussling with an elderly parent who came to understand I was right but needed time to admit it. (My father lived to be 94, and we faced many such issues together.) Biden, I am assuming, has been trying to come to grips with the possibility that he might now be the Democrat least likely to defeat Trump.

I do not know—no one can at this point—whether Biden’s replacement will fare any better in November. (Biden has thrown his support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris, as one would expect. Representative Jim Clyburn endorsed her, and the Democrats seem to be coalescing around her.) But at least the Democrats have a fighting chance now. Biden said recently that he couldn’t wait to get back on the trail against Trump, an attempt at bravado that implied he was about to start barnstorming across the fruited plain. I did not believe he was physically capable of doing that kind of campaigning; I doubt many elected Democrats did either.

Of course, if the nominee is Harris, the Republicans will go into culture-war overdrive. They will say that as a Californian, she is too liberal. They will say that as a former prosecutor, she is too conservative. They will say that she is too female and too Black. (Well, they won’t say those last two out loud, but get ready for a fusillade of dog whistles that will be amped up to the point that they could shatter granite.)

Indeed, the MAGA Republicans are already griping about a Democratic Party “coup,” as if they have serious concerns about democracy in any political party, including their own. But Biden’s decision reflected a determination to put the fate of his country ahead of his personal vanity, a choice Trump is inherently incapable of making.

After today the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans could not be clearer. Biden faces challenges of age that are not going to get any easier. His decision to make way for a younger candidate reaffirmed that his party is not about one man. Trump, meanwhile, continues to bellow gibberish at his rallies, raving like the emotionally unstable, would-be dictator that he is.

Even after Trump insulted America’s veterans and the nation’s war dead, even after he was found liable for sexual abuse, even after he racked up 34 felony convictions, almost no elected officials in his party called for him to leave the ticket. (As usual, Mitt Romney was seated at a table for one.) Yet millions of Americans, sadly, have come to regard Trump’s pestilential character as merely a curious facet of an otherwise normal candidate.

Now that Biden is stepping down, perhaps all the false equivalency can end. Biden is a good man, and he’s been a good and consequential president with a first-term record most of his predecessors would envy. He is capable of serving out his term and should do so. (The calls from Republicans today that he should now resign, coming from opportunistic hypocrites such as Elise Stefanik, are as meaningless as they are predictable.) Trump was a disaster, an incompetent and ignorant president whose selfish decisions, especially about COVID-19, likely cost many thousands of Americans their lives.

Biden’s decision is now also a challenge to every voter in the pro-democracy coalition to live by their words. For two years, many Americans lamented the choice between the aging Biden and the dissolute, unbalanced Trump. Their wish has been granted: They will now likely have a choice between a shouty, 78-year-old habitual liar whose life is a record of shame and failure and a 59-year-old woman who has served honorably as a big-state attorney general, a senator, and the vice president of the United States.

Harris has her critics, and she will bring her own vulnerabilities to a campaign. Every American should assess her record with judicious skepticism, as they would that of any other politician. But in the end, if the vice president is the eventual nominee, she will be a candidate similar to many others throughout American history who can claim a long record of senior-government experience. (Like Trump, for example, she has been given briefs on nuclear-launch procedures. Unlike Trump, she almost certainly understood them.)

Every voter who cares about democracy but has claimed to be paralyzed by the two old men in the race will now have no excuses for indecision. The Democrats have made clear that they intend to field a stable, experienced candidate. The Republicans, a cult of personality in the grip of fevered delusions, will field Trump. Tonight, Americans have the clarity they demanded.

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