Editor’s note: This op-ed has been updated to reflect President Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he is withdrawing from the presidential race.
With President Joe Biden’s announcement today that he is withdrawing from the presidential race, it’s worth looking back on what got us here.
The televised moment that may change modern American history lasted only 18 seconds. It was the first and most troubling sign that something was seriously off with President Joe Biden.
About 12 minutes into his June 27 debate with Donald Trump, the president began answering a question on the national debt when he veered off into a rambling and incoherent word salad on health care: “…making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with…with the Covid…excuse me, with dealing with…everything we have to do with [extended pause]…look, if…we finally beat Medicare.”
There were other stumbles throughout the night, but that one was arguably the cringiest, perhaps the first time in years Democrats suddenly felt vulnerable.
It had been a long time since anyone associated Democrats with the word “vulnerable.” Indeed, ever since America’s #1 blowhard announced his entry into the presidential race, Democrats and their media supporters have feasted on his verbal recklessness. Bashing Trump was the gift that kept on giving. Unlike most politicians who never tell you what they really think, this guy went overboard in the other direction.
For more than eight years, Democrats were united in their attacks on Trump, spoiled by the constant ammunition Trump himself would provide. Bashing Trump became so easy it turned into a kind of shorthand— “fine people on both sides,” “drink bleach,” “January 6,” “destroy democracy,” and so on.
Inevitably, this convenient Trump-bashing blueprint made Democrats smug and complacent. Why look inward when you can just keep the spotlight on someone you believe deserves only contempt?
After losing to Trump when he shockingly beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, instead of doing any soul searching to find out why so many people voted for him, the Dems doubled down on their Trump-bashing throughout his tenure. Even after they regained the White House in 2020 under Joe Biden, the blueprint still ruled. Trump was an obvious threat who had to be crushed in the service of keeping the Dems united and in power.
But in their zeal to crush that threat and stay in power, the Dems ignored and covered up an even more lethal threat brewing in their midst: a president in mental decline.
I have no doubt some savvy Democrats saw this ticking time bomb early on and tried to ring the alarm. Biden had promised, after all, to be a one-term president—the man who would boot Trump out of the White House and set the stage for a new generation of Democratic leaders.
A few things happened along the way, however, to change the dynamics. The Dems did surprisingly well in the 2022 midterms against Trump-supported candidates. Trump himself was mired in criminal indictments that promised to suck up most of his time and financial resources during the election campaign, and maybe even land him in jail.
Seeing a vulnerable Trump imploding in legal quicksand, the Dems got cocky. They figured there was no need to look too closely at their own budding implosion of a frailer-than-ever president.
The signs of Biden’s mental decline were there for years, of course, but the Dems and their media enablers became expert at covering them up. The problem is that the very notion of decline means it gets harder and harder to cover up. But even as it got harder, they could always count on an opponent who was in worse shape. When Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York courtroom less than two months ago, Biden and Co. were emboldened to continue with their Trump-obsessed blueprint.
Trump had hit rock bottom. He was due for sentencing right before his convention in Milwaukee. How much popular support can a convicted felon and a lying huckster ever get? As long as the Dems kept the klieg lights squarely on the man many called Hitler, they saw little risk in continuing to cover up the mental state of their own candidate, the leader of the free world.
It might have worked. We’ll never know.
Here’s what we do know: Biden and his team made the fateful decision to have an early debate with Trump to boost their poll numbers and show the nation he was ready to slay the Trumpster once again. But this wasn’t 2020; it was 2024.
With more than 50 million people watching, the debate blew up in their face. In those 18 seconds of cringe, the Democrats suddenly went from a party of unity to a party of panic. With their own convention only two months away, they were stuck with a weak candidate who was now widely exposed and likely to put Trump back in the White House, their worst nightmare.
As the Dems were panicking, things started turning up roses for Trump. Even though he was his typical bombastic and lying self at the debate, the optics of a confident Trump next to a weak and fumbling Biden boosted his image and shifted the spotlight, for once, on his opponent. Then the Supreme Court made a favorable ruling on presidential immunity that effectively neutralized or delayed his legal trials until after the election.
As if that weren’t enough, Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet on July 13 that attracted widespread sympathy and turned him into a budding folk hero. Even his biggest detractors had to admit that this man could take a punch. After years of withstanding endless hits, including a lawfare assault that would have destroyed any mortal, the man was miraculously still standing.
How much legal pressure was he forced to face?
“If the accused had been a terrorist or hardened criminal,” former prosecutor Andy McCarthy wrote in NRO, “Democrats and their legal- and media-elite allies would have wailed endlessly at the scandal of simultaneously indicting the same person in four complex cases, in courthouses a thousand miles from one another; at the expectation that such a defendant could navigate the complications, comb the discovery, litigate pretrial motions, prepare competent defenses, and endure four trials — all on or before a date chosen for political rather than law-enforcement reasons. And that, even as activist civil lawyers aligned with the prosecutors were concurrently suing the defendant for every penny he was worth — and expecting him to find time for those trials, too. Yet, that is exactly the burden imposed on Trump.”
Have we ever seen in recent political history such a stunning comeback and turnaround?
Less than two months ago, Trump was a convicted felon drowning in multi-trial hell and huge legal bills who risked being sentenced to jail before his convention. His opponents, meanwhile, were raising $30 million at a star-studded Hollywood dinner, secure in knowing they could never lose to a convicted felon.
Today, Trump is riding high as the ultimate survivor on top of a united party, while Biden is recovering from Covid and was teetering on top of a divided party eager to oust him when he finally announced on Sunday that he would withdraw from the race.
But wait. It gets worse.
Even after Biden has agreed to step down, the road to finding a new candidate at this late stage only promises more internal strife among Democrats.
One camp is in favor of naming Vice President Kamala Harris as the candidate, while another favors opening up the process to other candidates in a “blitz primary” or contested convention. And let’s not forget the camp that still believes Biden earned his 14 million primary votes, and that forcing him out now is the equivalent of an anti-democratic coup.
“If the Democratic elites push Biden out and disenfranchise 14 million voters like me, the Democratic legislators are no better than Republicans,” said one top Biden surrogate focused on reaching Black voters, according to NBC News. “Democrats lose the so-called save democracy argument, and it will appear racist.”
Whichever way it goes, with the Chicago convention only a few weeks away, we have a divisive mess that is likely to get messier and more divisive. “There is no sugarcoating the mess Democrats find themselves in right now,” Norman Ornstein writes in The Los Angeles Times.
As a result, Democrats are in the excruciating position where instead of focusing on Trump, they’re forced to flog themselves in public. It’s like a drug addict who goes cold turkey. The Dems are desperate to jump back into full-time Trump-bashing mode, but how can they do that if they don’t have a candidate they can agree on?
Following a long period when they got used to being united around attacking Trump, the Dems are experiencing an ugly meltdown that is opening deep internal wounds, where, among other things, their affinity for “identity politics” may be coming back to haunt them. They spent years comfortably looking through a window with Trump as their one common target; now they’re looking at a mirror where all they can see are circular firing squads.
Meltdown notwithstanding, though, this thing is far from over. If there’s one thing we’ve learned with modern-day politics, never be shocked by the unexpected. A savior may yet appear to rescue the Dems (Aaron Sorkin wrote in The New York Times that it should be Mitt Romney– no joke). Trump may yet go through a self-destructive binge.
But if the Dems end up losing in November, they shouldn’t blame the 18 seconds of cringe when their man showed the nation he was too old and mentally unfit for the job.
They should blame instead the 18 months when they chose to hide from the voters a crucial truth in the hope that big, bad Trump would save them once again. Should they lose the election, those are the 18 months that will change history.
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