Biden Is No Longer Fit For Office

And the Democrats’ insistence that we don’t believe our lyin’ eyes is eroding trust.

Jill Biden speaks at a post-debate campaign rally on June 28, 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images.)

Yascha Mounk: What’s missing from calls for Biden to withdraw from the race

The debate last Thursday made painfully obvious that Joe Biden now suffers from significant mental impairment. There has been a good deal of speculation on social media as to the precise nature of it. But whatever the correct medical diagnosis may prove to be, it is obvious that his moments of lucidity alternate with times at which he is visibly disoriented and his trains of thought trail off into the wilderness.

Even Biden’s own team, in trying to make a case for their struggling principal, have tacitly admitted the extent of the problem. One briefing emphasized that Biden is usually in full control of his mental capacities between the hours of 10am and 4pm, a statement that was unwittingly revealing about the condition his team finds him in during the rest of the day.

Biden’s struggles were on such visible display during the debate that they finally blew away the taboo about commenting on his mental decline, which had held complete sway over the mainstream media until this spring, and continued to restrain the candor of many pundits even after that. In a remarkable example of what the Turkish-American political scientist Timur Kuran calls “preference cascades,” the conventional wisdom has, in the span of less than a week, made a 180-degree turn. If it still took bravery, however modest, to call for Biden to step aside at this time last week, the ranks of his champions have now, for the most part, dwindled to naked partisans on #Resistance Twitter. From the editor of The New Yorker to the editorial board of The New York Times, the voices of institutional authority are now urging Biden to step down.

But as I was reading the various hand-wringing calls for Biden to do what decency requires, I was struck by the extent to which most of these new, supposedly forthright, assessments continue to be mealy-mouthed about the true nature of the current situation. Take the statement by the New York Times editorial board. It begins with a condemnation of Donald Trump, noting that he is an “erratic and self-interested figure unworthy of the public trust.” It goes on to lavish fulsome praise on Biden, calling him an “admirable” president; “under his leadership,” the paper of record claims, “the nation has prospered and begun to address a range of long-term challenges, and the wounds ripped open by Mr. Trump have begun to heal.” After the throat-clearing, the true point of the article is finally revealed: “There are Democratic leaders better equipped to present clear, compelling and energetic alternatives to a second Trump presidency. … It’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.”

I agree with the editorial board’s assessment of Trump. Its praise for Biden’s presidency seems to me far too lavish, but insincere flattery has always been a mainstay of funeral orations. What strikes me as the truly culpable omission is that the entire article is written in the posture of campaign advice: Trump is dangerous. Democrats need to beat him to protect our democratic institutions. And since Biden, on account of his infirmity, is no longer the best bet for doing so, he should step down.

What goes unmentioned in the entire article—and, for the most part, in other recent calls for Biden to step down—is an acknowledgment of the substantive reasons why Americans might not want to be governed for another four years by a mentally impaired octogenarian whose faculties are visibly deteriorating at a rapid pace.

For the administration to set out a clear direction for the country and push forward important legislation, you need a leader capable of formulating and implementing a vision. For the vast apparatus of the federal bureaucracy to accomplish anything beyond routine tasks, you need a manager who pushes and probes and admonishes. And in the case of a genuine geopolitical emergency, you need a statesman who is capable of making the toughest of calls—potentially including decisions about whether to deploy nuclear weapons—in a matter of minutes. A team of politicos vying for the favor of a flailing principal simply isn’t capable of leading the most powerful country on earth, no matter how smart or decent each of them may happen to be. (And as Quico Toro rightly points out below, the fact that Biden’s team has evidently misled the public about the president’s true condition for the past months is a reason to fear that they may not be quite as decent as they seem.)

Yes, Biden should drop out of the race because he deserves a dignified end to a distinguished life and career. Yes, Biden should drop out of the race because it is vitally important to beat Trump. But most obviously of all, Biden should drop out of the race because he is no longer fit to be president of the United States.

Yascha Mounk is the editor-in-chief of Persuasion.

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Quico Toro: When you lie to people, they stop trusting you

Watching Joe Biden’s appalling debate meltdown, it seemed obvious to me that within a day or two he would be out of the race. That a man who can’t consistently produce four consecutive coherent sentences shouldn’t be president of the United States seemed to me fully self-evident, like saying that after it rains the ground gets wet. I figured switching candidates this late in the game would be awkward for everyone and mortifying to those directly involved, but it never seriously occurred to me that anyone could doubt the need to do it.

After all, what were they going to do, argue that the president’s cognitive decline is bound to go into reverse as he gets older?

I had this all very wrong. From the very next day, it became clear the tight circle of advisors around Joe Biden intended to try to ride out his debating Waterloo, as if this was just another bad news cycle rather than a candidacy-ending disaster. They wheeled him out onto a stage in North Carolina and then tried to tell us, with a straight face, that his ability to read text off of a teleprompter refuted the plain evidence of incapacity everyone had seen on live television not 24 hours before.

And then it dawned on me: The Biden people’s plan was to gaslight us all into thinking we hadn’t all seen what we had all seen. There was Representative Ro Khanna urging the Biden people to acknowledge the knock, dust themselves off, and “figure out a way to move forward in a winning campaign.” There was California Governor Gavin Newsom saying, “You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?” There was Mitch Landrieu, Biden’s campaign co-chair, falling back onto last month’s talking points and saying once the dust settles we’re all going to come around. There was Barack Obama, of all people, pretending what we’d seen was no worse than some of his own debate performances.

Biden’s cognitive decline isn’t the kind of thing it is possible to spin convincingly. Which is why I watched the attempts at damage control with a sense of nausea. Their determination to try to spin their way out of this mess does nothing to help him, but it is devastatingly effective at destroying their own credibility.

Here it would be customary to add some “to be sure” pap about Trump being a nightmare for democracy, that he should never be president, and so on. This was true before the debate, and it remains true now—but here’s the thing. Now is not the time to dwell on Trump, whose flaws are obvious, precisely because Biden’s damage control apparatus is using Trump as an excuse to not get their own house in order and to elide the harsh realities of working for an unfit candidate.

It is precisely because Trump is so dangerous that their bullshit is so unforgivable. The damage control exercise will be remembered as more damaging than the damage. After all, Biden’s cognitive decline isn’t exactly news—even if the extent of it only became clear during the debate. The case for keeping him in office, despite the certainty of further decline as he moves into his mid-80s, always rested on voters’ confidence in the people around him. Biden was a serious, patriotic politician who had chosen a team of serious, patriotic handlers to help him run the government. But if that team can’t come to terms with the reality that after it rains the ground gets wet, what use are they to anyone?

I realize I’m late—very late—to this insight, but then we all come to these realizations in our own time. I’d accepted intellectually the case Yascha’s been making for a long time about the way liberal institutions have squandered our trust. But—what can I say?—I’m a liberal. I hadn’t felt the truth of his insight in a way that would properly anger me. Until this weekend.

Reading one report after another about the Biden-Harris camp’s appalling damage control operation, I could feel the presumption-of-competence I’d implicitly extended to them leaving my body. Each time I see a White House flak minimizing Thursday night’s shitshow, I get an insight into the way the world looks from a Trump voter’s point of view in a way that had eluded me for years.

If, as The New York Times reported, Biden’s deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks really did say on Friday that “nothing fundamentally changed about this election last night,” then Quentin Fulks either doesn’t understand how politics works or, far more likely, is so confident in his ability to pull the wool over our eyes that he shouldn’t be let anywhere in the vicinity of presidential power. If his boss Jen O’Malley Dillon really thinks Thursday’s disaster can be measured in short-term polling numbers, then she is emphatically a part of the problem and not a part of the solution.

Faced with bullshit on this scale, I for the first time truly felt in my gut the raw cynicism of the Democratic Party’s governing caste. I felt, vividly, why a sane person might prefer to vote for Trump over an asshole who insists we’re better off trusting them than our lyin’ eyes. 

No one who saw Thursday’s debate can really believe the presidency is safe in the hands of the 81-year-old version of Joe Biden. At best, you might persuade voters that the presidency is safe in the collective hands of the team Joe Biden has chosen to serve as his top aides. When that team turns around and tries to convince us Biden underperformed because he had a cold, it dynamites the remaining rationale for voting for him. 

Keeping fundamentally cynical, dishonest, power-mad people from controlling the executive branch was supposed to be the entire rationale of a Biden presidency. Yet only a terminally cynical, dishonest or power-mad person could think it possible for the Joe Biden we all saw on Thursday night to effectively lead the government of the United States. 

These people may have gotten into politics to fight monsters, but they lost all sight of the need to take care not to thereby become monsters. It’s as though they’ve gazed into the Trump abyss for so long, they forgot all about the abyss gazing back into them.

Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion. He writes about climate policy on his Substack 1% Brighter.

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