The Night the Biden Presidency Ended

A grotesque spectacle that must shock Democrats into finding a new candidate.

Presidential debate, June 27, 2024. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images.)

Tonight’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump turned out to be deeply consequential. It made amply apparent what many have suspected for a long time: Biden is simply no longer fit to be the Democratic nominee. For the good of his country, and his own well-being, he must open the field for someone else. Here are two first attempts at grappling with the implications of a momentous night, from Quico Toro and Sam Kahn. - Yascha

---

Quico Toro: Biden Cannot Continue To Run

Fifteen minutes into the presidential debate, I found myself shaking: stunned by a political meltdown nothing had prepared me for. I imagine millions of us who’ve feared a second Trump term had the same realization at the same time. 

As I’m living outside the United States at the moment, I had paid relatively little attention to the campaign before the debate. Which means I came to it like many swing voters probably did, expecting the kind of dreary, indecisive draw presidential debates usually turn into. 

Without giving it much thought, I’d assumed the line about Biden being too old was mostly a Republican talking point, an attack line blown out of all proportion to score cheap campaign points. I’d expected rough parity in the senility-stakes. What we saw was… not that. 

In one painful exchange early on, Biden tried to explain his position on Medicare before spluttering. “We've been making sure we are able to make every single person eligible what I've been able to do with the Covid, excuse me, everything we have to do with... look... I finally beat Medicare…”

“I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don't think he knows what he said either,” Trump answered. 

What we just witnessed was the collapse of any pretense that Joe Biden can effectively lead the United States through January 2025, let alone January 2029. Seeing the president stumbling incoherently through half-forgotten answers, jumbling his millions and billions and trillions in his now paper-thin, geriatrically-inflected whisper, then staring into space during Trump’s answers with the vacant look of a long-term care-home resident, my overwhelming urge was to protect him, to jump in somehow and rescue him from the grotesque act of elder abuse he was being subjected to.

Not, of course, that Trump did anything beyond the usual firehose of nonsense and lies. It’s just that what was actually said last night mattered little next to what it revealed about the mental fitness of the sitting president. Trump came across as an older adult with a normal level of cognitive functioning for his age. Biden came across as someone in need of round-the-clock care, able to produce short bursts of relatively coherent political rhetoric before sputtering into foggy incoherence.

That Joe Biden, this Joe Biden, isn’t actually running the Executive Branch of the United States is entirely obvious. The best pitch that can be made for him now is that he’s being kept around the way a German president is, an ornamental figurehead rolled out to cut ribbons and sign bills, while younger, more capable people run the country. In the kind of crisis that demands actual capable leadership, the guy who can string three coherent sentences together but not four is just not going to cut muster. 

Looking forward to November, it is clear that the Joe Biden we all just saw just isn’t a plausible presidential candidate. America is not Germany. Americans expect their president to take charge. Biden can’t. We all saw he can’t. There’s no point pretending otherwise. If there are any reserves of sanity left in the Democratic party, its senior leaders, starting with Barack Obama, will now persuade Joe Biden to spare himself the indignity of being dragged through a campaign he’s not up to, one that would very likely end up with a humiliating November defeat that would once again leave a dangerous, authoritarian narcissist in charge of the country.

Once it is clear that Biden is willing to step away from the nomination, Democrats can then figure out the next steps. They could settle for a good, old-fashioned brokered convention. Or they could call for a consultative, one-day, all-state primary that gives regular voters a say in picking the next candidate. (If Britain and France can organize unanticipated national legislative elections in a matter of weeks, surely the Democrats can manage something similar.) Or they can figure out some other creative solution.

But one thing is now clear: letting a once great senator who richly deserves to spend his remaining years in the company of his grandchildren be dragged to a humiliating and hugely consequential defeat wouldn’t just be political suicide for the Democratic Party. It wouldn’t just be an act of cruelty against an American patriot who is not to blame for what time has done to his synapses. It would be an historic mistake that would leave American democracy in the hands of the kind of demagogue the Founders always warned us about.

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

---

Sam Kahn: How Could Democrats Ever Let It Get So Far? 

My order of blame.

1. Joe Biden himself, obviously. In his political career, Biden’s strength has been in leading from the heart and having a certain merrily-we-go-along sense of civic responsibility. Maybe it’s not completely true, but I’ve always liked the idea that he decided to run for president out of a sense of outrage after Charlottesville. But after four years in office, that civic responsibility has betrayed him. Somewhere inside himself, the canny career politician must have known that his role was to staunch the bleeding of the first Trump administration—get elected in 2020 and then turn the leadership of the party over to somebody else. But he got greedy and had the usual inertia of older politicians—he simply didn’t want to give up power. The result was a complete inability to reckon with his age or with his obvious deficits in a one-on-one matchup with Trump.

2. The spin circle around Biden that refused to engage in any real talk about his age. I was horrified earlier this spring to read that Biden and his senior advisors simply didn’t believe in poll numbers. The direction the spin took was to imagine that the pollsters and liberal media were somehow out to get Biden, and were fixating on his age—while Biden had a unique channel to ordinary Americans and swing voters. That was always wishful thinking—Biden had never been that popular— but the debate puts that narrative  completely to rest. Biden’s poll numbers are low not because of anybody’s spin but because the American people aren’t totally spinnable. They can see how much he struggles to get to the ends of sentences, they can see his mind is drifting off. It’s almost impossible to imagine anyone—no matter who he was up against—actually wanting four more years of Biden and his obvious mental deterioration. 

3. The media pundits who allowed themselves to get wrapped up in the campaign’s spin. Throughout 2023, virtually no one in mainstream media was brave enough to pose “the question” of whether Biden’s age made him unfit as a candidate. A wave of pundits in early 2024 started to break through and to impose some basic sanity, but then with a better-than-expected State of the Union, the spin cycle began again, and major media outlets seemed somehow convinced that it was possible to work around the candidate, to sort of pretend that Biden wasn’t there and just attack Trump. A particularly egregious form of spin held that Trump was just as old and senile as Biden. It was almost possible to believe that if one looked at written transcripts of their speeches, but not when the two of them debated. Trump is clearly comparatively sharp. Biden just doesn’t have it anymore. No amount of spin can alter that. 

---

There are very few silver linings from a fiasco like tonight’s debate, but if there is one, it’s that there is still time for Biden to step down. The primary calendar is a late imposition in U.S. party politics. A sitting president can throw their support to the convention and let the convention decide, as was done for over a century. It’ll be hard to coalesce around a candidate and give them enough running room to catch Trump by November. But Trump is also a very vulnerable candidate—his answers on abortion, on January 6, on NATO, were all terrible. Any normal candidate would have been able to take him to task, and watching Biden debate was like watching a basketball team miss layup after layup. 

Within a few moments of the debate ending, there may well be an attempt to spin this again, but it’s just not going to work. Too many Americans saw Biden and his obviously diminished capacities. This is an emergency. He cannot continue to run. The Democrats will lose and the country will suffer greatly from a second Trump term. There is no alternative to stepping down. 

Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

The opinions presented here reflect the views of the authors, not those of Persuasion.

---

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: