It’s all over now. The only question is if Joe Biden realizes it. Whether he stubbornly clings to the shattered fragments of his doomed candidacy and insists on continuing his bid for a second term, or he finally cries uncle under the deadweight of every party leader and dozens of Democrats in Congress calling publicly or privately for him to step aside – eight on Friday alone – Joe Biden must know by now that his time is up and his presidency is finished.
Those who lived through the final days of Richard Nixon will notice many similarities in the decline and fall of Joe Biden. The signs are all there: detachment from the gravity of his situation, refusal to admit responsibility for his descent, increasing paranoia, bitterness over his party betraying him, and an ever-shrinking coterie of advisors urging him to stay the course. The circle of trust for this now COVID-plagued president has evidently been reduced to his wife and convicted son, both of whom have as much to lose as the president if he surrenders the privileges of power. What else could possibly go wrong for this man?
It has become a sad tale. As the fading embers of his presidency flicker in the distance, the president sits in virtual exile in his bunker by the beach, fending off face-to-face calls telling him to quit from the two most powerful Democrats in the land, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and from Barack Obama through surrogates. But, at some level, he has to know this was a self-inflicted wound.
He put his party in an impossible position, first with his insistence on seeking re-election after declaring in 2020 that “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” and then with his obstinate refusal to withdraw after a cataclysmic debate performance. With the aid and comfort of his longtime supporters in elite media, Joe Biden still has time to preserve some level of dignity. But he has no time to lose, with nothing less than the future of his party on the line. Congressional candidates are being bombarded with questions about the top of the ticket and have few answers, leading to panic that has spilled from the backroom to the public stage. The possibility of getting swept in the trifecta – White House, Senate, and House – on top of a conservative Supreme Court seems very real to Democrats these days.
Biden’s Choice: Fight or Flight
The fallout from the debate was immediate and severe. The money dried up. Biden’s approval dipped to unelectable levels. His polling went from dispiriting to frightening. Even George Clooney threw in the towel. But still Biden dawdles, more than three weeks after the debate, and with a skinny one month until Democrats meet to nominate their candidate in Chicago. The party is already girding its loins for massive anti-Israeli protests that threaten to turn their convention into a living hell, one that might only get worse with open dissent triggered by Biden vacating the top spot on the ticket.
But as he considers the two unappealing options still available to him, fight or flight, there is also the matter of Biden’s enduring legacy. Will it end up as that of a statesman who put the country over his own legendary ambition, or the self-interested careerist whose intransigence led to an electoral wipeout for his party that could take years to overcome? Clearly, the time for Biden to have announced he was not running again was after Democrats sidestepped a predicted red wave in 2022. Together with taking Trump down in 2020, he had reached the height of his power. But as history has repeatedly taught us, those who seek power as an end rather than a means to an end are loathe to relinquish it. Joe Biden convinced himself that his assets, not Donald Trump’s liabilities, were responsible for landing him in the White House, and that they would keep him there.
Of course, just to make sure, progressive prosecutors doing the bidding for Biden made a fateful decision. They unleashed a barrage of indictments designed to put Trump behind bars, judgments designed to bankrupt his business empire, and organized initiatives to remove him from the ballot. In an irony for the ages, that strategy to drive Trump into the ditch did the opposite, reviving his political career, backfiring so spectacularly that political scientists will be studying that epic failure for generations.
For Democrats, the End of the World as We Know It
For the Democrats, the magnitude of losing for a second time to Donald Trump cannot be understated. This would not be like losing to Mitt Romney, John McCain, or even George W. Bush, all conventional politicians. They are scared to death of the specter of a swashbuckling Donald Trump re-affirmed, re-emboldened, armed with knowledge and power he hardly possessed the first time he marched into Washington, under the banner of a Republican Party more united than any time since the Ronald Reagan era. And unlike when he was first elected, he will be unchecked even by the inherently moderating effect of seeking office beyond 2029.
If the 45th-turned-47th president gets a Republican-controlled House and Senate to work with, the possibility or even likelihood of sweeping changes to the permanent bureaucracy, not so fondly called The Swamp, would send shivers up the collective spines of entrenched bureaucrats. They would see their lives pass before them as their worst nightmare – Donald Trump unplugged, on a mission, and now, after a brush with death, convinced God is on his side – unfolds right before their eyes.
Make no mistake, Democrats are scared to death of what Trump might do after they have used every available means to wipe him off the map. Democrats despised George W. Bush with every fiber of their being, but they did not arrest, imprison, and bankrupt him, nor remove him from the ballot, nor call him the embodiment of evil (though they were prone to do so with Dick Cheney). The extreme emotion they express about Trump is more about fear than rage.
In the end, no one can stop Joe Biden from carrying on what Florida Governor Ron DeSantis memorably called his Weekend at Bernie’s presidency. He is at once a dead man walking and a candidate with all the necessary delegates in hand to guarantee his nomination. But he is perhaps the only one left, outside his immediate family, who continues to believe that he can defeat Donald Trump, or even remain commander-in-chief for another six months now that his decline has become the world’s major talking point.
It is still a bit early to complete the political obituary of Joe Biden. As his world collapses around him, longtime friends tell him it’s over, and he learns the truth of Harry Truman’s famous saying that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog, the one thing the 46th president of the United States has left is the singular ability to write his own ending.
