On Friday, the president insisted he was all-in for re-election. By Sunday, he was out. What just happened?
Forty-eight hours is an aeon in American politics, especially if you are Joe Biden and the party that you lead, and a relentlessly growing number of your closest allies within it, are turning inexorably against you.
On Friday morning, the message coming out of Joe Biden’s camp left no room for interpretation. He might be sick with Covid, but he was resolute: the Biden re-election show must go on.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, snapped on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a program that the president watches so avidly it has become the daily temperature gauge of Biden’s ailing campaign.
Then Biden himself popped up with a statement clearly intended to silence the doubters. “I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda,” he said, referring to the ultra-right blueprint produced by Trump acolytes for a second Make America Great Again (Maga) term.
When news came in later that afternoon that the Biden campaign had scheduled a visit to Austin, Texas, for an event at Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library on Wednesday, it seemed that he really did mean it. Biden, 81 be damned, was forging ahead.
The problem was, the doubters would not be silenced. As Friday slipped into Saturday, the noise emanating from them was building from whispers into a cacophony.
On Friday alone, at least 10 Democrats in Congress joined those who had publicly called for Biden to go, arguing that it was in the best interest of the party and the country given the threat to democracy posed by Trump. Prominent figures in the party such as Senator Sherrod Brown, himself in a tough race for re-election in Ohio, called on Biden to end his campaign.
Sending a message that would not have been lost on Biden and his team, top Californian lawmakers close to Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic speaker of the House, joined the chorus. Adding her name to that of Adam Schiff, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren told Biden bluntly that his candidacy was “on a trajectory to lose the White House and potentially impact crucial House and Senate races down ballot. It is for these reasons that I urge you to step aside.”
While the 40-odd members of Congress who by Saturday had stuck their necks above the parapet remained a small minority of the 264 Democrats in Congress, in private the rot went much deeper. The stamp of Pelosi, and other leading Democrats who had been pushing Biden to quit from behind the scenes, was beginning to tell.
As Biden continued to self-isolate in his house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, with the first lady, Jill Biden, only able to support him from a separate room, the president could sit and stew over the many of his supposed political friends who were abandoning him. According to the New York Times, he was fuming about Pelosi’s role as the person he blamed for being the prime instigator of a campaign to oust him.
Barack Obama, with whom Biden has had a fraught relationship since Obama nudged his former vice-president to stand aside for Hillary Clinton in the presidential race in 2016, was also the subject of Biden’s mounting frustrations, the newspaper reported.
With the walls closing in, it couldn’t have helped Biden’s mood that Trump was delighting in his misery. So much for the new, warm and caring Trump who was supposed to have emerged from the previous weekend’s shooting – on Saturday Trump was back to his favourite pastime of rubbing salt into a rival’s wounds.
He was so happy to be in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump told a Maga rally – so much more fun than sitting “on some boring beach watching the waves coming in”. There was more.
“At this very moment, Democrat party bosses are frantically trying to overthrow the results of their own party’s primaries to dump crooked Joe Biden from the ballot,” Trump gloated.
For once, he was telling the truth.
Not that Biden’s own campaign team knew any better. The Times reporter, Kenneth Vogel, disclosed on X that 30 minutes before the historic announcement was made, Biden re-election staffers were busily calling delegates pushing them to shore up his crumbling hopes by publicly declaring support for him.
Too little, too late.
We don’t know when exactly he made the decision, but it seems by late on Saturday Biden had finally come to the view that he had no choice but to repeat the words that so many Democrats had been telling him over these past exceedingly painful days: “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down.”
He called two of his closest advisers, Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, to the vacation home and together “far into the night” they wrote the announcement letter, according to the New York Times. Members of the president’s family and some close aides were told that the end was coming on Saturday, but most of the campaign staff were only notified literally 60 seconds before the news broke.
History books will record the moment the statement was posted – 1.46pm, 21 July 2024.
It may be some time before we know the full emotional depths to which Biden had to dig to write that agonizing letter. As he said in it, the presidency had been “the greatest honor” of his life, and now he was kissing it goodbye.
But that was then. The 48 hours were now done. A new era begins.
