It took 24 agonizing days after the disastrous debate in Atlanta against Donald Trump for Joe Biden to surrender to the evidence: the President of the United States announced this Sunday at 1:46 p.m., East Coast time (7:46 p.m. in mainland Spain), through a surprise message on the social network X that, at 81 years old, he is giving up on his efforts to run for re-election next November. With this decision, the most atypical American campaign in recent history entered a little further into chaos, with one party without a clear candidate and the other surrendered at the feet of a candidate who has just survived an attack that almost cost him his life and who is adored by his followers as a messianic figure.
“To my fellow Americans,” Biden begins a text in which he tells them that being president “has been the greatest honor” of his life. “My intention was to seek re-election,” he writes, “but I believe it is best for my party and for the country that I step down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties in office for the remainder of my term.”
“Over the past three and a half years, we have made great progress as a nation,” he says in the second sentence of the text, before going on to defend the legacy of his time in the White House, where he arrived with the task of suturing the wounds of a country in tatters after four years of Trump and which he is leaving pushed by his own people and by the global outcry over suspicions about his physical and mental abilities.
In that post, Biden summarizes some of those achievements: the American economy, he says, is “the strongest in the world”; under his mandate, the price of medicines was lowered and health benefits were increased; the first gun control law in 30 years was passed and the Supreme Court appointed the first African-American woman in its history. None of this ended up being enough for the world to believe him when he said, in an often angry tone, that he was capable of continuing, given that almost all the polls predicted a Trump victory at the polls less than four months before the elections.
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In a second messagealso published on X, although this time directed at Democrats, Biden announced within a few minutes that he was supporting the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him at the head of the campaign. It was the most logical choice. “My first decision as the party’s candidate in 2020 was to choose her as my vice president,” the message reads. “And it has been the best decision I have ever made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be our party’s nominee this year. Democrats: it’s time to unite and defeat Trump. Let’s do it.”
It took Harris two and a half hours to respond to that endorsement with a statement in which she said: “I am honored to have the President’s endorsement and I intend to win this nomination. (…) I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite our nation — and to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme agenda. We have 107 days until Election Day. Together we will fight. And together we will win.”
Trump’s reaction
The feared rival at the polls, who last week was officially designated as the Republican Party’s candidate at a convention in Milwaukee that showed he has the conservative party at his feet, reacted to the sensational news by telling CNN that he thinks it will be “easy” for him to beat Harris at the polls.
Later, in a message on Truth, his social network, the former president argued (in capital letters): “The WASHINGTON ESTABLISHMENT, the media that hates America and the corrupt DEEP STATE did everything possible to protect Biden, but he has ended up abandoning the campaign, [es una] “COMPLETE DISGRACE!” Leading voices in the Republican Party joined in, led by vice presidential candidate JD Vance, in calling for the US president to resign, under the logic that if he cannot be a candidate, he is not qualified to lead the country.
Biden’s two messages put an end to half a century of one of the most tenacious political careers in Washington, of someone who before becoming president was vice president and senator. And they open a period of uncertainty with unforeseeable consequences for the United States. They put an end to more than three weeks of unfavorable polls and doubts about Biden’s physical and mental abilities to win in November, first, and, more importantly, to continue four more years in the White House. Since the debate, the pressures have been in crescendo, in public and in private, from donors, strategists, analysts, the media, senators, congressmen and their leaders in both Houses, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, as well as from leading figures of the Democratic Party such as Nancy Pelosi and former President Barack Obama.
First, there was the “panic” felt by his supporters when they saw him erratic, from lapse to lapse, on the television set that CNN set aside in Atlanta for the first presidential debate. Then came the editorial of The New York Times who was calling for his resignation and the first Democratic legislators to sign up to the list of those who begged him to reconsider, which grew in number and prominence of its signatories until it exceeded thirty. On Sunday, a final prominent name was added: that of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who had resigned from the party in May but still represented it on Capitol Hill.
Last Friday, Biden warned of his intention to return to the campaign trail next week. Sick with Covid, he spent the weekend confined to his beach house in Rehoboth (Delaware), taking Paxlovid and keeping a light work schedule that included a call with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. The American media reports that Biden, in addition to being sick, is angry with old allies who have been turning their backs on him, especially Barack Obama, hurt by what he considers a betrayal.
The most pressing question is whether the party will agree or not to Harris, who also received public support from Hillary Clinton, as the successor. There is not much time for discussions: the Democratic National Convention is being held in Chicago between August 19 and 22. It is not just that we have to go into this meeting with our homework done to avoid a chaotic spectacle like that of 1968, when Richard Nixon’s Republicans swept the polls. But there is another deadline: the party has set itself the end of the first week of August as the deadline to virtually name the chosen one, whether Biden or someone else.
This is the first time that a sitting US president has withdrawn from an election race so late. To find anything remotely similar, you have to go back to 1968, when Lyndon B. Johnson announced much earlier, in March, that he did not intend to run for re-election. Biden went to the convention with the support of the 3,939 delegates who voted for him in a primary in which he faced virtually no rival. That means there is less than a month left for Democrats to decide who they will vote for in Chicago and just under four to mount a solid campaign against Trump.
Some Democratic voices, led by Pelosi, have advocated for holding a mini-primaries There are also no precedents for this. If, through this express election or through the logic of Biden’s blessing, the vice president ends up being the one chosen by the party for the November ballot, it would still remain unclear who would accompany her as a candidate for the vice presidency.
When Biden named her as his second-in-command in the 2020 election, he did so for the symbolism of introducing someone who would become the first woman and the first Black person and person of Asian descent to hold such a high position in the American administration, but also because of her age. Harris is 59 years old, and Biden campaigned in those elections presenting himself as a mere “bridge” to the new generations. These three and a half years have not exactly been a walk in the park for Harris, who has faced criticism largely caused by the enthusiasm that her entrance aroused on the scene. Her rivals consider her excessively leftist, intolerably woke and too weak. The United States has also shown in the past its hesitation in choosing a woman as a occupant of the White House.
By the time he broke the record as America’s longest-serving president, Biden had already changed his mind, and in April 2023 he launched his candidacy to renew what is perhaps the most difficult job in the world: leader of the world’s leading power.
Doubts about Biden’s fitness to serve go back much further than the June 27 debate, though his administration, allies and liberal media tended to downplay them. The first serious warning sign came this year, when special prosecutor Robert Hur, charged with investigating Biden’s handling of confidential papers he still held without permission after leaving his post as Obama’s vice president (2009-2017), said in his report that the president was unable to remember the name of his son, Beau, who died in 2015, and described him as “an old man with a bad memory.”
At the end of the bombshell message that has turned the United States and the world upside down this placid Sunday, Biden resorted to one of his favorite arguments. “I still think what I always thought: there is nothing that America is not capable of, as long as we do it together. We have to remember that we are the United States of America.” With the country on the verge of a nervous breakdown and more divided than ever, that phrase constitutes, perhaps, the definitive demonstration of optimism that has governed his long political career. That virtue that adorns him, according to those who know him well, was not enough to survive the last battle of his long political career.
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