Joe Biden can’t spin his way out of this

Mandel Ngan/AFP

We are living big history. We do that so often we don’t always notice. But a proud president is hunkered down in the White House, and his party is frantically trying to decide whether to press him to step aside from his bid for re-election after a catastrophic 90 minutes revealing that he is neurologically not up to the demands of a campaign or a second term. (And revealing, too, that his true condition, the depth of his decline, had been kept, quite deliberately and systematically, from the American people. Oh, the histories that will be written, and the villains that will be named.)

To me it feels like August 1974. The president’s position isn’t going to get better, it is going to get worse. The longer he waits to step aside the crueller his departure will be.

The post-debate polls show he is losing support both overall and in the battlegrounds. A cratering like that doesn’t happen because you had a bad night, or a cold, or were tired. It happens when an event starkly and unavoidably shows people what they already suspected. It happens when the event gives them proof.

Before the debate a majority of those polled said they no longer thought he had it in him physically or mentally to do the job of president anymore. After the debate that number reached 72%. You can’t un-ring that bell.

There’s no repairing this. His staff can’t spin or muscle their way out. He is neurologically compromised, we can all see it, it isn’t his fault. You have no governance in how you age and at what speed, or what illnesses or conditions arise. You only have governance in what you do about it.

Those who support the president offer suggestions on conference calls. “Just get him out there—long, live interviews, lots of news conferences, a big rally in the round with Q&A from the voters.”

They don’t know what they’re talking about. He can’t do what they want him to do. He can’t execute it. He tried to do it last week—the debate was, in effect, a live, high-stakes interview. He won’t be able to do it next week or next month either. Old age involves plateaus and plummets. It gets worse, not better.

The president’s staffers fantasize that they can plow ahead with teleprompter events—he looks stronger at the podium. But no one doubts he can stand and read. His staffers think they can smooth past things with supportive interviews with sympathetic journalists, but that won’t work either, not long term. Because everyone saw the debate, or, since, has seen pieces of it, and the image of a debilitated president has burned its way into the American brain and there’s no erasing it.

A big part of the president’s personal mythos, and it is shared by all of Biden-world, is that the guy’s a survivor, he always pulls through, you knock him down, he gets back up. An inner belief like that can get you far and gird you. But it can also harden into mere conceit and unrealism, and blind you to the real facts of current circumstances.

President Joe Biden looks down as he participates in the first presidential debate of the 2024 elections with former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP

I don’t agree with the narrative that what was revealed in the debate was a sudden and dramatic decline. What he has been showing, for at least two years, is a steady and unstopping decline. In January 2022 we worried here about the president’s propensity for “unfinished sentences, non sequiturs; sometimes his thoughts seem like bumper cars crashing and forcing each other off course.” In April 2022 we wrote of a poll in New Hampshire that asked if Joe Biden was physically and mentally up to the job if there is a crisis. Fifty-four percent said, “not very/not at all.” In June 2022 we said there’s a broad sense it’s not going to get better: “He has poor judgment and he’s about to hit 80 and it’s not going to change.” Voters feel “unease.” In December 2022: Mr. Biden doesn’t think he’s “slipping with age,” but he’s wrong. “He’s showing age and it will only get worse, and he will become more ridiculous, when he’s deeper into his 80s.”

Trusted Biden intimates must tell him to get out of the race. “You got rid of Donald Trump. You got us out of Afghanistan. You passed huge FDR-level bills that transformed the social safety net. . . . You did your job in history. You fulfilled your role. And now you should go out an inspiration.”

In September 2023 Mr. Biden had been busted in the press for telling tall tales that didn’t check out. We noted that while repeated lying is “a characterological fault, not knowing you’re lying might suggest a neurological one.” “The age problem will only get worse.” “In insisting on running he is making a historical mistake. . . . He isn’t up to it.”

What we saw in the debate isn’t new. That’s why voters won’t accept the idea that it was just a bad night. They think it’s been a bad and worsening two years.

US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden arrive for a post-debate rally in Raleigh, North Carolina on June 28. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

It doesn’t feel right that the final decision will come down to one family’s psychodrama—that feels too small a thing for such big history. In any case it isn’t about one man’s personal needs, or his family’s enjoyment of importance and the blessings of proximity to power. It isn’t a party question or a White House question, it’s about America. Can America afford for another four years to have an obviously neurologically impaired president? No, it isn’t safe. It is on some level provocative. Weakness provokes. The president’s rationalizers point out that he’s fine from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. I am sure presidents Xi of China and Putin of Russia will only decide to take back Taiwan or move on Poland at lunch time EST, to keep things fair. Why wouldn’t they schedule their aggressions around the president’s needs?

The elected officeholders of the Democratic Party should take responsibility and press the president to leave. You can’t scream, “Democracy is on the line,” and put up a neurologically compromised candidate to fight for it. They haven’t moved for two reasons. One has to do with their own prospects: You don’t want to be the one who kills the king, you want to be the one who warmly mourns the king and takes his mantle after someone else kills him. The other is fear of who would replace him on the ticket, and how exactly that would happen.

These are understandable fears. But the answer isn’t to hide in a dumb fatalism, a listless acceptance of fate. It makes no sense to say, “Joe Biden is likely going to lose so we should do nothing because doing something is unpredictable.” Unpredictable is better than doomed.

This is a party afraid of itself, literally afraid of its own groups and component parts. They are afraid of their own delegates. Party professionals think letting the convention decide would reveal how fatally shattered and divided the party is—how wild it is. But that’s how the party looks now, with its leaders in Washington frozen and incapable and no one in charge.

What a tragedy this is. A president cratering his historical reputation, his wife and family ruining any affection history would have had for them when Donald Trump wins. They have no idea how they’re going to look.

The Wall Street Journal