Joe Biden’s greatest service would be to step down now

Astoundingly stubborn and nursing many personal grievances, the President has three powerful forces still campaigning hard for him to remain.

US President Joe Biden waves as he leaves after speaking during a press conference at the close of the 75th NATO Summit. Picture: AFP

Joe Biden can’t continue as Democratic presidential candidate. He probably can’t continue as President, but that’s something else. In a political, and perhaps constitutional, crisis unique in modern America, Biden has repeatedly demonstrated his manifest unfitness for the job he holds.

This is the view of the majority of Americans, according to polls, and also of countless senior Democrats. A representative poll at the end of the week showed 74 per cent of Americans think Biden, at 81 and soon to turn 82, is too old to be President.

This is not just about age but about the way age has affected Biden.

Two-thirds of voters want Biden to quit. Almost two-thirds of Democrats want him to withdraw. More than half those who call themselves committed “Biden voters” want him to pull out.

Democrat election guru James Carville declared: “Mark my words: Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race.”

Even more significant was the intervention by George Clooney. What moral authority does a Hollywood actor have in national politics? Hollywood celebrities have become a key part of the Democratic elite, as the party has deserted its working-class roots and embraced ever more weird and woke movie star values.

Clooney spoke with the assumed authority that might once have characterised an archbishop or a retired general. He declared, after pointing out he was a Megasaurus fundraiser: “We are not going to win with this President.”

Clooney recently hosted a fundraiser for Biden. His testimony is devastating. He wrote: “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago was not the Joe Biden of 2010 … not even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

Media leaks appeared that Biden aides and advisers were meeting secretly to work out how to convince him to retire.

Biden’s decline has been obvious for years, but most mainstream media is committed to the idea that Donald Trump is an epochal, existential evil and must be stopped.

Until Biden’s disastrous debate, the consensus saw Biden as the best way to do that. The debate and Biden’s poor polling make that idea unsustainable.

It’s the liberal media that has turned decisively against Biden, especially CNN and The New York Times.

Biden’s frailty and cognitive incompetence are constantly reported by media that once scorned such reportage as fake news. Retrospective credibility has been awarded to special prosecutor Robert Hur, who inquired into Biden keeping confidential documents from when he was vice-president.

Trump was charged for analogous alleged offences. Hur concluded Biden had broken the law (though no one seems bothered by this) but that it would be impossible to prosecute the President because he was “an elderly man with a poor memory”.

Hur was savaged for his report and the White House steadfastly refused to release the tape of Biden’s testimony to Hur. Now similar reports saturate the media. Biden did a series of radio interviews, over the phone, after the debate with Trump. It turned out that the White House would agree to these interviews only if the radio station asked questions provided in advance by the White House.

When this was revealed publicly one radio host was sacked. Under this corrupt arrangement Biden could read his answers to prearranged questions. It also turned out that Biden uses a teleprompter even in the homes of Democrat donors when he is doing no more than making a stump speech.

Biden’s interview on ABC TV with George Stephanopoulos did little to reassure doubters. It also led to a bizarre media moment. One of Biden’s difficulties is not just that he sometimes can’t finish sentencrightes and confuses basic facts but that his speech is often slurred, faint, almost indecipherable.

This led to a dispute over whether Biden said to Stephanopoulos that he would be satisfied so long as he had done “the goodest” job he could. The White House, and the ABC network acting at the request of the White House, corrected the transcript to substitute “as good a job” as he could. Maureen Dowd, uber-liberal columnist at The New York Times, said she and a colleague listened to the recording over and over and she was all but certain Biden said “goodest”. She couldn’t be absolutely sure because Biden’s speech was so slurred.

No one is taking pleasure at an elderly person struggling. We all have relatives who’ve experienced those challenges, and it’s coming for most of us eventually. But that’s no argument for a person in such a condition to remain as president, much less for four more years as president.

Biden himself remained defiant, a Shakespearean tragic.

In Hamlet, Ophelia laments: “O what noble mind is here o’erthrown”, except describing Biden’s mind at any stage of his career as noble is a stretch.

In King Lear the ageing, fading monarch laments: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

Unlike Lear, Biden doesn’t have a thankless child. The Biden family remains fiercely, indeed dysfunctionally, loyal to Biden remaining President. But he seethes at the ingratitude of senior Democrats calling for him to go. Nine Democrat congressmen and one Democrat senator explicitly called for Biden to step down.

Many who wouldn’t go that far publicly made more veiled statements, urging Biden to make a decision quickly, even though he said he’d made his decision and was staying in the race.

Clooney claimed every Democrat congressman and senator he spoke to, whatever they said publicly, privately agreed Biden was no longer viable.

Biden rages, Lear-like, against the Democrat elite. He’s not interested in what the elites think, he claims, though his whole career has been built on elite patronage and insider status. But now, Biden says, the elites don’t count. The people still love him.

But Mr President, the interviewers say, the polls show people want you to step down. I don’t believe the polls, Biden says. I believe what the voters tell me directly, though in truth Biden very seldom meets voters spontaneously. Anyway, the enraged octogenarian claims, we have our own polls, and our polls show I’m a winner.

Biden came to resemble a weird, ultra-aged, Democrat caricature of some Trump characteristics. The only advisers he paid any attention to were his immediate family, Jill and Hunter. All the elites were against him. Above all, the nation faced an existential crisis, and “Only I can fix it!”

The implications, for global leadership, of Biden’s infirmity are obvious.

If Biden’s unfit to be the candidate in November, he’s really unfit to be President today. It’s widely reported that he works, more or less, from 10am to 4pm. When he was briefly contrite after the debate, Biden told people he needed to sleep more, work less and take fewer appointments after 8pm. Yet no modern president has held fewer press conferences, done fewer sit-down interviews with professional journalists or taken more rest time than Biden.

One excuse Biden offered for his feeble debate performance was jet lag. Yet he had a full uninterrupted week at Camp David to prepare.

All this is frankly ludicrous. This kind of feebleness in a leader can paralyse a national government. Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982 after a long time at the top of the Soviet Union, was by the end an infirm and frail leader. The joke was that he’d long ago died in office, but no one dared tell him.

Brezhnev’s sclerotic Soviet leadership was no match for a dynamic America. Under Biden, decisions get made, but not, it would seem, by him. The big question at Washington’s NATO summit this week was whether Biden could perform well enough to survive another week as President.

Right on cue, Biden made two classic gaffes. He introduced Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as President Putin and he referred to Kamala Harris as Vice-President Trump.

By the way, Anthony Albanese’s absence, when four Indo-Pacific leaders had been invited – Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand – was noted with some concern and attributed, fairly or not, to Albanese’s domestic political problems.

Three powerful forces are still campaigning hard for Biden to remain President and run in November.

The first is Biden and his family. Biden’s wife, Jill, who recently scored a soft-focus, idealised cover on Vogue magazine, reportedly desperately wants her husband to stay president. Hunter Biden wants the same. No doubt they’re a loving family, though plenty of Biden family gothic horrors have been revealed, but for Jill and Hunter the status, access, influence, power and, indeed, money they derive from Joe being President is huge.

Biden himself is astoundingly stubborn and, again like Trump, harbours, nurses and treasures a whole series of personal grievances. The Clintons in his view betrayed him to take the nomination that should have been his in 2016. Barack Obama made no effort to convince Biden to run then. And so on and so on.

The second group that wants Biden to stay is the left wing of the Democratic Party. Both Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, iconic leaders of the Democrat left, vigorously opposed Biden’s candidacy in the Democratic primaries of 2020. Now they have not a peep of disloyalty to him. This is because, in office, Biden has moved to embrace, enable and implement the most left-wing agenda of any US president.

Similarly, the federal bureaucracy and agency heads all like the Biden presidency. This is government by the bureaucratic elite. Their decisions, instincts and prejudices, are all ratified by a passive President.

In this, there is actually an argument in favour of Biden. The US system, especially the military and the foreign affairs system personified in the State Department, is powerful and competent. The strongest argument for Biden is that he lets the US system function. Although in the end there is still no substitute for presidential leadership.

The third group that desperately wants Biden to stay in the race is Donald Trump and his closest supporters. If Biden stays, he can never put the issue of his decline to bed. Even before the debate, he was behind Trump in the polls. Now he’s further behind. Trump leads the national race in almost all the polls and he leads in all the battleground states. That doesn’t mean Trump’s got it won, but it does mean Trump is favourite. The last Republican presidential candidate actually to win a majority of the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004. If Trump wins the popular vote, he’ll win the presidency by a landslide in the electoral college.

If Biden is the candidate, with his extreme difficulties in unscripted moments, the election will likely be a referendum on Biden. In that case Trump almost certainly wins.

Although it will be incredibly difficult for the Democrats to replace Biden, and could be very messy even if he goes willingly and soon, nonetheless that offers Democrats their best chance of beating Trump. Vice-President Harris is universally regarded as a weak and vulnerable candidate with no record as a vote winner.

But she would still have a very solid chance of winning. The Democratic machine is ruthless and much more effective than the Republicans. In 2020, it managed an already declining Biden through ruthlessly rationing spontaneous appearances and whipping up hysteria against Trump. Harris is not a very good debater but she will be young and indeed relatively fresh politically compared with Trump.

Quite astonishingly, Biden dropped only a couple of points in the polls after the debate. Trump and Biden are both well-known figures and widely disliked. Voters know their failings. That means the Democrat base vote is still pretty strong.

Harris would instantly enjoy overwhelming mainstream media support. She may not be a strong debater but, like Sarah Palin in 2012, she could certainly learn some good answers and nifty one-liners by rote. Unlike Biden, she’s coachable.

Trump has shown incredible self-discipline while Biden’s candidacy has been imploding. But Trump will come roaring back on to centre stage in the coming days as he picks his vice-presidential candidate and the Republicans hold their national convention next week.

It’s not entirely unprecedented that the US has had to force out a corrupt or ill president. In 1974 a delegation of congressional Republicans convinced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency. But that was because they told him he would be impeached in the House of Representatives and convicted in the Senate if he didn’t go voluntarily.

Dwight Eisenhower, a highly successful president from 1953 to 1961, suffered a heart attack and serious stomach surgery that incapacitated him for weeks, and a stroke in office. Democrats tried to demonise Nixon, his vice-president, but they couldn’t shake Ike’s popularity and he continued to project the image of being in charge. When he recovered from each illness, there was no question of dementia.

Woodrow Wilson was more problematic. In 1919 he was felled by a severe stroke and more or less couldn’t function for the rest of his term. His wife, Edith, virtually ran the government until the end of Wilson’s second term in March 1921. That kind of response to presidential infirmity would be unthinkable today, and rightly so.

Biden for all his failings has been friendly to Australia, pioneered the AUKUS deal, and does indeed value alliances. Trump himself was good for Australia in his first term. My guess is Trump would be better in his second term than he was in his first. He wouldn’t be seeking re-election. He would want a legacy. And he would work to make America stronger, whereas Biden has been neglectful of US military capability, notwithstanding the immense strategic challenges around the world. But of course Trump is intensely unpredictable.

Biden will certainly be sunk if he suffers further decline in the polls. Conversely, probably only a big rally in the polls, however unlikely, can now save him. But it looks as though his presidential days are drawing to an end, with the deepest uncertainty now swirling around US politics and society. Biden’s greatest service to his nation would be to leave with dignity and generosity. But don’t hold your breath.