Joe Biden shows he will put himself above all else

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

The dam has held. The floodwaters are receding. The Lord Almighty has declined to intervene. Joe Biden is home and dry. That was the message the president and his team hoped to ram home at the end of this, the most crucial week of his presidency. But the cracks are still widening.

Immediately after his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump two weeks ago, it looked as though the demands from Democrats that Biden should step down would prevail. With polls indicating the president’s already faltering chances of winning another term slipping further, a handful of members of Congress made public calls for the president to step aside as the party’s nominee for November’s election.

“[Our] candidate must be able to clearly, articulately and strongly make his or her case to the American people,” said Adam Smith, one of the more senior Democrats in the House of Representatives, last weekend. “It is clear that President Biden is no longer able to meet this burden.”

Many other less brave souls (or those with more to lose), whispered anonymously that Biden had to go, and for a while it seemed like the pressure might be enough to break the dam.

But Biden and his campaign strove to hold it together. Last Friday he said in a hastily arranged interview with ABC News that he would never willingly quit – only if “the Lord Almighty” came down and told him “might” he consider withdrawing.

All weekend his team deployed more secular appeals to quell the panic, with aides calling members of Congress to cool it. On Monday Biden issued a long letter to all Democrats, insisting he would stay on and reminding them in not so subtle terms how difficult it would be for them to remove him against his will, given he had already won the party’s primary contest and was the de facto nominee ahead of next month’s convention.

It seemed to do the trick. At what were described to me as “brutal” private congressional gatherings on Tuesday, some members continued to express strong doubts but the consensus was to stick with their man. As John Fetterman, the senator from Pennsylvania, a vocal Biden supporter, told me this week: “We’ve got to just tough it out … We’re all in a foxhole here and I think if you’re in a foxhole panicking doesn’t help.”

The problem for those wanting Biden to go remains acute. Their hope has been that a campaign of tough but mostly behind-the-scenes persuasion would make him see the light and gracefully withdraw. When he refused they faced an impossible choice: go public en masse and risk a bloodletting among Democrats that would doom them and their party in November, or continue with a badly wounded candidate seen by most Americans as unfit for office - which would also doom them.

Initially they seemed to have chosen the path of least resistance. But the agony continues. Senators and members of congress in tough races of their own have seen their private polling numbers slump this week. A number of them, along with big party donors like George Clooney and others I spoke to, think the passage of time, more bad polls and more bad public performances by Biden will force the issue.

This week may only amount to a reprieve. Many Democrats have been reluctant to undermine Biden during the NATO summit in Washington. When that ends I am told we can expect more calls for him to go, especially if his performance at a press conference due to be held on Thursday evening is less than great.

The president’s backers believe time is on their side. Next week public attention will shift to the Republican convention in Milwaukee where Trump will reveal his running mate, accept the party’s endorsement and then go on the campaign trail, giving Biden a critical breather. By that stage, his supporters hope, just a few weeks from the Democratic convention, it may be too late.

So the next few days will determine Biden’s future. If the Democrats are condemned to run behind an ailing leader whom polls show most Americans think is incapable of doing the job for another four months, let alone four years, it will be fitting punishment, with three groups of people to share the blame.

First, the media. The supposed guardians of American democracy have largely ignored or covered up the mounting evidence that Biden’s faculties were rapidly deteriorating. When some reporters did tackle the issue, the big, Democrat-friendly media dismissed the work as “misinformation” and “cheap-fakes”.

Second, leading Democrats themselves. The current panic is no principled conversion to the realisation that their candidate is unfit to hold office until he is 86 years old. It is a cold calculation based on his slumping poll numbers. If they and the media had been able to keep Biden’s infirmities from the public, and kept his poll numbers at least competitive, they would have happily maintained the deception and risked the country’s future.

Most of all, of course, this is down to Biden himself. He has said over again that in this year’s election democracy itself was on the ballot, that saving the country from another Trump term was essential to the republic’s survival. But even as he saw how voters have recoiled from the thought of four more years for him, even as younger, more vigorous, more convincing Democrats were available to make the party’s case, he refused to budge. In picking Kamala Harris as his vice-president four years ago, he chose someone most voters think is even less qualified to be president than he is, thereby knowingly making his party’s ultimate plight worse.

He has behaved like a man committed above all else to his self-interest and that of his family, a man willing to sacrifice his own party and perhaps his country for the sake of clinging to the biggest job in the world.

We become what we despise, a wise man once said. Who else in this dispiriting American election campaign does that remind you of?

The Times