CNN
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President Joe Biden ran for reelection to protect democracy, only to come to the painful realization that the only way to do so was to cede power himself.
Biden’s decision to end his campaign came after he contracted COVID-19, spent days quarantining at his Delaware beach house and watched many Democrats turn away from the president who led his party to power just four years ago.
Biden’s offer to hand over power in the national interest stands in contrast to former President Donald Trump, who vehemently opposed leaving office after he lost to Biden in a free and fair election in 2020. It is ironic that Republicans who covered up Trump’s election fraud are now accusing Democrats of trampling on the will of primary voters who voted to re-elect the president.
“Serving as your president has been the greatest honor of my life,” Biden wrote in a letter to X on Sunday afternoon. “While I intended to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and our country that I step aside and focus solely on fulfilling the duties of my presidency for the remainder of my term.”
Biden quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, but the late-season decision could lead to confusion and division as the Democratic nominee moves rapidly to endorse himself a month before the party convention in Chicago and with less than four months to go until the election.
Biden’s campaign effectively ended after the first 20 minutes of his debate with Trump last month, with the president confused, exhausted and unable to attack his opponent or make an effective case for himself.
Biden’s struggles confirmed the concerns of most voters that he was too old for a second term that would have ended at age 86. Concerns about his performance at the CNN debate in Atlanta were exacerbated by his efforts to stay active in television interviews and on the campaign trail. Three weeks of serious political uncertainty led to daily defections from Democratic lawmakers and behind-the-scenes pressure from party officials like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. With donations drying up, Biden’s campaign seemed unsustainable. It was clear that even if he wanted to continue, he couldn’t.
Yet Biden, proud and defiant, has resisted all attempts to remove him from the race, arguing, along with a core of loyal staff, that no other Democrat is more qualified or likely to defeat Trump, whom the president sees as an existential threat to American democracy and the soul of the nation.
But in the end, Biden could not find a way to get voters to forget the harrowing image of the 81-year-old commander in chief, who appeared seriously weakened and stumbling during the debate.
Inflation eclipses legislative record
Biden’s impressive legislative record rivals any Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, which was one of the reasons he resisted attempts to drop him from the race and said he wanted to get the job done.
Biden, the oldest president in history, was 78 years old when he took office. In his inaugural address, Biden proclaimed that the checks and balances of America’s political system had thwarted and defeated Trump’s election lies, but he was unaware at the time that the former president’s threat to democracy would only grow.
The new president immediately began tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst public health emergency in the last 100 years, which had been exacerbated by Trump’s mismanagement and politicization of his own country’s public health guidelines.
Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package that the White House credited with lowering the unemployment rate to a 50-year low and helping the U.S. economy recover faster than other developed countries. Biden also passed a $750 billion health care, tax and climate change bill known as the Beat Inflation Act, as well as a bipartisan infrastructure bill that other recent presidents have failed to deliver.
But Biden underestimated the threat of inflation, which has risen to its highest level in 40 years. Though the cost of living has fallen, many Americans still feel the strain of rising food prices and interest rates, presenting Trump with an opportunity.
Overseas, Biden responded forcefully to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and sought to reinvigorate NATO, making him the most significant Western leader to do so since the end of the Cold War. But the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 tarnished his status as a self-described foreign policy expert, and his handling of Israel’s war on Gaza has eroded his credibility with some in his base.
A tough decision for a president who has abandoned two previous election campaigns
The soul-searching Biden endured led to a decision that represents something of a humiliating conclusion for a politician who has pursued the top job for years and been repeatedly overlooked on his rise to power.
It’s not easy for the world’s most powerful president to separate personal ambition from the fate of the nation. And the debilitating divide that has developed between Democratic Party leaders and Biden in recent weeks has been a brutal lesson in the cruelty of politics, given that the president ousted Trump from power after one of the most tumultuous presidencies of modern times. It will be especially painful for Biden not to be able to take on Trump, who has spent the past three years saying he is too frail and mentally frail to effectively serve as president.
The humiliation of having to essentially shelve his reelection bid will be tough for the president, who has had to abandon his White House campaign twice before: in 1987, after he was found to have plagiarized the work of a British politician, and in 2008, after losing support in a closely contested race that was dominated by President Barack Obama and former first lady Hillary Clinton. Sunday’s outcome was also the latest tragic development in Biden’s tragic life, who lost his first wife and infant daughter in a car accident while elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware; in 2015, his beloved son Beau died of brain cancer, and he had to bury another child; and in recent years, he has dealt with the pressure and pain of helping his other son, Hunter, overcome the horrors of addiction and a personal crisis that led to his conviction on firearms charges earlier this year.
Given Biden’s political and personal record, it’s not surprising that he has stood firm when calls from within his own Democratic Party have grown for him to drop out of the race.
But with the growing likelihood that Trump’s achievement will be remembered not for ousting the most erratic president in modern American history, but for paving the way for an even more extreme second term for him, political forces are set to move in an attempt to dash his hopes.
If Biden’s gamble pays off and another Democratic candidate beats Trump, he could go down in history as one of the most successful one-term presidents in history. He would have made such a victory possible by putting his own ambitions on hold for the good of his party and his country. But his late withdrawal will raise questions about whether he has given his party and his Democratic successor the impossible task of launching a campaign within days against a united Republican Party that emerged from its convention in Milwaukee last week confident it was on a path to victory.
Seeking a second term at age 81 has proven to be an impossible mission, and despite his efforts, Biden may have avoided major problems for his party if he had come to the same conclusion before the primary season began.
If history is any guide, Biden’s approval rating, which was at its lowest, will soar in the coming days. When Johnson announced in 1968 that he would not run for a second term on his own authority, the ensuing public events across the country drew huge crowds. Johnson’s decision came in March during the primaries, and his withdrawal set off a series of upheavals, exacerbated by the assassination of Democratic primary candidate Robert F. Kennedy and the violence-ravaged Chicago convention (where this year’s convention will also be held). The eventual Democratic candidate, then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, lost to Republican Richard Nixon. A few years earlier, in March 1952, another Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, had decided not to run for a second term. That year’s Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson lost to Republican Dwight Eisenhower.
But while Biden’s selflessness has won him explosive support – and even nostalgia for the success of his now lame-duck presidency – that may not be shared by his successor.
No president has ever dropped out of a presidential race so late in modern history, and Harris, or whoever takes the baton, now faces one of the toughest tasks in electoral history — against an opponent who has already proven he’ll do whatever it takes to win.
