The dilemma for Democrats: Damned they retain Biden, damned they replace him

Half of the United States—the “liberal” half—is in a state of panic. A “very aggressive panic”, as Tom King, CNN’s seniormost Washington DC correspondent, put it minutes after the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on June 27 ended. More than 51 million viewers were exposed to what has been the worst-kept secret in the US—that their country’s president is going senile, if he is not already so.

But Biden, equally aggressively, refuses to accept this. A large section of Democrats are hankering for him to quit his re-election bid and give the stage over to someone else. Biden, though, is totally adamant. In an ABC News interview last Friday, he said that he would drop out only “if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get outta the race’”. He also said that he’s “running the world” and has been doing so very well.

More from Opinion

Sergio Gor’s senate hearing signals the future of Indo-American ties How Trump’s ‘War on Drugs’ buildup against Venezuela has a hidden agenda

Only a few hours before the interview, Biden had gotten his years mixed up at a campaign rally in Madison, Wisconsin. “Well, let me say this as clearly as I can—I’m staying in the race,” he told a cheering crowd. “I’ll beat Donald Trump. I will beat him again in 2020.” A second’s pause, and then, “And by the way, I’m going to do it again in 2024.”

The liberals’ worst nightmare seems to be coming true. Donald Trump, who is a mixture of Voldemort and Thanos to them, will be moving back to the White House.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

How army remains Pakistan’s biggest business house

60 years on, why 1965 India–Pakistan war still matters

The debate was a disaster for Biden. During those 90 minutes, Biden often looked befuddled. He mumbled and sometimes he was unable to complete sentences or was plain incoherent. At one point, after he answered a question about the massive illegal migration crisis the country is facing on its southern border, Trump shook his head and said: “I don’t really know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”

When the debate ended, while Trump strolled off the stage, Biden’s wife Jill held him by the hand and gently guided him out.

For at least a year now, every opinion poll has found that a high percentage of Americans think that Biden does not have the cognitive abilities any more to be an effective president and that he should not run one more time. A Wall Street Journal poll done right after the debate found that 80 per cent of voters now think so.

Biden, who will turn 82 a fortnight after the election on November 5, is already the oldest US president ever. If re-elected, he will be 86 by the time he remits office. Since moving into the White House in January 2021, Biden has tripped on staircases several times, shaken hands with invisible entities, lost his train of thought on many occasions, had clear memory lapses—like saying that Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, was still the president of France, and even spoken gibberish—he said something that sounded like “cumalidefasredsulc” to describe the benefits of his debt forgiveness plan. Last year, at a press conference in Vietnam, he started speaking so incoherently that his staff ushered him off the stage mid-sentence.

Trump is 78, but does not show his age. He remains energetic and as physically belligerent as ever.

The Department of Justice appointed attorney Robert Hur to investigate whether Biden had illegally stored classified documents from his days as vice-president in the Barack Obama administration in his home after his tenure was over. The transcripts of Hur’s interviews reveal that Biden couldn’t remember the year when his beloved son Beau died, and even the years—2009-2017—when he was vice-president. In his report, Hur wrote that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory”, so though he had committed a crime, criminal charges should not be filed against him. In other words—let the poor man be, he doesn’t know what he is doing. But this poor man holds the most powerful job in the known universe.

That Biden has been getting too old for the task has been common knowledge. There are dozens of videos on social media of him doing or saying something silly or inexplicable, but the White House has consistently maintained that the president was hale and hearty in body and mind. While a backbencher school child could see that this was not true, mainstream liberal US media, led by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, have fervently toed the official line, terming all of it Republican Party propaganda and Trumpist smear campaigns. Top NYT columnists like Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and multiple-award-winning journalist Thomas Friedman have repeatedly written, as recently as a few months ago, that Biden’s mind was sharp as a razor.

It’s quite entertaining to see how all these hallowed media outlets made a U-turn within hours of the presidential debate ending. NYT and Washington Post are now appealing to Biden every day to retire. NYT has suddenly discovered that “Mr. Biden is not the same today as he was even when he took office three and a half years ago”. The keyword here is “even”. Perhaps inadvertently, the writers are acknowledging that Biden’s brain was already diminished when he took oath as president. Anonymous Biden aides have admitted to the paper that the “decline had accelerated lately”. So everyone near him knew for a long time that the president’s brain was fading. Both Krugman and Friedman are asking Biden to drop out.

The truth is that the Democratic Party and influential legacy media have been lying consistently and have colluded in a massive three-and-a-half-year cover-up that could have endangered the world. Maybe it already has. All because they are morbidly afraid of Trump returning to the White House.

So what happens now?

As per Democratic Party rules, and as Biden mentioned in his ABC News interview, he is technically already the party’s nominee. There is a purely theoretical chance that Democrats can choose another candidate at their four-day national convention that begins on August 19, where the party’s presidential candidate will be formally anointed. But that leaves just two and a half months for the new anointee for the White House campaign.

The best solution that frantic Democrats are suggesting is that Biden resign the presidency. Kamala Harris becomes president and automatically the Democrat candidate.

Harris is the most unpopular US vice-president in the entire era of opinion polls, but from the Democrats’ point of view, she has national name and face recall, which none of the other potential nominees have. Plus she is a woman and a Black. And she ain’t senile.

But Trump will possibly crush Harris, who ran a spectacularly bungled-up campaign in 2020 for the Democratic Party nomination for presidential candidate. As political scientist Charles Lipson has written in The Spectator, “When it comes to keeping Biden or replacing him, they are damned if they can, damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.”

And while Democrats try desperately to figure out a solution to this trilemma, Trump would be laughing his head off. As would Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

The author is former managing editor of Outlook, former editor of The Financial Express, and founding editor of Outlook Money, Open, and Swarajya magazines. He has authored books such as ‘The IITians: The Story of an Extraordinary Indian Institution and How its Alumni Are Reshaping the World’, ‘Fallen Angel: The Making and Unmaking of Rajat Gupta’, and ‘The Last War’. The views expressed in his column are personal, and do not reflect those of Firstpost. You can follow Sandipan Deb on Twitter @sandipanthedeb