The Biden Drama Is Over but the Fallout May Linger

The Democrats need to restore trust in their own honesty if they want to win back a winning majority of the voters

To the great relief of just about everyone who planned to vote for him, President Biden has declared that he is dropping out of the race and will not be a candidate for president again. At the same time, he endorsed Vice President Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket. Both the press and the people can now finally move on from the debate about whether and when Biden will drop out and actually return to discussing the future of the country.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the last several weeks will be completely easy to put behind. Assuming you voted for him in 2020 and have been open to voting for a Democrat in 2024, how you feel about Biden’s decision to bow out depends greatly on how you felt about his decision to stay in for so long. That, in turn, probably depends on just what you think has been going on for the last several months to years with regard to Biden’s fitness, and just how dishonest the White House has been about that subject.

The most charitable read is that Biden was old and physically somewhat frail but still fully capable of discharging the responsibilities of his office as recently as this past February when special counsel Robert Hur gave the Democrats an off-ramp from a Biden candidacy by describing him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” whom no jury would convict of criminal conspiracy. Biden’s condition clearly has deteriorated significantly since then, but he’s undoubtedly had good days and bad days all along, and perhaps it wasn’t until after the bulk of the primaries were past that the problem became truly unavoidable. At that point everyone on the inside must have frozen and tried to brazen out the situation, a plan which crashed and burned spectacularly on June 27th. But because the previous plan had been to brazen things out, no one on the inside was prepared for the firestorm ignited by the debate, and so we’ve had the past few weeks of shouting and cuticle-chewing before finally winding up here, with a belated withdrawal from the race.

It hasn’t been the most dignified process, but I think people could be broadly forgiving if they were inclined to believe this story. I’m not convinced they should believe it, though.

I say that because people have been talking about whether Biden would be capable of serving a second term as president since before he was elected to his first. Biden and his people ought to have been thinking seriously about the question of succession from day one. Probably they should have planned from the beginning for Biden to announce in early 2023, not long after the midterms, that he would not be running for reelection. No such plan was put in place, presumably because Biden decided from the get-go that he wanted to run again, and everyone lined up behind the boss. But that didn’t mean the questions were actually answered, and it was malpractice on the part of both the administration and the press to pretend that they had been.

Once that die was cast, of course, I imagine that motivated reasoning took over, on the part of both his administration and the rest of the party and its supporters. Serious potential opponents didn’t run in the primaries because taking down a sitting president of your own party is almost certainly a doomed effort that only causes your side to lose and therefore poisons your relationship with the party going forward. Without serious opponents, no external force was going to stop Biden from running and winning essentially all the delegates, and since that’s what he wanted to do that’s what he did. And if Biden was running, and winning, then it was important to put the best face on his candidacy and stifle objections rather than be open about the toll his age was taking.

All of that is understandable. But it’s not so readily forgivable, I don’t think, because if Biden’s decline wasn’t precipitous, if there were plenty of signs earlier on, then it implies that there was a sustained campaign of deception—underwritten, substantially, by self-deception, but surely not limited to it—going on for far longer than a few weeks. In general, I am reluctant to place my trust in people who engage in that kind of thing, and I suspect a lot of voters feel the same way.

I would like to believe the charitable interpretation, mind you. But to do so, I’d need someone to explain to me how I’m supposed to trust people who say that Biden deteriorated rapidly in the last few weeks from a reasonable baseline for being president when, if there was a more sustained deception going on, those same people were the ones precipitating it. Answering that, I think, is a genuinely tough problem.

And the problem is general. Kamala Harris, for example, had no real choice but to be a loyal soldier and present publicly as fully confident in her boss—I understand that. And I can believe that she might have thought if her staff leaked about how bad things were, it would have backfired because the leaks would have been discounted as an attempt to undermine the president and thereby smooth the path for her to replace him. Those are good enough reasons to explain why she held the line. Yet, it is also the case that she’s in a much stronger position now to win the nomination than she would have been if Biden had declared his intention not to run back in January of 2023, and she had had to run a real primary campaign. How do I know how to assess her statements going forward given that I can’t un-know that fact?

Mind you, I’m not confused about the difference between the parties on this score. I continue to consider Donald Trump manifestly unfit for the presidency, among other things for his complete detachment from reality and his routine demands that people prove their loyalty to him by vocally joining him in that detachment. His running mate’s willingness to participate in outright fantasy about the 2020 election is the most prominent and important example. But it’s also worth remembering that Trump’s first term administration leaked like a sieve, such that the public was (if it chose to inform itself) well aware of its chaotic state. Multiple former officials have attested to his unfitness since leaving office, notwithstanding Trump’s continued presence on the political scene. It has taken time and effort for Trump to establish the total dominance over the GOP that he currently enjoys; Trump faced plenty of serious primary opposition this season, and if things had broken differently he might not have been able to avoid engaging directly with his opponents. Finally, just as with Biden’s debate performance, the whole country saw what happened on January 6th, 2021, including his own Vice President’s refusal to bow to his commands, and heard a host of GOP luminaries in and out of office condemn him in no uncertain terms, all of which should by rights have put an end to any political future for the former president.

That’s not what happened, of course, and it didn’t happen for two big reasons. First, Trump remained enormously and uniquely popular with a substantial portion of the Republican Party base despite everything. At his nadir of post-presidential popularity within his party, when Governor Ron DeSantis briefly rose above him in the primary polls, Trump still retained the fierce support of at least a third of prospective GOP voters. This popularity was manifest even in the immediate aftermath of January 6th, and explains the second big reason why Trump didn’t pass from the scene after that spectacle: the GOP-controlled Senate refused to convict him at his second impeachment. That failure both surrendered the most practical means of preventing him from running again, and signaled unmistakably to the party’s own voters that they need not see Trump’s behavior that day as disqualifying.

The indictment of Trump and the GOP stands, but it doesn’t obviate the indictment of the Democrats, which is somewhat different. Biden, after all, has never had anything like Trump’s kind of support. He is a normal politician with a normal complement of superfans, but at bottom the vast majority of his supporters back him because he’s a Democrat who won the presidency, not because of something unique about Joe Biden. Republicans have behaved in a disqualifyingly cowardly fashion often enough around the subject of Donald Trump—but to be fair, dealing with a successful demagogue is a genuinely difficult political problem. Democrats who participated in the Biden charade that has now come to an end were arguably doing something much less serious—but by the same token, they had much less reason to fear the consequences of taking action.

I’m glad that they finally did, and that it’s finally over. Now that it is, Biden’s own trespasses will, I suspect, be largely forgiven and forgotten before too long. He has a genuine record of accomplishment, and inasmuch as that record lasts his memory will be associated with it (and if that record doesn’t last then he will be forgotten, and his appalling debate performance along with him). History books will note that our then-oldest president dropped out of the race late because of declining mental fitness, something that might grow more and more notable if we make as much progress as we hope to in combatting dementia over the next few decades, but the details won’t matter in the long run.

They matter now, though. If Harris secures the nomination in Biden’s stead, she’ll have done so without running the kind of gauntlet that nominees generally have to do. If anyone else secures the nomination rather Harris, that statement will be vastly more true of them than it is of her. No Democratic nominee will have had the opportunity to prove their bonafides and build a bond with the electorate that a primary contest provides. Parliamentary systems can swap leaders easily because the government is elected by the legislature, and therefore derives from the majority coalition therein. American presidents, by contrast, have a great deal of personal power, power they exercise over their party rather than being derived from it. They need to establish a personal basis for trust.

I understand the impulse to just say “compared to Trump?!?” and drop the mic. But if the voting public as a whole saw Trump the way Democrats do, then there wouldn’t be much of a contest, would there? If nothing else, Harris and the Democrats more generally have to remember: they need to establish trust in part so as to be convincing to the as-yet unconvinced when they levy their case against Trump. I hope they do remember, and that they have a better plan for doing that than they did for dealing with Biden’s decline.