For a while there, it looked like President Joe Biden was maybe, just maybe, in the clear. On Monday morning, he gave a forceful defense of his candidacy in a call-in interview to MSNBC and in a letter to congressional Democrats.
Then came Wednesday, when the “elites,” as Biden has branded Democrats who want him to quit the presidential race, redoubled their efforts. First, the most senior House Democrat declined to endorse his candidacy. Then, Hollywood celebrity donors—including the biggest of them all, George Clooney—called on the president to quit the race, and a scheduled lunch for donors at next month’s Democratic National Convention was suddenly scrapped.
The drip, drip, drip came in a series of potentially devastating developments that called into question whether and for how long Biden can withstand the intense blowback over his decision to stay in the race following last month’s debacle of a debate against Donald Trump.
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You do remember Trump, don’t you? For almost two weeks now, he has been uncharacteristically quiet, even though the Republican National Convention begins in a few days. The man who needs attention like a fish needs water has been content to lay low during a Democratic Party implosion caused by the flailing Biden. The Biden campaign hopes that will change as the RNC begins. And it may, though probably not as much as they hope.
Wednesday called into question how much longer that spectacle can continue before Biden causes an electoral wipeout of Walter Mondale proportions, as polling forecasts for both the president and down-ballot Democrats, who tend to rise or fall with the presidential nominee, grow more ominous.
The day began with Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker and a close Biden ally and personal friend, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to deliver a message directed straight at the Oval Office, where Biden has huddled with family and top aides, who appear to be insulating him from the grim realities of his candidacy.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” Pelosi said, giving a brutally tepid assessment. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision because time is running short.” She knows perfectly well that Biden has made the decision: He had said on the very same program that he wasn’t going anywhere. Now, she was asking him to give it another thought, or face the prospect of handing the White House keys back to the Trumps.
She added, maybe a little gratuitously: “People want him to make that decision.”
Her former colleagues in the House were coming to conclusions of their own. On Tuesday, Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey became the seventh Democrat to call on Biden to step aside, so that the party may choose a candidate better suited for what is surely to be a grueling, down-to-the-wire contest against an energized Trump.
A few hours after the Pelosi interview, Rep. Pat Ryan of New York became the eighth Democrat to urge the president off the ticket. “Joe Biden is a patriot but is no longer the best candidate to defeat Trump,” he wrote in an X post. And later, Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont became the first Democrat in the Senate to call for Biden’s withdrawal from the race in an opinion piece for The Washington Post.
If either failed to cause a major stir at the White House, that’s because it was eclipsed by an op-ed posted to The New York Times website by Clooney, the Hollywood icon who just weeks ago co-hosted the Los Angeles fundraiser that netted $30 million for the Biden-Harris campaign. You did not need to read much beyond the headline to get the message: “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.”
The editorial page of the Times was not much better. Wednesday’s print edition featured a second editorial calling on Biden to quit the race. Similar editorials have been published by the Boston Globe and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "The party needs a candidate who can stand up to Mr. Trump,” the Times said, making clear that Biden was not going to be that candidate.
Everyone who has called on Biden to drop out has made sure to express their love for the 81-year-old president. But with Trump, a mere 78, now leading in the polls, pure political fear is coming to the fore. Biden’s strategy has always been to remind Americans of the dangers of electing Trump. But with concern for Biden’s cognitive decline surging since last month’s debate, that strategy is boomeranging back to the campaign, becoming a potent argument for why Biden should leave the race, either allowing Vice President Kamala Harris to take the ticket or allowing for a mini-primary, as Democratic strategist James Carville has suggested.
However he does it, they want him to do it quickly, before the Heritage Foundation foists its Project 2025, with its hard-right, Christian nationalist vision onto the nation.
“We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign,” Clooney wrote, effectively conceding that he, like many Democrats, and most of the press, could have applied more scrutiny to the president’s increasingly unsteady comportment. Still, he argued, not having done so is hardly an excuse to invite Trump back to the White House. “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024,” his painfully viral Times op-ed concluded.
Between Pelosi on MSNBC and Clooney in the Times, Biden may well feel validated in the conviction that “elites” are trying to shuffle Scranton Joe off the stage. And they are—but not because of a condescension that has, in truth, sometimes been directed towards Biden by peers with fancier degrees and summer houses on Martha’s Vineyard instead of Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach.
A Biden campaign spokesman, Seth Schuster, told The Daily Beast that Biden is “running to win” and that “we have our heads down and are making sure we’re doing everything to ensure he beats Trump in November.”
Clooney and Pelosi are speaking out because Biden does not seem to be hearing the pleas from fellow Democrats. Reports that he is taking counsel primarily from First Lady Jill Biden and Hunter, the president’s troubled son, have only deepened concerns that he is being deprived of a crucial vitamin: reality.
Even the president’s former communications director, Kate Bedingfield, piled on.
“If they have data that supports the path to victory that they see, they should put it out there now and help people who badly want to beat Trump rally around it. People want to see the path,” she wrote on X.
The data, of course, does not exist. Biden is falling, and he may not be able to get up.
Trump could even win New York State, a once-unthinkable prospect that led New York Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado on Wednesday to join those calling on Biden to exit the race.
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, defended the president’s decision to keep fighting. “Rather than ask the president to step aside, isn’t it time to ask fellow Americans to step up?” she said in an email to The Daily Beast.
She insisted there’s “still time and a path” to get to the 270 electoral votes needed for Biden to win a second term, even “in a deeply divided country.”
The Democratic National Convention is not until late August, which means the Democrats have time, just enough of it, to find a new candidate—if Biden allows them to. In another signal to an increasingly isolated campaign (which did not respond to a Daily Beast request for comment), blue chip donors in Chicago, where the DNC will be held, said they are putting aside plans for a convention fundraiser.
Biden will use a Thursday press conference to try to convince voters, donors and congressional Democrats that they have it all wrong, that he is with it, up to the task, ready to go, in it to win it. But even a stellar performance on Thursday cannot diminish the damage of his debate performance and what a day like Wednesday has done for his chances of survival. And there will be many Wednesdays to come.
Even Michael Douglas got in on the act, telling The View that he agreed with fellow star Clooney’s op-ed.
“I’m deeply, deeply concerned,” Douglas said.
