This week on The Daily Beast Podcast, co-host Samantha Bee offered a scathing critique of Joe Biden, his inner circle and the broader Democratic Party in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. Bee accused the party of a “lack of honesty,” arguing their unwillingness to confront Biden’s capacity for a second term led to an outcome that could have been avoided.
“I know people who were present at interviews with Joe Biden a long time ago,” Bee told co-host Joanna Coles and guest Nell Scovell. “I’m talking two years ago,” she continued, “and it was observable to them that he would not be in (a) condition to run for a second term.”
(In a piece titled “I’ve Seen Joe Biden Up Close. Nobody Can Deny His Decline,” Coles wrote similarly for The Daily Beast this past June.)
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During his 2020 campaign, Biden had said he intended to serve only one term in the White House—a pledge that ended up coming true, but certainly not for the reasons he intended. “He was extremely arrogant about it,” Bee argued of the President’s about turn(s) over running for re-election. “He did a lot of things that were good, I think... And I applaud him, and I applaud the people around him for doing things that were correct. But this was a failure that was catastrophic.”
Bee paid credit to Vice President Kamala Harris, asserting she “ran as good a campaign as they could run” under the circumstances. But those circumstances were all wrong, she argued, as others have done in recent days: Democrats missed an opportunity to have an honest discussion about Biden‘s viability, Bee said—and, with that addressed, the possibility for an open convention to identify a tried-and-tested consensus candidate in his place. “There was so much dissatisfaction with Joe Biden, and they were not honest about it. They didn‘t really work at it early enough,” Bee concluded.
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