Biden's Gambit Goes Bust

How, and why, the President's strategy failed.

“Don’t underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up”

— President Barack Obama

When I think back on the Biden Nomination Crisis of 2024 in the future, I hope that I will be able to recall its most liminal moments. I want to remember the week after the ABC interview but before the Trump shooting, when things settled into a surreal routine. What it was like to see Biden, after he emerged from his crisis bunker with Hunter, finally schedule what his own staff called “big boy” public appearances—but only once a week. The experience of reading countless background quotes and reports about the entire party being terrified of his chances but also terrified of speaking out. The absurdity of watching arch-centrists say Biden needed to go while the hard left demanded that he stay until the end. The madness of waking up with headlines about donors pulling tens of millions of dollars, the sitting president saying that only God can judge him, and Republican leads in double-digit Biden 2020 states, all with the knowledge that the entire spectacle was completely unnecessary.

It was hell, and it was a special kind of hell. It was the product of selfishness, cowardice and idiocy—the work of someone too arrogant to care about anyone besides himself and too stupid to even recognize what his own best interests were. It was a house built by the kind of of malignant narcissist whose first and only strategy to get what he wanted was threaten political murder-suicide, hoping that fears of his childishness would get the party back in line. He had nothing to offer but a half-baked self-mythology, a sense of entitlement, and endless whining. 

And now, it appears that he is at the end of the line.

While Joe Biden, as always, still has the final say, and one should never underestimate his capacity for narcissism, the events of the past few days make it clear that the President’s effort to stay on the ballot has taken a major turn for the worse. In the span of only a few hours on Thursday, reporting revealed that the entire leadership of his party, actual, spiritual and otherwise, have become convinced that he cannot win this year and have been actively working to push him out of the race. While these efforts, by themselves, haven’t settled things (obviously, Biden hasn’t left yet), the fact that these figures have gone semi-public in their opposition is a significant step. It is a step that, at least according to reporting, has finally started to get the message through Biden’s thick skull, possibly making the question of his departure from the race a question of “when,” not “if.”

It’s been a long few weeks. We’ve seen a number of false starts, shifts in momentum, twists and turns. Some more could still be in store. But no matter what happens, these stories have brought us to a point that many of us thought we would never reach. Going forward, it would now be far more surprising to see Joe Biden stay in the race than to see him drop out. 

So, before this cycle finally, possibly, mercifully ends, it’s worth looking back over the past few weeks and asking: how did we get to this point? How did a man who was supposed to be a veteran institutionalist—a party man—end up here? How in the world did things get this bad for Joe Biden?

AP Photo/Susan Walsh