It's risky, but Joe Biden must give up his seat to someone who can beat Donald Trump | Jonathan Freedland

What was the worst moment? Maybe when a particularly rambling sentence from Joe Biden ended with a mumbled, garbled declaration that we had finally beaten Medicare, as if he were the enemy of the public service that Democrats cherish and defend. Maybe it was when the president didn’t speak, but the camera showed him staring into space, his mouth hanging open and slack? Or was it when he spoke and it came out in a thin, thin whisper, a voice that failed to grab the viewer’s attention, even when the words themselves made sense?

For anyone who cared about the future of the United States and therefore, thanks to the country's unmatched power, the future of the world, it was agonizing to watch. More and more often, one found oneself staring at the clock, desperate to see it through, if only for humanitarian reasons: it seemed cruel to subject a visibly fragile man to such an ordeal.

In this sense, the first and, given what happened, probably last televised debate between the current and former president confirmed the worst fears that many Biden supporters have long harbored about his ability to confront and defeat Donald Trump. For more than 90 excruciating minutes, every late-night gag about Biden's age, every wickedly cut TikTok video portraying him as embarrassed and semi-senile, came true. There was no turning it on, despite the White House's efforts to blame it on a cold. Joe Biden delivered the worst performance ever seen in a presidential debate.

Expectations were at an all-time low: All he had to do was show some vigor, reassure people that his marbles were all there and correct, and that would have been enough. The bar could hardly have been lower. But Joe Biden failed to clear it.

And if the debate confirmed Biden’s limitations, it also served as a reminder of why those limitations matter. On the one hand, Trump is presenting this race as a showdown between the strong and the weak: He presents himself as a strong man, facing an opponent too weak to lead and protect the United States in an increasingly dangerous world. On the purely physical level of what people could see and hear on their television screens, the Atlanta debate reinforced Trump’s portrait.

But, just as importantly, Biden’s inability to make clear and intelligible statements meant that Donald Trump’s lies went unchallenged. And there were so many of them, lie after lie after lie. Trump claimed that Democrats supported abortion at nine months, even if it meant killing babies after birth. He claimed that the real culprit in the storming of the Capitol on January 6 was not him, but former Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. He claimed that he was the one who cut the cost of insulin, when it was Biden who did that.

There have been dozens of others in the same vein, an endless stream of lies. But because CNN made the baffling decision to do nothing more than read scripted questions without ever questioning the candidates' statements, Biden had to fight back in real time. And he couldn't do it. Postgame fact-checkers stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, trying to set the record straight. But by then it was too late.

Mumbling, lies and no fact-checking in sight: the first video of the 2024 Trump-Biden debate

In this sense, the debate represented the 2024 campaign in microcosm. Trump is a liar, a convicted felon, and a would-be dictator who plotted to overturn a free and fair election so he could cling to power, but he is ready to return to the Oval Office because his opponent is too weak to stop it. As former Obama administration official Van Jones said after the debate, it's a fight between an old man and a crook, but the former's weakness allows the latter to prevail.

The mere fact that Trump spoke loudly and with, by his standards, relative self-discipline, coupled with the lack of questioning by the moderators, gave him a credibility that should have been denied him. He is a failed coup leader, a nationalist-populist and racist menace who would succumb to the world’s autocrats and deliver Ukraine to Vladimir Putin’s wolves: he should not be allowed anywhere near power. But because he was competing with a man who could barely finish a sentence, he was presented as a legitimate candidate for the highest office in the world.

We can now expect Trump to win if he faces Biden on November 5. He was leading in all the key states even before the debate and now there is no clear chance of moving upward again. Thursday night’s face-off was supposed to be that moment. This is why the White House chose to hold the debate so early: to allay fears about the president's age and to reframe the race not as a referendum on Biden, but as a choice . This bet failed doubly, aggravating an already serious problem.

What now? Unfortunately, there is no Graham-Brady letter mechanism in American politics, no equivalent to the short, sharp defenestrations of Westminster. Some imagine Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having a word with each other, but Biden is a proud, stubborn man who has felt ignored for too long, including by these two. Perhaps the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate could do that: given Biden’s decades-long attachment to Congress, he could heed warnings that unfavorable candidates could suffer if he remains at the top of the ticket.

But ultimately it will be his decision. He won his party's primaries earlier this year virtually unopposed; the nomination of the Democratic party belongs to him, unless he renounces it. Some say the only person who could persuade him to do this is his wife, Jill. But after the debate, she loudly congratulated her husband, albeit in a way that reinforced the feeling of a man well beyond the prime of his life. Joe, you did a great job! she says. You answered all the questions! You knew all the facts!

Even Democrats who acknowledge that Thursday’s victory was a disaster worry that a change is risky. Biden could give way to his vice president, but Kamala Harris is even less popular than he is, and Trump would be happy to exploit the rich deposits of sexism and racism that would open up. The party could set the stage for a contest at its convention in August between the deep bench of next-generation Democratic talent, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, her California counterpart, Gavin Newsom, and others, but it could be messy, bitter and rushed. None of the contenders has been tested in the national spotlight, and Democrats would turn on each other when they should be targeting Trump.

Democrats all agree on one thing: Joe Biden is a good, honest man who was a president of unintended consequences. But communication is a key part of governing, and Biden has all but lost that ability. For the past year or so, Democrats have been crossing their fingers and hoping that the evidence emerging before their eyes will fade, partly because any other course of action would carry great risks. After this debate disaster, they can no longer deny that inaction is also a risk and, given the perils of a second Trump presidency, certainly the most serious.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/28/joe-biden-democrats-donald-trump The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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