Calls for withdrawal after Biden’s humiliating defeat

The double victory that I had hoped for on Thursday — Biden over Trump in the CNN debate and the US soccer team over Panama in Copa America — never happened, as both Biden and the soccer team went down in humiliating defeats.

In fact, both bombed, and their fall was heard loud and clear across this nation. Biden had no answer to a vigorous Trump, who got away with a long series of his usual lies but who seemed much younger, energetic, well-spoken and disciplined. And the US soccer team, reduced to ten players after a disastrous red card to Timothy Weah early in the match, turned a likely victory over an inferior team into a 1-2 defeat. The Americans now risk elimination from the tournament if they don’t beat Uruguay next week. It was an embarrassing defeat.

For the president it was a “painful evening,” writes Robert Reich, professor and a leading liberal voice.

Biden should now “withdraw from the race,” according to influential commentator Andrew Sullivan.

Their words are echoed by many, as the Democratic Party and its supporters are reeling from what Steven Schmidt, an anti-Trump former Republican, calls “a disaster of the first magnitude” for Biden. 

The Democratic Party will have a Chernobyl-level panic, and there will be calls for Biden to step aside in the 2024 election for younger, rising stars in the party. The election that no one wanted revealed itself tonight. There’s just no way that Joe Biden can stay on the ticket and lead the Democratic Party to certain catastrophic defeat, turning the country over to the greatest threat to its democracy since the Confederacy.

Biden’s performance, writes veteran journalist Joe Klein, was “worse than disastrous. It was sad, it was humiliating. Biden looked like a hospice patient who got lost on his way to the bathroom.” 

Klein adds his voice to all those who think change must now happen:

Joe Biden has had an honorable career and, I believe, he’s been a very good President. It’s tragic to see it end this way. But end it must. He cannot win this election. On the evidence of last night, he would be unable to function as President for the next four years. He needs to stand down, as soon as possible. He needs to release his convention delegates and allow the Democrats to pick a successor.

So my hunch that Biden would come through, as he so often had done in big moments, turned out to be wrong, completely wrong. Biden, 81, did show his age, and although it had been much discussed, many were surprised, some even shocked.

There was panic in the reactions from leading Democrats as well as grass root party members. What do we do now? This cannot go on? But how and what can we do?

In CNN’s flash poll shortly after the debate, 67 percent of the debate watchers surveyed, around 565 registered voters, said that Trump had won the debate – a debate that Biden and his team had wanted but which they now, surely, regret having proposed. 

We’ll see how this panic plays out in the coming days. Maybe it will all settle down. Unless Biden himself decides to withdraw there is little the party can do to change the planned and official nomination of Biden as the party’s presidential nominee at the Democratic convention in August.

Journalist Klas Bergman has reported from Europe, the Middle East, Central America, Canada and the United States, primarily for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and the Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of Scandinavians in the State House — How Nordic Immigrants Shaped Minnesota Politics. This article first appeared on his Substack blog Notes on America, which he writes from his current home in Los Angeles. It is republished with permission.