President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House on Sunday, ending his bid for reelection following a disastrous debate with Donald Trump that raised doubts about his fitness for office just four months before the election.
The decision comes after escalating pressure from Biden’s Democratic allies to step aside following the June 27 debate, in which the 81-year-old president trailed off, often gave nonsensical answers and failed to call out the former president’s many falsehoods.
Sitting in the Oval Office behind the iconic Resolute desk in 2022, an animated President Joe Biden described the challenge of leading a psychologically traumatized nation.
The United States had endured a life-altering pandemic. There was a jarring burst of inflation and now global conflict with Russia invading Ukraine, as well as the persistent threat to democracy he felt Donald Trump posed.
How could Biden possibly heal that collective trauma?
“Be confident,” he said emphatically in an interview with The Associated Press. “Be confident. Because I am confident.”
But in the ensuing two years, the confidence Biden hoped to instill steadily waned. When the 81-year-old Democratic president showed his age in a disastrous debate against Trump in June, he lost the benefit of the doubt and on Sunday withdrew as his party’s nominee.
The highly influential Congressional Black Caucus used its political action committee Sunday to throw its full support behind Kamala Harris as the next Democratic nominee for president.
The Black caucus, among the largest caucuses in Congress, had stood steadfast by Biden since the debate last month even as many other Democrats called for him to step aside. By shifting its support to Harris, the group, which represents a crucial voting bloc for Democrats, is seeking to avoid further party chaos through an open convention process.
Trump’s campaign senior advisors Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles released a memo that echoed much of the language and particular punctuation used by Trump in which they said Harris “is just as much of a joke as Biden is.”
“Harris will be even WORSE for the people of our Nation than Joe Biden. Harris has been the Enabler in Chief for Crooked Joe this entire time. They own each other’s records, and there is no distance between the two,” the memo read.
LaCivita and Wiles, who effectively serve as Trump’s campaign managers, said Biden can’t remove himself from the campaign “because he is too mentally incompetent” and remain as president, calling him “a national security threat” and “clear and present danger” to the country.
The advisors repeated a question that Republicans are expected to press Democrats and Harris on for the remainder of the campaign: Does Harris believe that America is safe and secure with Biden remaining as president for six more months?
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