Just two weeks ago, President Joe Biden said he would only resign if God intervened. God has yet to appear, but nearly everyone in the Democratic Party has publicly or privately asked him to step down. Former President Barack Obama is no longer shy about expressing his doubts about Biden among party members and the former speaker House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has told lawmakers she believes she can “soon” persuade the president to step down as head of the ticket. On Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on MSNBC that Vice President Kamala Harris “is ready,” and Rep. Mark Takano added that Biden should hand over the reins to her because “there’s too much at stake to fail,” AP reports.
Some 1,500 kilometres from Milwaukee, where Trump was being cheered on by his party’s rank and file on Thursday evening, Biden remained in Covid-19 quarantine at his beach house in Delaware. The president’s isolation is not just for health reasons. Various American media outlets reported on Thursday that Biden is expected to announce his resignation this weekend. But the president’s campaign team has already announced that Biden will resume his agenda next week. Although this seems to be the only one insisting that the Democrat is still in the race.
Even Biden’s family has already begun to discuss an “exit” plan, according to NBC News. Since late June, the president’s inner circle has played a key role in Biden’s fight with critics calling for him to resign. The hours following the “bad night” the Democrat had in the CNN debate against Trump were spent at Camp David surrounded by his loved ones, who assure that the president was still in “the fight of his political life.” His wife, Jill Biden, has been one of the figures who during this time has encouraged him to continue in the race.
That his people are now considering what Biden’s resignation should look like to ensure that it “is worthy of the more than five decades he has served the country” reflects how mortally wounded the president’s candidacy is. As with the reports of a possible resignation this weekend, the White House has also denied that this family plan “is happening.”
Biden has been in constant free fall since Trump crushed him with falsehoods before the entire country. During these last three weeks the president has tried everything to mitigate the impact: giving television interviews, increasing campaign events, writing a letter to his congressmen calling for unity, meeting with the governors, being more energetic during key moments such as the NATO summit. But nothing has worked; with each public appearance of Biden, a new congressman joined the list of legislators who have asked him to resign, or figures such as George Clooney came out to ask him to leave. Even donors have taken action and the largest super PAC that the party has behind it, Future Forward, announced that it was freezing the donation of 90 billion dollars while Biden remains the candidate.
Seen from the perspective of the criticism he has received for his statements and the lapses he has suffered at key moments (such as when he introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as Russian Vladimir Putin), the strategy of filling the president’s agenda with events reads differently: to expose Biden as many times as necessary until the president reaches the same conclusion as the rest of the party’s critics. After Biden’s mistakes at NATO, the newspaper The New York Times posted how members of his own team were already calling for the president to drop the nomination. The looks on the faces of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jack Sullivan when Biden called Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump” spoke more at the time about Biden’s future than the president’s performance.
Six days after the NATO press conference alone, and four days after the attack on Trump in Butler (which has given a further push to the Republican campaign), Biden was no longer referring to divine intervention to leave the race: “[Renunciaría] “If a doctor told me I had this or that problem,” Biden said in a televised interview. The candidate thus timidly opened the door to withdrawing. The next day he tested positive for Covid.
Source: www.eldiario.es
