Hey Ho, Joe’s Gotta Go

Democrats are sleepwalking toward catastrophe with Biden

U.S. President Joe Biden greets supporters after addressing union workers on September 4, 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

In a recent post cautioning against thinking our Donald Trump problem can be solved by legal means, I wrote that the former president “will be defeated in the political arena or not at all.”

But will he be defeated in the political arena?

An awful lot of Democrats and quite a few anti-Trump conservatives appear to think it’s a near-certainty that he will. The sitting president has all the normal advantages of incumbency. Plus, Joe Biden has already beaten Trump once. And since then, the 45th president has attempted a self-coup, incited an insurrection against the national legislature, and been indicted in four jurisdictions on 91 counts. He faces multiple trials that will be unfolding throughout the 2024 campaign. Before Election Day, he could be found guilty in one or more of these trials and face jail time as a convicted felon. How could such a man possibly hope to improve on his showing the last time he ran, unsuccessfully, for president? (To be clear, I’m assuming Trump will be the Republican nominee in the 2024 general election. That seems like a reasonable assumption given his persistent, enormous, unwavering lead in the primary race.)

I admit, it sounds daunting. But then, going all the way back to the opening months of Trump’s original presidential campaign, during the fall of 2015, I’ve had a difficult time grasping how anyone could vote for him. To the extent that during the four years of his presidency I was able to acquire such a grasp using empathetic imagination, I lost it after the events of January 6, 2021, which convinced me Trump was nothing less than a traitor to American democracy. Surely many others share this view of the man. Right?

I’m honestly not sure whether it will matter. That’s because the 2024 election isn’t going to be an up-or-down judgment of the former president as a human being. It’s going to be a contest between two (or more) candidates—and the truth is that Biden is looking incredibly weak right now. (I should note that I personally think Biden’s been a fine president, so this post isn’t a substantive critique of him by other means.) By complacently resigning themselves to sticking with Biden as their nominee, Democrats, I worry, are sleepwalking toward catastrophe. If Biden’s party and even the president himself wanted to maximize the chance of soundly defeating Trump, they would announce the current president’s intention to step down on January 20, 2025 and support an open primary contest next winter and spring to choose an alternative nominee for president.

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