Over and Out

Why I’m done with Joe Biden

President Joe Biden speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Sherman Middle School on July 05, 2024 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It’s always the cleverest lines I come to regret.

Back in February, when I wrote my essay for The Atlantic calling on President Joe Biden to step aside in favor of another Democrat, I wanted to make sure readers knew where I was coming from. So I included this statement about halfway through:

I am going to be voting for the Democratic nominee in November, whether or not it’s Joe Biden. I would be doing that even if the party ran a potted plant in Biden’s place. A potted plant in the Oval Office would be infinitely preferable to a president who embodies a potentially fatal threat to the country’s democratic institutions.

I thought I was being funny. Now I think I was just being flippant. (That holds for the original formulation, as well as for my halfhearted restatement of it on Twitter/X one day after the June 27 debate.)

I haven’t shifted one iota in the direction of voting for Donald Trump, a man thoroughly unfit to serve as president. I will never cast a ballot for him.  

But that doesn’t mean I would literally vote for a potted plant over Trump—just as I will not vote for a thoroughly enfeebled Biden just because he’s the alternative presented to me by the Democratic Party on Election Day.

I’m done with Biden. Ideally, he would resign his office immediately. Such a resignation would put the presidency in the hands of Vice President Kamala Harris, who would then be able to run against Trump as an incumbent, defending what’s worthy of defense from the past four years, laying out a vision for the future of the country, and taking the fight to the Republican nominee with prosecutorial zeal.

Could she beat Trump? I don’t know. I tend to doubt it. But at least she would have a decent shot, whereas I now consider a Biden victory a remote possibility, one the likelihood of which will fade much further over the coming weeks and months.

But the desire to give the Democrats a better chance of beating Trump is not the primary reason I can no longer support Biden’s bid for re-election. The primary reason is that, like Trump (if for very different reasons), Joe Biden is no longer fit to serve as president.

Against Leaderless Leadership