Let’s start with the obvious: No one actually knows the best path forward for the Democratic Party in 2024, and all options in front of us are bad. A second Biden term is seeming less and less likely, and Democratic voters and pundits like seem increasingly nervous that we’re marching to our own funeral. But the prospect of challenging an incumbent president just a few months before an election also seems hubristic and dangerous, especially when the Democratic Party is deeply divided, the vice president is unpopular and has been largely marginalized, and there is no obvious Plan B. The worst of all worlds seems to be a scenario in which Biden continues his campaign but the party mutinies and an ugly replacement battle fails at everything except mortally injuring an already-weak candidate.
It is hard to overstate the stakes of this election. Joe Biden surely understands them as well. Which is why I hope that, in the aftermath of this debate, he is doing some serious soul-searching with his advisors, his colleagues, and the person he seems to trust most: His wife Jill.
The catastrophic debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Thursday was a wake-up call even for many hard Biden partisans that this president, for all the good he’s done in office, is struggling to make his case to the American people and does indeed come across as a struggling elderly man who may be kind and respectable but increasingly lacks the cognitive sharpness to hold the most powerful office in the world. At the same time, the threat of a second Trump presidency is enormous, far bigger than most Americans seem to grasp—Trump is scheming on a radical executive power-grab which could put everything from the Fed to control of the media in his hands, while he also promises vast human rights abuses, an end to a freedom-and-democracy-pursuing liberal international order, and a series of economic plans that would radically drive up prices and plunge the nation into financial free-fall. It’s no exaggeration to say that a second Trump presidency could mean everything from the termination of abortion rights nationwide, to deportation camps for immigrants, to the end of America as a beacon of economic and political stability, to the rise of global autocratic and imperialist power from Russia, China, and other dangerous actors.
