President Joe Biden’s supporters might have hoped that his performance in Thursday night’s debate against Donald Trump would stamp out burning questions about his age and his ability to secure another term in office. Instead, his stumbling and error-prone display poured gasoline on the flames.
The conflagration reached all the way to the opinion pages of The New York Times, where not a single one of a panel of 12 writers concluded Biden had won the head-to-head with his opponent, a recently convicted felon. Worse still, a host of columnists at the newspaper were outright calling for him to abandon his re-election bid altogether.
“I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep,” wrote Thomas Friedman, a political commentator and friend of Biden. “I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime—precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.”
