In a remarkable turn of events, Donald J. Trump is heading into the Republican convention in Milwaukee as the clear frontrunner against President Joe Biden. A new Cook poll indicates that Trump has solidified his lead over Biden with six states moving toward him, not to mention support in New York slipping for his candidacy. Faced with political peril, Biden has adopted a truculent tone, decrying elites and the press for seeking to stymie his run for a second term. His media appearance on Thursday to close the NATO conference in Washington, which his aides are calling his “big boy” news conference, will pose another stern test of his ability to speak spontaneously and coherently when answering questions about domestic and international affairs.
It should come as no surprise that signs of unrest inside and outside the Democratic party about Biden are continuing to mount. Take George Stephanopoulos. “I don’t think he can serve four more years,” the ABC News anchor said on Tuesday after he was asked by on a Manhattan street whether President Joe Biden should step down. He’s since issued a hasty apology—“Earlier today I responded to a passerby. I shouldn’t have”—but he was stating the obvious. Then there is George Clooney. Clooney, who recently headlined a fundraiser for Biden, has now called upon him to exit the race.
Trump, in turn, has largely held back from attacking Biden, reckoning that there is no need to pile on when he is headed toward what Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett has suggested could be a landslide victory, encompassing both the House and Senate. Such a victory has eluded presidents since Ronald Reagan, as the electorate has become increasingly polarized and candidates seek to slice and dice the shrinking number of uncommitted voters. Might Trump be able to pull off this feat, winning a mandate for leadership? Might he be able to enact his legislative aspirations, including abolishing Obamacare in a second term?
Perhaps the most immediate signal of Trump’s immediate ambitions will be his choice for vice-president. If Trump picks a more establishment candidate such as Sen. Marco Rubio or North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, it will indicate that he’s going for the grand slam. Selecting someone like Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, by contrast, would amount to doubling down on the MAGA base. The implications for the GOP’s future, particularly if Trump were unable to serve out a full second term, are not insignificant, particularly for foreign affairs.
For now, however, it is Biden who commands the spotlight. Even his most stalwart defenders such as former White House chief of staff Ron Klain are finding it difficult to advance a persuasive case for his continued candidacy. In a revealing interview with the New Republic’s Greg Sargent, Klain was unable to spell out a specific path that Biden could adopt to stage a political comeback. Instead, he relied on feel-good messaging: “I don’t think this is something about like, I’m going to show you a bunch of numbers and the numbers are going to tell you I’m right. It’s like, look, what wins in a state like Pennsylvania? It’s someone who is authentic, who has the—I’ll say the piece of data that is on the President’s side is, he cares about people like me, shares my values, all those things. He’s doing very well in those metrics…I think his attributes in the end are the winning attributes as they were in 2020.”
The problem, of course, is that 2024 is not 2020. Trump is not an incumbent president dealing ineptly with a national health crisis. Instead, he’s posturing as an outsider battling the elites. Trump is not presiding over a faltering economy. Instead, he’s dinging Biden over inflation. However, the greatest impediment to Biden’s reelection is that he is not the Biden of 2020. He hasn’t simply lost a step; he’s become a hollow man.
As Tim Alberta reports in the Atlantic, Trump has been planning for a landslide win all along, predicated on the contrast between his hyped-up masculinity and Biden’s physical debility. Remove Biden from the picture, however, and you scramble the Trump camp’s plans. Whether Vice-President Kamala Harris or another Democratic candidate could successfully win the presidency is an open question. But it seems increasingly unlikely that Biden can perform that feat. It’s time for him to bow to the inevitable and exit the race.
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.
Image Credit: Shutterstock.
