Because he beat him once, in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden convinced himself that he was the only one capable of defeating Donald Trump on November 5. The calamitous debate of June 26 showed the opposite: his physical (flagrant on screen) and mental (he was incapable of reasoning) decay became his opponent’s best electoral argument. Incidentally, 2024 is not 2020: both candidates have aged, especially Biden, and the White House is facing two wars, in Ukraine and in the Middle East. The story is not the same.
In the interest of his own camp; in the interest of America; in the interest of democracy, Joe Biden must renounce his candidacy. If the octogenarian president (he would be 86 at the end of a second term) really wants to block the path of the New York billionaire who, according to him, “threatens democracy”, he must leave the field open to a new generation. But he must act quickly, because the Democratic Party convention, from August 19 to 22, is fast approaching. A replacement candidacy would have the immense advantage of destabilizing the Trump camp, which, precisely, fears this scenario.
Now, Biden’s presence in Washington is harming the entire West. The White House, which is running at a slow pace, irresistibly recalls the Kremlin of the early 1980s. By highlighting the gerontocratic nature of the USSR, the deaths of three general secretaries of the Communist Party in less than two and a half years (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko) had dealt a fatal blow to the prestige of the Soviet Union. Today, it is the image of America – and, by ricochet, of its allies – that is weakened by the pitiful Trump-Biden spectacle. “Their debate was very entertaining for many Chinese people,” the polemicist Hu Xijin jokes on social networks. “Objectively, the poor quality performance of these two old men constitutes negative publicity for Western democracy,” adds the former editor-in-chief of the tabloid close to Beijing Global Times.
In March 1964, the unpopular Lyndon B. Johnson surprised everyone by announcing that he would not run again. Immediately, his popularity ratings took a spectacular leap. Thus, in the middle of the Vietnam War, JFK’s successor saved his posterity in extremis. To remain in history as the courageous transitional president who regenerated democracy, Joe Biden must follow the example of “LBJ”. It is in his own interest. It is also ours.