What Could Make Biden Drop Out?

Democrats need to confront their candidate problem head-on.

President Joe Biden was in Camp David with his family over the weekend, where they spent some time getting some family portraits with famed photog Annie Liebovitz. Hopefully it was a nice respite from the rest of the weekend, which the Bidens spent trying to tamp down calls for him to suspend his campaign after Thursday’s debate clunker.

Most elected officials within the party are making it clear they’ve still got Biden’s back.

But a host of prominent Democrats are sounding the alarm bells. Perhaps the most prominent: Rep. Jamie Raskin, who told MSNBC Sunday that “there was a big problem with Joe Biden’s debate performance.”

“There are very honest and serious and rigorous conversations taking place at every level of our party,” Raskin said. “One thing I can tell you is that regardless of what President Biden decides, our party is going to be unified . . . He will be the figure that we rally around to move forward and beat the forces of authoritarianism and reaction in the country.”

Down in Mar-a-Lago, a certain someone was spending his post-debate afterglow daydreaming about what getting power back might mean for him. On Sunday afternoon, Donald Trump reposted a meme saying former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney was “guilty of treason” and calling for “televised military tribunals.”

Oh, and the Supreme Court is giving its ruling on whether he is entitled to “presidential immunity” today. Happy Monday.

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Will Joe go—and what might make him pull the trigger? Our new managing editor Sam Stein throws it back to an earlier time Biden faced a similar decision:

(Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images.)

The Ghost of Bork

After a weekend of stewing, the abject panic over that Biden debate performance has largely morphed into a single question: At what point would he leave the race, if ever?

We are not there yet, according to reports from the New York Times and Politico. But we do actually know what factors would compel Biden to quit. After all, he’s revealed them before.

In his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep, Biden recounted how his 1988 White House run became fatally upended by revelations he’d plagiarized from the former leader of the U.K.’s Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, and exaggerated his academic credentials. The process that followed rings familiar.

Biden talked to top advisers and friendly lawmakers. But, he wrote, “it really came down to family.” His sons, Beau and Hunter, “were afraid I might walk away from public life, fold up my tents, and call it a career.” His mother, by contrast, said it was “time to get out.”

When he talked to Jill, it got more interesting.

“Once we were alone,” Biden writes, “the question we asked was simple. Could we save my presidential campaign and stop Bork? And which was the most important?”

Bork is, of course, Robert Bork, whose nomination for the Supreme Court was before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Biden was chairing at the time. Biden doesn’t explicitly say it in his memoir, but he leaves the clear impression that he and Jill decided Bork could not be stopped with him in the race. He drove to Washington the next morning where he announced the end of his campaign. “We had a Bork briefing to do,” he wrote.

Thirty-six years later, Biden is once again conferring with family about whether to keep a White House bid going. It’s assumed those conversations are sacrosanct. Maybe so. But it’s also likely he’s grappling with the same question as back then: Can he save his presidential campaign and stop Trump? And which is the most important?

—Sam Stein

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Under the Gaslight

Professional Democrats have split over how to respond to Biden’s debate performance. While many are calling for a shakeup to the ticket, others are insisting things are fine—that the only real danger is the “bedwetters” losing their confidence in the top of the ticket.

Some of the arguments this latter coalition is putting forward are . . . interesting. It was just one bad night! Obama and Reagan had bad debates too! Biden had a good event the next day! Only white guys are worried about Biden’s age!

Tim goes chapter and verse on these arguments in a must-read piece for the site today. Here he is, for instance, on that last point:

Only White men are worried about Biden’s age!

This doozy was all over the internet this weekend, including in this post by Jen Rubin.

If only it were true! We have dedicated hours of conversations on The Bulwark Podcast and in Sarah Longwell’s focus groups talking with black and Hispanic voter experts and actual voters about why Biden is underperforming his 2020 share with those demographics. The same research and conversations have been featured on Astead Herndon’s The Run Up and Jon Favreau’s The Wilderness.

Time and again in these conversations two themes come up: inflation and Biden’s age.

And that was before Thursday!

The latest polling data reinforces this long-held worry for Team Biden. In the CBS poll 47 percent of black voters said they were concerned about Biden’s cognitive health.

Does that mean Donald Trump is going to win black voters? Of course not. Does it mean Joe Biden is losing ground from 2020? Absolutely. It’s showing up in all the numbers. And the bigger threat, in the words of Bakari Sellers and Charlamagne tha God, might not be black voters going to Trump, but staying on the couch.

“Determining whether Biden is, at this juncture, the best bet for defeating the Trumpian menace requires honesty,” Tim writes. “Solving a problem requires first admitting there is one. And that requires dispensing with the current torrent of BS spin.”

I can’t stress it enough: If you’re tempted to sneer off the “bedwetters,” you owe it to yourself to go read the whole thing.

And I’d just add one point of my own: If the stay-the-course crowd were really as chilled-out and stress-free about the whole thing as they say they are, would they really be reaching for panic-button arguments like silence, white man?

—Andrew Egger

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No reprieve from the grim tidings today, unfortunately. Alarm bells are going off for Will Selber, who writes that a number of reports over the past week underscored the growing possibility of a domestic terror attack within the year:

ISIS Still Has Teeth

On June 25, NBC News reported that the Department of Homeland Security identified 400 immigrants from across Central Asia who crossed the southern border using Islamic State-affiliated smuggling networks. While nearly 150 of these individuals have been detained, the location of many others remains unknown.

FBI Director Christopher Wray likely had this smuggling network in mind when he testified to Congress back in March about a “particular network” with “ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about.”

This news comes on the heels of an early June arrest of eight Tajiks by federal authorities in New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. The New York Times reported that authorities were closely monitoring these individuals, but fears of an imminent attack triggered their arrests.

Although these arrests are not tied to the ISIS-affiliated smuggling network, they highlight the newfound risks emerging from Central Asia, which has become a fertile recruiting ground for extremists. In late March, an Islamic State branch based in Afghanistan launched a devastating attack by Tajik operatives in Moscow.

In the wake of the NBC report, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hastened to reassure the public. During testimony before Congress Wednesday, DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Kenneth Wainstein stated that there “was not information” that any of the 400 immigrants were Islamic State operatives. And Homeland Security Advisor Jen Daskal told reporters Wednesday that DHS had “enhanced our screening and vetting, instituted recurrent vetting of migrants to identify newly uncovered threats and detain those who pose a public safety threat.”

Behind the scenes, however, federal law enforcement is scrambling. According to a mid-level DoD official who asked for anonymity to discuss these cases, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has asked the Department of Defense to provide linguists with Top-Secret clearance to help the FBI translate texts and audio in Philadelphia. The official described the request as “an immense need” and said the FBI needed linguists who could speak Tajik, Russian, Uzbek, Pashto, Dari, Farsi, Turkish, and Urdu. The sooner, the better.

Moreover, according to an early June DHS inspector general report, DHS still needs to improve its screening methods for asylum seekers and noncitizens applying for admission, stating that “the USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) did not always complete timely screenings” for 400,000 applicants between 2017 and 2023.

Over the last six months, the Islamic State has conducted successful attacks in Russia, Afghanistan (against the Taliban), Iran, and Turkey. There’s also some reason to believe ISIS may have carried out or inspired the attack that left 20 people dead in the Russian province of Dagestan last week, although no group has yet claimed direct responsibility.

While it’s good to see the Biden administration knocking down bureaucratic walls, they will need to start taking the fight to the Islamic State again in Iraq, Afghanistan, and West Africa. But that will be exceedingly difficult due to the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan and the loss of bases in Africa.

—Will Selber

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Catching up . . .

• Biden’s family tells him to keep fighting as they huddle at Camp David: New York Times

• The road to a crisis: How Democrats let Biden glide to renomination: New York Times

• Whitmer disavows ‘Draft Gretch’ movement—and delivers a warning to Biden: Politico

• Supreme Court to rule on Trump immunity, social media laws: Washington Post

• Far right leads first round of France’s parliamentary election in blow to Macron: CNN

• For Ukraine and Russia, a deadly summer lies ahead with little hope of big gains: Wall Street Journal

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Cheap Shots

We mentioned this already, but it bears repeating. These are the stakes:

On the bright side: