Joe Biden’s re-election campaign ended on Sunday when, ill with Covid and surrounded only by family members and closest advisers at his holiday home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, he sent a brief statement on social media telling the world he had made up his mind. withdraw from the 2024 Democratic party ticket.
In the three weeks since the disaster happened on the debate stage in Atlanta, the 81-year-old president is struggling to convince his party and the American public that he is not only fit and ready to fight Donald Trump again, but to serve another four years in the White House.
But no matter how hard he tries to persuade worried lawmakers on Capitol Hill or what tone he takes in interviews, the gaffes keep coming, including the embarrassing moment at a NATO summit where he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “President Putin”.
While many Democrats have come forward publicly and privately to ask him to “pass the torch”, Biden appears to be increasingly isolated, confiding in only his most trusted advisers.
Trump’s assassination attempt followed by the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee provided a brief interruption but, in the middle of the interruption, Biden was attacked with Covid while campaigning in Las Vegas, forcing him to go into seclusion.
There, recuperating at a Delaware beach retreat with only his wife, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, for company, Biden finally received the number.
The decision to quit “happened in the last 48 hours,” an unnamed senior aide told CNN late Sunday, as the president took calls to help his closest aides and family members over the weekend.
The exit plan was first seriously discussed on Saturday night and continued on Sunday morning.
In the end, it was the polling data, not concerns about mental acuity or other health conditions, that made them come up with the method, another aide told the network.
Biden insisted at the NATO “big boy” press conference that only convincing polls could change his mind about staying in the race, a problem former House speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly pushed him, warning that he had no path to victory. and risked taking the House and Senate down with him if he stumbles on to Election Day.
White House adviser Steve Ricchetti, senior campaign adviser Mike Donilon, deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini and senior adviser to the first lady Anthony Bernal all joined the Bidens at their vacation home over the weekend and it ultimately fell to them to make it clear. a president who has no way to return from the abyss.
“The poll numbers he got recently are too bad for him,” the adviser said Washington Postadding that the pressure from Biden’s Democratic lawmakers, as well as sympathetic party donors, strategists, activists, celebrities and media pundits is simply too great to ignore.
“They want to stop the bleeding, to give them time to think about what they want to say… Every day there are new people.”
It has all taken a personal toll on the lifelong Democrat, public servant for more than half a century. So Joe Biden finally accepted his fate as someone who felt “betrayed and bullied” by someone he considered a friend, an insider said.
Biden held a family meeting on Saturday night and his daughter Ashley and son-in-law Howard drove to Rehoboth on Sunday to join him.
Afterwards, Biden called key players in his administration, including Vice President Kamala Harris, and other absent family members.
Biden also made separate calls to chief of staff Jeff Zients and campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon to inform them of his decision.
Just two days earlier, the latter appeared on MSNBC Morning Joe to announce that his boss would “absolutely” stay in the race.
Only 107 days before the presidential election, other assistants, including communications adviser Anita Dunn, had to find out the important news that Biden would not be the party’s 2024 candidate after all the same way as the American people: in the post on X.
Back in Washington DC, Ziets presided over a call with the president’s Cabinet and with senior White House staff that evening, before the public announcement was made, with Biden himself joining in to tell him privately that he was abandoning his dream of re-election.
According to PostZients then wrote an email to the entire White House team shortly after 2:26 p.m.
Read: “There’s more to be done — and as President Biden said, ‘There’s nothing America can’t do — if we do it together.'”