The bind Biden's Democrats are in

This past week has been rather good for Donald Trump. By performing badly in the debate organised by CNN, President Joe Biden convinced many around America why he might not be the best man to be in the White House for the next four years. His forgetfulness, his lisping and his clear inability to reach the end of sentences have now led to a situation where Trump may end up regaining the White House in November.
And that is not all. The US Supreme Court, packed as it is with arch conservatives, has now ruled that Trump enjoys immunity of a sort over his actions as President between 2017 and 2021. The court, in a judgement on Trump's argument that as President he could not be prosecuted for anything that he did as President, has made it known that the former President has immunity for official acts but is not immune for unofficial acts. The difference is not clear and the court has not spelt out what the judgement means.
But that the verdict is a triumph of sorts for Trump is beyond denying. Now the sentencing in the hush money case, where he was recently declared guilty, has been deferred. He and his supporters are in upbeat mood and may already be planning what they will do once Biden is defeated in November. For many Americans and certainly for the wider world, the prospect of Donald Trump making a comeback to the presidency is horrifying. The reasons hardly need to be listed here again. Suffice it to say, though, that a second Trump presidency will be a repeat of the chaos he created and presided over in his first term.
Which brings one to the issue of what the Democrats now mean to do about Joe Biden. Leading figures in the party, appalled by his disastrous performance in the debate with Trump, have off the record been urging that he call it a day and stand aside from presidential contention and make way for a candidate who will be able to give Trump a good run for his money and prevent the cantankerous Republican from returning to the White House. Neither Biden nor his family are yet ready to believe that his presence on the Democratic ticket could spell disaster not only for him but also for Democrats looking to gain or preserve seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The pressure grows on Biden to withdraw. For the President, it would have been a far better option to bow out after a single term in the White House and leave the field open for younger politicians to engage in a battle for the White House this year. Indeed, when Biden was elected in 2020, the expectation was that he would not go for a second term. He was old and even a single term would be a hard exercise for him. The hope among many Democrats and America watchers at the time was that Vice President Kamala Harris would be the Democratic nominee for President in 2024. In these past four years, Harris certainly waited patiently for that moment. The moment did not come.
Biden's problem with the CNN debate was not that he had no ideas to offer. He was in fact far ahead of Trump in an enumeration of the record of his presidency. Trump's statements, as fact-checking showed after the debate, were a litany of lies, as many as thirty in total. Besides, Trump was all bitterness in the debate, in addition to being downright insulting to the President. The debate was a reminder for everyone that Trump had changed not a bit in the past many years. He was insulting to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to Biden in 2020. His reputation as a man unfit for the presidency has persisted.
For Biden, gaining the presidency in 2020 was a moment relished by decent folks all around the world. It was a sign, as Biden himself told his fellow western leaders, that America was back. He meant to restore decency in American politics and reassure Washington's allies that foreign policy would return to the values America had always espoused in line with the views of Europe. Tellingly, however, when Biden told his fellow leaders that America was back, they asked him, 'for how long?' No one at that point imagined that the defeated Trump would continue to loom large in politics, that circumstances hinting at his return would shape up only four years later.
Biden could have definitively blocked Trump's probable path back to power with a robust performance at the debate. He was unable to call forth the energy to do that. Often during the debate, he appeared dazed. Trump mocked him at a certain point by stating he did not know what Biden was saying and even if Biden himself knew what he had said. It was a debate where Trump should have been on the defensive. His malignant role on 6 January 2021, his long campaign to have courts all over the country accept his false arguments that he had beaten Biden at the 2020 election, his paying hush money to a porn star to have her silence at the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton are areas where Biden could have made the former President perspire.
None of that happened. It is now for Democrats to decide how best to guarantee that Donald Trump is kept from winning the November election. They can frankly let Biden know, in discussions with him, that he needs to move aside if Democrats are not to take a beating in November. Biden will certainly recall Lyndon Johnson's decision to take himself out of contention for a second term in the White House in 1968 owing to the gathering protests over his conduct of the Vietnam War. He will also remember how senior Republican politicians visited the White House in August 1974 to convince President Richard Nixon that he had to resign unless he wished to be impeached and prosecuted over Watergate. Both Johnson and Nixon stepped aside so that their parties would not go down with them.
Biden now needs to take a long, hard look at himself. He has done a good job as President in these four years. As a man who has had his share of personal tragedy --- he lost his first wife and daughter in a road crash in 1972, he saw his elder son Beau, having served as a soldier, die later of brain cancer, his second son Hunter now convicted of criminal acts --- Biden is a survivor. His first attempt to seek the presidency in the 1980s ended when it was revealed that his speeches had been plagiarised from other prominent Americans.
As the influential New York Times has bluntly stated, Joe Biden needs to go. Democrats ought now to choose from among Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer and Kamala Harris the candidate who can beat Donald Trump in November.
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