Biden was not selfless, he grudgingly accepted reality

Timothy Snyder hailed Biden as "humanly magnificent and morally extraordinary", a staggeringly sycophantic reframing of the president's eventual withdrawal

Let me start by making one thing clear. I have enormous respect for Professor Timothy Snyder, a formidable historian and gifted scholar of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He speaks five languages and reads 10, has published a dozen books and won prizes around the world. Snyder is, unquestionably, a great public intellectual.

I also cannot abide cant and sycophancy. Which meant that I gnashed my teeth in anger when I read a message Snyder tweeted on Friday about President Biden’s decision to withdraw from November’s presidential election and allow the Democratic Party to select a new candidate. I’ve read the tweet a dozen times in the hope it’s ironic or satirical, so crassly fawning is it, but I fear I can’t detect anything but cloying, sentimental sincerity.

What POTUS did last Sunday was humanly magnificent and morally extraordinary. And it was also spectacularly strategic. Years from now historians will be searching for words to describe the Biden benediction.

This is nonsense, and it is grotesque nonsense.

There have been credible reasons to suspect, for some time now, that Joe Biden’s mental acuity is not what it once was, which is hardly surprising for a man of 81. Yes, the issue has been exploited by Donald Trump and the Republican Party as a partisan attack line, but that does not ipso facto make it false. I am easily persuadable that Biden’s cognitive decline has been pronounced since his inauguration on 20 January 2021, and it is worth remembering that Biden let those who wanted to, without making an explicit announcement, believe that he would only serve one term, then step aside for a successor.

Even at the start of his presidency, he was 78 years old, nearly a decade older than the previous oldest starters in the White House, Donald Trump (70 in 2017), Ronald Reagan (69 in 1981) and William Henry Harrison (68 in 1841). The bizarre, unpredictable soup of Donald Trump’s mind is sui generis, but we now know that some observers saw what they believed to be early signs of dementia in President Reagan in 1986. (Harrison, the shortest serving president, died a month into his term so we can draw no conclusions.) It is true that Biden suffered from a stammer as a child, and it can still sometimes affect his articulacy, and it is also true that in his long political career he was never particularly noted as an effective or fluent orator.

Nevertheless, it is simply not credible to deny that there have been no causes for concern about his cognitive abilities. Since at least 2023, White House staff have, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, “aggressively stage-managed” the president’s schedule, with claims that almost all of his public engagements take place between 10.00 am and 4.00 pm on weekdays. This is entirely understandable, in the abstract, for a man in his ninth decade; whether such accommodations should be made to suit the current incumbent of the presidency of the United States is another matter.

It is not necessary to rehearse Biden’s every public slip and fumble here. In February, Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that the president had “wilfully retained and disclosed classified materials” but would not face charges, and described him as appearing to be an “elderly man with a poor memory”. The first presidential debate against Donald Trump in Atlanta on 27 June was a disaster, as we know, Biden repeatedly losing his train of thought and struggling for words. Then on 11 July he gave a press conference at the conclusion of the NATO summit in Washington, in which he mistakenly referred to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine as “President Putin” and Vice-President Kamala Harris as “Vice-President Trump”.

None of these incidents prove that Joe Biden is cognitively unfit to be president or to stand for re-election. Taken together, however, they are certainly enough to entitle anyone, Republican, Democrat or independent, to ask the question. The presidency is more than a full-time job, the most demanding, stressful and important role in the world, and it cannot adequately be performed part-time. I argued in The Hill a few weeks ago that November’s presidential campaign was in a way irrelevant, because there was enough evidence to cast doubt over Biden’s fitness to execute his office even for the remaining few months of this year.

Absurd excuses were posited for his unsteady debate performance: he had a cold, he was jet-lagged. Gruesomely patronising footage emerged of a post-debate event at which the First Lady, Jill Biden, congratulated her husband for doing “such a great job. You answered every question.” While many senior members of the Democratic establishment vehemently, sometimes implausibly, defended the president’s performance and asserted his fitness to ask for, and to serve, another four years in the White House, there had been a shift, and voices started to be raised in concern, broaching the question of whether Biden should, indeed, be the party’s nominee in November. David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, admitted that the debate had “confirmed people’s fears”, while an anonymous Democratic congressman said “This was a disaster. Biden’s team needs to convince him to withdraw and have an open convention.”

Perhaps it was inevitable after that. Rep. Jared Huffman of California and Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio admitted uncertainty over Biden’s candidacy, while Rep. Jared Golden of Maine and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington stated they believed the president would lose in November. Democratic election legend James Carville said two days later that he thought Biden would not be on the party’s ticket in November, and on 2 July, only five days after the debate, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas was the first Democratic member of Congress to say explicitly that Biden should step aside.

The president himself remained insistent that he would remain his party’s candidate. On 5 July, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News, he insisted he was subjected to a cognitive test every day, and added, “You know, not only am I campaigning, but I’m running the world”. He said there were “no indications of any serious condition”. Three days later, in a bizarre twist, he called in to MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, and was clearly angry.

I’m getting so frustrated by the elites… the elites in the party, ‘Oh, they know so much more.’ Any of these guys that don’t think I should run, run against me. Announce for president, challenge me at the convention.

It was increasingly an untenable situation. On 21 July, despite his previous insistence, Biden suddenly announced that he would not, in fact, continue as the Democratic candidate, but would step aside and allow the party to choose a replacement. Shortly afterwards, he endorsed the vice-president, Kamala Harris, as the prospective nominee.

I dwell on this because the last five weeks did not show Joe Biden to be, in Snyder’s words, “humanly magnificent and morally extraordinary”. It showed quite the opposite, an aggressive and increasingly petulant old man dismissing the valid and understandable concerns of his colleagues about his cognitive abilities. Biden seemed, firstly, to be determined to hang on to the nomination under any circumstances, and, secondly, to be relying on a tightly knit circle of advisers dominated by the First Lady. It took four weeks of increasingly public debate and anxiety in the Democratic Party for him to recognise the simple political and electoral hazard of a candidate who would turn 82 a fortnight after the election and who frequently misspoke, confused words and names and lost his train of thought.

Don’t get me wrong. Joe Biden clearly made the right decision. His path to victory in November was becoming narrower and narrower, and, while Kamala Harris’s putative candidacy has potential flaws, it has shaken up the election, breathed new life into the Democrats and forced the Republicans to recalibrate their strategy. The president’s withdrawal has also neatly flipped the age issue so that Donald Trump, who recently celebrated his 78th birthday, is now the oldest candidate for president in American history. That is not to say that he will not still win, but the odds have shortened.

But to reframe Biden’s eventual acceptance of political and electoral reality as some extraordinary act of grace and moral selflessness is ridiculous. Worse, it is so patently ridiculous that it calls into question the other opinions of the person making the observation, and in Snyder’s case that is a great shame. Donald Trump is a liar, a cheat, a boor, a charlatan and an aspirant dictator. That does not automatically mean that his opponent, or former opponent, is imbued with saintly qualities, because that is not how public life works. I have no particular interest in condemning President Biden’s character, and the manner of his leaving the Democratic Party’s candidacy will soon be forgotten. The fawning cant of making Biden into an idol is unnecessary, however, and it perpetuates a public sense of disconnection between what they see and know to be true, and what commentators tell them has happened. Truth and realism in politics are essential qualities.