Opinion: Michael Ian Black: This Is a Biden Emergency—He Needs to Exit the Race

Last week, I made the single worst prediction of my short career as a political commentator, declaring in my weekly Daily Beast column that “My mind is made up. Your mind is made up. One of these guys is going to be president next year, but this debate isn’t going to be determinative unless one of them does something really stupid or dies.”

Well, Joe Biden didn’t do anything stupid and he didn’t die (although I might ask for a second opinion on that point), but the first, and likely only, presidential debate of 2024 may very well go down as the single most determinative event of the campaign. Why? Because, for Gampy Joe, this debate was about a single, fundamental question: Is he competent and capable enough to serve another four years?

The answer: No.

No.

I’ll say it again: No.

Michael Ian Black: We Know the Debate Is Total Bullshit, but We’ll Watch Anyway

I don’t care that Trump lied. Trump always lies. His lies are baked into his candidacy, as well as his own incompetence and corruption. If anything, Trump was the best possible version of Trump last Thursday, keeping his bellicosity and flights of inane rhetorical fancy to a minimum while still unleashing his usual unchecked diarrhetic river of bullshit. And before anybody asks, fuck that fucking fascist blowhard. He will never—never—get my vote. But for those who don’t feel their skin crawling, as I do, whenever he befouls my television screen, it was simply Trump being Trump.

But this wasn’t Biden being Biden, or at least the Biden we were reassured is still “sharp as a tack.” For many Americans, this was the longest we’ve seen an unscripted Biden in years. The White House has been steering him away from press conferences and long interviews, a tactic which many found disquieting before the debate, but which now seems like political malpractice. Not for Biden, for the country.

The White House said Biden still had a cold, Tuesday. The same day, as The Daily Beast reported, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called for Biden’s ouster from the 2024 presidential ticket, calling his mental fitness a “legitimate question.”

Her comments, in an interview with MSNBC, came hours before Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) became the first sitting Democratic lawmaker to call for Biden to bow out of the presidential race. He was quickly followed by Adam Frisch, a Democratic House candidate in Colorado, who echoed the call.

Tim Ryan, who’s running for Senate in Ohio as a Democrat, posted to X that “we have to rip the band aid off” and start backing Kamala Harris for president.

Why are these people (sadly) right? The man we saw on Thursday is not the same man who ran for president four years ago. That guy was pretty fucking old, too, but he bore no resemblance to the cut-rate wax sculpture I saw attempting, and failing, to string a paragraph together. That Joe Biden is somebody I’ve never met, and somebody I would be nervous about leaving unattended in front of a microwave oven, let alone the nuclear football.

Is he surrounded by a loyal and competent staff? No doubt. And guess what? I don’t care. I’m not voting for Ron Klain to be President of the United States. I’m not voting for any of the vaunted Biden brain trust. My vote for Joe Biden last time was intended to be for Joe Biden. This time around, I expect the same, to cast my vote for President of the United States for the person who is actually going to be President of the United States.

How do I do that with any confidence at all?

Was the debate a “one-off,” as his allies were saying? Or was it another sign of deterioration? Watergate journalist and fellow octogenarian commented on CNN last night that, “People I’ve talked to have all been to Ron Klain and said, ‘We have a problem. We have a problem such as we saw the other night.’”

Oh really? There’s a problem with Biden’s age. As I joked on Twitter, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure he’ll be younger in a few months.

Did Biden, as we were idiotically assured during the debate, have a cold? Was he up too late? Was it just an anomaly? I don’t care. What reassurances do any of us have that that guy—the guy with the cold—isn’t the guy running the country right now? And what reassurances do we have that that guy, currently trailing Trump in most polls, has any shot of defeating him in November?

The one time I went skydiving, I learned about the importance of redundancy. A skydiver’s main chute is meant to be deployed manually. If, for some reason, the skydiver does not deploy, the chute will automatically unfurl when the altimeter each skydiver wears registers a certain elevation. If, for some reason, that doesn’t happen, the skydiver can deploy their emergency chute. Again, if some reason, the secondary chute doesn’t deploy, it will also automatically deploy when the altimeter reaches a second, scarier elevation. In other words, there is a Plan B, C, and D.

Last Thursday, America’s main parachute failed to deploy. That main chute was a competent and capable President of the United States defending his record and illustrating the threat posed by a second Trump administration. Biden failed to do that. Worse, he appeared unable to do that. Within three minutes of the debate’s start, I tweeted, “Joe just froze. Debate over.”

It only got worse from there.

And so now I’m supposed to just blithely pretend that, in the most critical stages of the presidential election, the Joe Biden of old is suddenly going to pop out a cake yelling, “Malarkey”? No. Democrats can accuse the Republicans of being in a cult, but if we ignore the evidence from last Thursday night, how are we any different?

How are we any different than Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr who declared Trump unfit for the office of the presidency in one breath while vowing to vote for him with the other because the threat of a Biden presidency is greater to him than the threat of an unfit Trump presidency? Is this the manner the Democratic Party wants to reduce itself? Do we want to be more like the MAGA folks?

I don’t.

Over the weekend, the Biden family huddled with advisors at Camp David to discuss what to do. That meeting, apparently, changed nothing. By all accounts, and with full-throated support of his family, Biden has decided to press ahead. That was Plan B.

It just failed, too.

So now we’re onto Plan C, the emergency chute.

He has to go. For those who want to recoil from that demand, consider the next several months on the campaign trail. Trump will continue to hold his Nuremburg style rallies, in which every deeply idiotic thought popping into his Big Mac addled brain will find expression in the tortured syntax of the very stable genius. His people will lap it up and he will continue to solidify his support.

Where will Biden be? Will Biden be entrusted to get in front of people, unscripted, answering tough questions from voters? Will he do this day after day after day, proving to those of us in desperate search for some positive augury that the Biden we saw on Thursday had been roofied or something? No. No, he won’t be out there doing exactly that because he can’t be trusted to do it.

Yes, aides apparently told Axios that Biden is “dependably engaged” from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Forgive me if that doesn’t make me feel a whole helluva lot better. I know presidents sometimes keep bankers’ hours, but there are days—many days, I imagine—when we need a POTUS dependably engaged even after Wheel of Fortune is over. Even Pat fucking Sajak knew it was time to get out while the getting was good. We don’t hire part-time presidents for good reason; it’s a full-fucking-time job.

So how does the 10-6 schedule translate to the campaign trail, where even five days later, he has yet to stand in front of a crowd to take their questions, let alone standing in front of a hostile press? The longer he avoids that necessity, the longer it allows columns exactly like this one to continue to be run.

And what happens when the White House finally gets the message? What happens they finally trot his old ass out in front of the people? What happens when he freezes again? Or stumbles? Or, God forbid, trips over another sandbag? Each gaffe, each stutter and miscue will now be exponentially magnified. What might have been brushed off before is now evidence Republicans will use to build the case that Biden is unfit to serve.

Pull the emergency chute. I don’t care if it’s messy. I don’t care if it’s ugly. If the stakes of the election are as existential as we are told to believe, then he has to go. Because every mistake from this moment forward only furthers the narrative that he’s no longer up for the job. And every time his allies make excuses for him, they will sound more and more hollow.

The Republicans have now effectively and decisively seized control of the election narrative: Trump gave you a good economy and peace. Biden gave you war and himself dementia. That’s where we’re at. I’m sorry if readers don’t like it and I’m sorry if they disagree. That’s the narrative. Can it change? Of course. But will concerns about Biden’s age evaporate? No, stupid. They will only grow worse. As they should. Because, he’s too fucking old.

The reason parachutes sometimes deploy by themselves if a skydiver fails to do it is because people cannot be trusted to always act in the best self-interests. Sometimes a stronger hand needs to step in and save people from their destructive tendencies. That’s where we’re at in the current presidential race. Somebody has to seize control and pull the fucking emergency ripcord before it’s too late. Hell, after this week’s Supreme Court rulings, it might already be too late, and now we’re just in the final processes of watching America go splat.

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