Now that the first debate for the 2024 general election has put to rest any doubts about the need to remove President Biden as the Democratic nominee, we will hear many serious liberals arguing for his removal primarily as a means to defeat Donald Trump. President Biden should go, the argument will go, because he will lose the election and only another Democrat can save the country from Trump's misrule.
This is a necessary argument for its intended audience: Americans who fear Trump more than anything else, and Democrats who are driven by partisan self-interest. There is no doubt that endorsing Biden now is Trump's best chance of an easy win, better than nominating Kamala Harris, who may be a terrible candidate but is better than her boss at this point. There is no doubt that endorsing Biden would be a grave omission if you believe that America needs to be saved from Trumpism 2.0.
But it's important to emphasize, especially for those of us who are not Democrats, that declining Biden's nomination is essential not only if we want to avoid Trump's reelection, but also if we want to protect the country from Biden's reelection — from a situation in which Biden's apparent decline would endanger the country he nominally leads.
So if a genie or a fairy appeared before Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Jill Biden and gave them a prophecy that Biden would somehow beat Trump, then the prospect of four more years of Biden as president should be enough to compel some serious action now.
The frequent analogies here to figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg don't go far enough: her long tenure was a sin against her own liberal ideals, and the appointment of her successor by a Republican president seriously undermined those ideals. But the decline of a Supreme Court justice is more manageable and less dangerous to both the Court and the country than the decline of a U.S. president.
To be sure, presidential advisers and cabinet members can assume some of the CEO's fading duties. But they are not legal advisers drafting opinions on leisurely timescales. Their boss sits at the center of a global network of alliances, commands the world's most powerful military, including a vast nuclear deterrent, and is responsible for preserving Pax Americana, a country currently threatened by an alliance of revisionist powers. A leaderless superpower in a destabilizing world — an empty ship — in the Oval Office would put the entire world order at risk.
I made this argument about Trump when unfitness was still a novelty. Before the 2016 election, I warned that his rivals would be eager to test a president with neither experience nor discipline, and that “the president need only be himself to pose a lasting danger to the world.” Early in his term, I worried that catastrophe in the Middle East would be far more likely with “someone who has no idea what he's doing in nearly every aspect of the presidency.”
My warning about the dangers of a presidential vacuum was vindicated to some extent as Trump struggled through the early months of the pandemic. But the geopolitical challenges were fortunately less severe, and Trump went on to seek a more effective foreign policy than I had expected. Biden defenders today might argue that Trump's first term shows that the American empire can survive an inept president…
…Under Biden, however, geopolitical challenges have intensified. Many of the choices the administration has made in response have been reasonable, or at least defensible, and his team has done a good job of avoiding harsh presidential constraints. But for the same reasons that Trump’s incompetence seemed likely to create danger, it seems likely that Biden’s decline will itself embolden his opponents, who are partly to blame for the enormity of the challenges we face.
Essentially, Trump's argument in the debate was that the world was more stable under his leadership because he was taken more seriously by his rivals. Whether that's been true in the past few years or not, given what Biden showed the world on Thursday, it will be true if he stays in office until 2028. On this key criterion — the ability to lead a superpower without letting the 25th Amendment dangle in the background — Biden seems no less unqualified than Trump, but no less so.
This reality does not erase Trump's unfitness in other respects, including the stain of January 6. It simply means that a second Biden administration would be extraordinarily dangerous to the country in very specific and significant ways. And replacing him with another Democratic candidate, however difficult that may seem, would protect America not just from the risk of Biden's defeat but also from the grave dangers of his victory.
