The Biggest Reason for Biden to Step Aside Now Is Not Really Even Age (2024)

The Thursday evening debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was one of the most painful two hours of television in living memory. It was so bad, especially for the sitting president, that an idea that was largely marginal as late as last week is now coming into the mainstream: Maybe the Democratic Party needs to replace Joe Biden on the 2024 ticket.

Whether Biden would actually agree to step aside, especially this late in the game, is a separate question; so is the wisdom of such a plan, which would be hugely disruptive and almost certainly result in mass Democratic infighting. But whatever happens in public, this debate was a pivotal moment, almost surely, for Biden and his campaign, in private. He is, by nearly all accounts, a thoroughly honest, decent person who, like any politician, doesn’t always make the right policy calls but moves through the world with empathy and treats those around him with kindness. One has to imagine that he walked off that debate stage devastated and disappointed in himself—or perhaps, that will be his reaction in the coming days.

The debate was so catastrophic that it’s hard to pinpoint one worst moment, but Biden’s answer on abortion rights—which should have been an easy win for him, given that it’s one issue where Democrats have a huge advantage—may have been his most egregious. Trump told a series of outright lies, including that the Supreme Court “approved the abortion pill” (it did not), that “the country is now coming together on this issue” (it is not, except insofar that it’s coming together in favor of abortion rights), and that Democrats support abortion not only up until the moment of birth, but afterward (they do not, and “abortion” after the moment of birth is already a crime called “murder”). Biden should have been able to efficiently knock those lies down, and then turn the terms of the debate back to where they actually sit: Republican-run states passing hugely unpopular abortion bans that have left pregnant women bleeding out and losing internal organs; Republicans trying to block voters from actually deciding for themselves whether abortions should be legal in their states; Republicans in Congress refusing to protect contraception or IVF when given the chance to vote on both; and Republicans pledging to pass a national abortion ban, which they are confident President Donald Trump will sign if he gets back into office.

Americans are incredibly receptive to the argument that abortion rights are about personal freedoms, and that abortion bans have disastrous consequences. But Biden was unable to articulate any of that. He gave a rambling answer about supporting Roe v. Wade’s three-trimester framework, which he then failed to actually articulate. His long-standing allergy to saying the word abortion tripped him up; as the already-digressive president tried to steer himself away from the A-word, he wound up not saying much at all. He also repeatedly emphasized that abortion should be a doctor’s decision, a stunningly condescending and patriarchal argument about an issue that almost entirely affects women, in a moment when it’s female voters who are largely driving pro-choice support to Biden’s campaign. And later, he bizarrely brought up the issue of undocumented immigrants murdering young women, something Trump has used again and again in his campaign to paint the Biden presidency as dangerously soft on the border—turning a question that should have been an easy victory into an opening for his opponent to rant about his favorite pet issue.

Biden’s struggles to answer the abortion questions were, in many ways, part of his struggles to answer many different questions throughout the evening: the result of inarticulateness that may be from being ill, or being tired, or age-related physical or even cognitive decline. But his struggles to answer the abortion question also seemed to reflect a general disengagement on the issue, and a genuine lack of knowledge. When Biden answered questions about foreign policy, for example, his responses were not exactly eloquent, but their lack of coherence stemmed from the fact that he seemed to be stringing a series of deep-in-the-weeds factual observations together, interrupting each thought partway through to add a new one; it was too much all mashed together, a sign that a lot of information on these issues is living in his brain, but he delivered it extremely poorly. On abortion, he just didn’t really seem to know his stuff—which made him unable to smack down Trump’s most egregious lies.

Biden has been a very good president. But he has never been particularly good on abortion rights. He is a pretty bad campaigner and has gotten much worse this time around. He has a tough race against Trump, and abortion rights are uniquely helpful to Democrats at a moment when voters are angry about immigration, the economy, and a host of other issues. That Biden bungled even his party’s strongest issue should be a moment of reckoning—not just for his supporters, of which I am one, but for the man himself.

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