US President Joe Biden should not have sought reelection to begin with, but his staff are to blame for concealing his infirmity until they could no longer do so, the Washington Post editorial board has said.
The Post made the statement in an editorial on Tuesday, which praised Biden’s “profoundly selfless decision” to drop out of the race and let the Democrats replace him with Kamala Harris.
“In retrospect, Mr Biden should not have sought reelection. The June 27 debate was worse than just a bad night, as the president maintained afterward. The 81-year-old had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his inner circle worked to conceal his decline,” the Post editors wrote.
The US would have been better off, they argued, had he bowed out after the “surprisingly good showing” of the Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Had he stayed in the race, they continued, “a diminished Mr Biden, at the head of a dispirited party, would likely have lost in November.”
According to the Post, Biden “deserves recognition” for surrendering power and giving a chance to a new generation of leaders, “albeit via internal party machinations rather than the ballot box.”
Biden may have exited the race but he remains president through January, the outlet noted, and the Democrats’ platform still promises “a second Biden term,” mentioning him 287 times over its 92 pages, while Harris is brought up only 32 times.
The oldest-ever US president at inauguration, Biden was already dogged by claims of senility and dementia during the 2020 campaign. His physical and cognitive decline has only grown while in office, only to be dismissed by White House staff – and most of the legacy media – as the remnants of a childhood stutter.
The president was “sharp as a tack,” his supporters continued to argue even after the June 27 debate. Biden vowed that only God could make him quit. In mid-July, however, he was flown out of Las Vegas to his Delaware home, reportedly with Covid-19.
At the end of that week, a letter posted on his personal X (formerly Twitter) account announced his exit from the presidential race. In a follow-up post, the same account endorsed Harris as Biden’s replacement. Insider sources credited former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, for this turn of events.
“They staged a coup against the president of the United States,” former president and current Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, told Fox News in early August. “It’s like you’re in a fight with somebody, and you’re really winning, and they take him out and they put somebody else in,” he continued. “Nobody ever heard of this before. This is a coup.”