STORY. Failed debate, serial slip-ups and withdrawal… A look back at the three weeks that led Joe Biden to say stop

The 2020 rematch will therefore not take place in 2024. While a new Biden-Trump duel was expected for the presidential election in November, Joe Biden announced that he was finally giving up running and supporting his vice-president Kamala Harris. A decision that comes three and a half weeks after his catastrophic debate against Donald Trump.

It was on June 27 that everything began to fall apart for Biden. Live on CNN in Atlanta, the outgoing president gave a calamitous hour and a half of debate. Joe Biden whispered, lost his train of thought, said the opposite of what he wanted to say. Even Donald Trump on the set couldn’t believe it.

The next day, the press lambasted Biden, including those who had always supported him. Morning Joe, MSNBC morning show that Biden watches, asks him to “questioning whether to withdraw”. Tom Friedman, the columnist of New York Times who presents Biden as a friend, writes that “debate [l’]made me cry” and “Biden has no business being in a new election”.

Democratic voters, on the other hand, are devastated. Like Jim, 81 like Biden, who lives in Washington: “It was a disaster. It couldn’t have been worse… I don’t know how he’s going to recover. And I don’t know what to do. They’re saying ‘we’ll find someone else’, but who? It’s very late. I don’t think we have any choice but to find someone else. I don’t see him winning.”

And it is a whole section of the Democratic leaders who are rushing to the president’s aid. Like Barack Obama who is more moderate on X: “A bad debate happens”. However, no one is really convinced by this temporary bad patch: the New York Times then calls on Joe Biden to hand over the reins in a historic editorial. The person concerned responded 24 hours later, at a rally in North Carolina: “I give you my word as Biden. I would not run again if I did not believe with all my heart and soul that I could do this job.”

The following Monday, Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett was the first elected official to publicly call on him to step down. And others wondered out loud, like the former speaker of the House, the influential California Representative Nancy Pelosi, who is very close to Biden. “I think it is legitimate to ask whether this is a simple episode or a lasting state.”. The polls are falling for Biden in several key states, the list of elected officials demanding that he drop out is growing. He writes to them on July 8 that he “stay in the race”that it is “the most qualified for the job”that he already beat Trump in 2020 and will beat him again in November. But party donors are pausing their payments and Hollywood is getting into the debate with George Clooney. The actor writes in the New York Times : “I like Joe Biden, but we need a new candidate.”

Other celebrities will also end up calling for Joe Biden to step down: Stephen King, Michael Douglas, Mia Farrow…

The NATO summit opens the same day in Washington, Biden hopes for a break, but it is missed. He shoots himself twice in the foot a few hours apart in press conferences. He first gives the floor to Volodymyr Zelensky by calling him “President Putin”before recovering, and then talking about Vice President Trump… instead of Kamala Harris.

Two days later, Trump was shot at a rally. Biden regained his presidential stature, called for calm in a brief address to the nation, but the Republican convention in Milwaukee gave him no respite.

It was while recovering from Covid in his house in Delaware that he published two press releases one after the other on Sunday July 21 to announce that he was retiring. “in the interest of the party and the country”and that he brings his “full support for Kamala Harris” to be the Democratic candidate on November 5.