Feeding Frenzy

Biden has been through this before. This time is a little different.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Those sharks Donald Trump is obsessed with? They’re coming for his opponent.

I’ve refrained from discussing the fallout from the presidential debate until enough time passed to get a sense of how things were developing.

When the debate ended, my sense was that Biden’s poor showing would not be a problem for him among those who watched it, because they also saw Donald Trump’s unhinged performance. We had confirmation of this from real-time focus groups and early polling, and it isn’t surprising because the fundamentals of this race have kept things locked in place for some time, and because presidential debates tend to reinforce pre-existing opinions rather than change minds.

But post-debate coverage is a different matter, because it has the potential to create its own reality.

A confluence of events led to a feeding frenzy over Biden’s age. Some Democratic officials and big-dollar donors started to panic at the possibility that Biden isn’t up to taking the fight to Trump in the most important election of our lives. Whatever pent-up concerns Democrats had about Biden’s age fueled the reaction. They started talking to reporters—whose attraction to crisis narratives is beyond irresponsible—and it provided jet fuel for the frenzy. Then things became self-fulfilling, with rumor and innuendo feeding the narrative.

If you’re wondering why we never see anything like this whenever Trump rambles incoherently through his rallies, falls asleep in court—or for that matter, after he was convicted of 34 felonies—it’s because Republican elites keep quiet or defend him. They don’t give the press a story.

And for their part, reporters have shown little interest in genuinely challenging Trump. He is a walking crisis narrative every day, and any threat to his candidacy would mean an end to the clicks he provides. Basic journalistic standards require reporters to press Trump about his cognitive health the same way they are hounding Biden, but we don’t live in an age of journalism. This is reality TV.

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Joe Biden is no stranger to this dynamic.

Those with long memories will recall that Biden was the victim of a feeding frenzy during his first run for president in 1988. That time it was about his ethics and character.

It’s hard to picture Biden at age 44, youthful and energetic, inspiring to some but talkative to the point where his mouth could be his worst enemy. It got him in trouble during the Democratic primaries when he appropriated a quote used by a British politician. That was followed by the revelation that he had failed to cite a published source in a law school paper, which Biden compounded by exaggerating how well he had done in law school.

Each revelation and misstep fueled the frenzy. Reporters had their narrative, and the candidate couldn’t find his way out from under it. His poll numbers started to collapse, and he was driven from the race.

This frenzy is playing out against a different backdrop.

Back then, Biden faced a multi-candidate primary field. Once his support dissipated there was nothing he could do but drop out.

Today, he is the presumptive nominee of his party and the incumbent president. He can be pressured to drop out but it has to be his decision. The nomination is his unless he determines that it is best for his party if he moves on.

But if he is going to remain the nominee he needs to get his party behind him, and he needs to do it quickly. A debate that was supposed to highlight Trump’s cognitive decline instead reinforced the deepest concerns about Biden’s. Those concerns will now be more salient than ever.

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Part of the campaign’s effort to move past the debate was a one-on-one interview Biden gave to ABC News last Friday. It was supposed to reassure wavering Democrats that Biden had the ability to take the fight to Donald Trump.

But if you understand how feeding frenzies work, you could have written the post-interview coverage before it took place.

Biden looked and sounded better than he did at the debate. There were no obvious gaffes. But he faced 20 minutes of questions from George Stephanopoulos about his fitness to serve—really 20 minutes of the same question asked different ways—that he could not possibly answer, because no one could. Biden pointed to his deep record of accomplishments to show that he has been up to the job in the past, but Stephanopoulos demanded that Biden guarantee he will be able to perform in the future.

Because no one can supply this guarantee, the logical conclusion of Stephanopoulos’ questions has to be that Biden should step aside to guarantee that it won’t matter. And of course that’s the outcome Biden is trying to prevent.

You see how this works? Without addressing that unanswerable question about the future, neither nervous Democrats nor the punditocracy would be satisfied, so not surprisingly the people calling for Biden to withdraw kept at it. Yes, Biden did fine. But it was not enough.

It’s never enough in the midst of a feeding frenzy.

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The only way for Biden to prove he can perform going forward is to perform going forward.

If he stays in, Biden will have numerous opportunities to demonstrate he has the ability to do the job. A second debate is scheduled for fall, and his advisors can allow him to have more unscripted time with voters at campaign events.

But if he goes ahead it will be with no margin for error. Biden has demonstrated he is capable of handling campaign rallies and unscripted interviews but now he has to pull it off every time. Any slip-up will throw the campaign into a frenzy that will make this look like a campfire—with no way out once Biden is nominated. It’s a risk that those who want Biden to drop out are assessing.

The problem is that Democrats face different risks and new unknowns if Biden withdraws, and these may be larger than the risk of Biden staying in.

Just like Biden can never assure journalists or nervous incumbents that he can wage an effective campaign or continue to be an effective president into his 80s, neither can they be certain that the benefits of passing the ball to Kamala Harris four months before Election Day will be greater than the many new risks this would introduce. (And it would have to be Harris, because throwing this to an open convention or nominating anyone else would be self-destructive—for reasons I’m happy to discuss if this ever becomes a serious consideration.)

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I have said often that Democrats will win if this election is a referendum on Donald Trump. That is no less true after the events of the past week.

It would have been far more preferable to have had the conversation about age and ability during the primaries, but no serious contenders stepped up to challenge Biden. So we are having it now.

No matter what Biden ultimately decides to do, and no matter how this frenzy plays out, Democrats will have to manage a higher degree of uncertainty going into the fall than they would have before this episode occurred.

But amidst all the angst, the structure of the election still hasn’t changed. Donald Trump hasn’t capitalized on Biden’s stumbles because he is a hard no for a majority of the country.

The challenge now is to get past the frenzy and try to turn attention to the small fact that the other candidate is preparing to end democracy as we know it.

On that score, the other big news from the past week was the emergence of Project 2025 as a campaign issue. In the long run, this development may be the most important of the cycle, because it becomes much harder for Trump to win when people understand what he intends to do. Unless events intervene, I plan to discuss this on Wednesday.

If Democrats can educate enough people about the MAGA agenda, they could probably nominate Michael Dukakis and win the election. But first they have to come together around Biden’s decision, regardless of what it is. And it is incumbent on them to do it soon.