On Thursday night, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump faced off in a CNN debate that ranged from mendacious to incoherent to petty. For the podcast “Matter of Opinion,” three New York Times Opinion writers reviewed the candidates’ performances and debated the issue on many Democrats’ minds: Should Biden drop out? This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: How are you feeling after watching this very special debate?
Ezra Klein: I think the problem is that Donald Trump seemed much more presidential than he did in 2020 and Joe Biden seemed much less. Months ago, I wrote a piece saying that Democrats should consider nominating an alternative candidate at the convention.
The argument was that something like this might happen, that as much as Democrats feel — and I would agree — that Joe Biden has been making good decisions as president and in that respect seems able to do the job, that he was no longer able to perform the job very effectively.
The debate was a bad day for Biden, and it is bad to have a bad day on the debate. On the other side, Trump, who is a very erratic performer himself, was much stronger than I’ve seen him in previous debates. He was crisp. He said a lot of things that were straight [expletive], that were brazen, that were bizarre, but he was much more in control. He was able to stop himself from talking in a way he couldn’t in 2020. He was quite clear in most of his answers.
Ross Douthat: This was the worst. I think we should just say Biden is too old to be running for president of the United States.
I agree that Trump was, by his standards, quite strong in certain ways. Some of his answers were ridiculous nonsense, wild exaggeration and so on, but I think you could say he did his job. He prosecuted the case against Biden, saying: The world is less safe than when I was in charge, the border is less secure, and inflation was low when I left, and now it’s high. But really, the important part of the equation is: Is Joe Biden still going to be the Democratic nominee? And if he is, the Democratic Party is derelict in its duty to the United States of America. I think that’s the only takeaway.
Cottle: You have both put forth the argument that he should not be the nominee. So where does that leave this race?
Douthat: Ezra’s got a plan. Ezra, tell them the plan.
Klein: If Joe Biden, God forbid, had some health crisis that meant he could not run, Democrats would not just curl up into the fetal position and hand the election to Donald Trump. They would do what the rules say they need to do, which is they would go to the convention. The people who imagine themselves as plausible Democratic nominees for president would give speeches and go on CNN and do town halls and say things on social media and go talk to state Democratic delegations and try to do the kind of convention campaigning that was how nominations were won for most of American history until the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
And then they would try to pick a ticket that they thought could win. Maybe that would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Maybe that would be Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. I don’t think Vice President Kamala Harris is a strong candidate, but I think she’s probably a little underrated. I would have much preferred to have Harris up on that stage than Joe Biden.
There is nothing conceptually impossible about going to a convention. You have months and a fair amount of Democratic talent. It is not a safe route. It is risky. It could blow up in everybody’s face. But at this point, the Joe Biden plan is blowing up in everybody’s face. I think you are very close to a situation that is: You can lose with Joe Biden or maybe lose with someone else. But if the fate of American democracy is hinging on this election, then you should do everything you can to win it. I don’t think it gets better for Biden from here.
Douthat: In fairness, Democratic voters did have a chance to vote for Dean Phillips over Biden.
Cottle: Stop smirking.
Douthat: I mean, he gets the nomination, right? Those are the rules.
Cottle: You’re enjoying this way too much.
Douthat: But look, Ezra just made a really strong pragmatic case for how the Democrats need to try to win this election and can’t let Trump get in. If Biden goes on like this, he’s going to lose. Biden is a different kind of danger to the U.S. than the instability of Trump, but it is a dangerous thing for the United States of America to consider reelecting the man we saw onstage to the presidency at an extremely dangerous moment in world history. It is morally bankrupt for the Democratic Party to go forward with this man as president.
Cottle: I have had many discussions about all of the kinds of logistical challenges that people have talked about. When you push out an incumbent president, you’re just asking for a world of hurt. But that said, at this point, the party really is overdue for a good gut check. And I think there are a lot of senior Biden people who need to be asking themselves: What on earth are we expecting to happen to turn this around? And I just can’t come up with a good scenario.
Klein: The problem I think the Democratic Party has is twofold. One is just simply a collective action problem, and this was also the thing that was an issue around the primaries. As Ross suggested, the only real Democrats who ran against Biden were Dean Phillips and then, in a different way, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And I think that might’ve been different if Democrats had suffered the wipeout in 2022 that many people expected they would. But they didn’t. They had a stronger than expected midterm that strengthened Joe Biden’s hand. And it’s very dangerous if you’re one of the national-level Democrats to challenge the incumbent president.
So you see people doing things like what Gavin Newsom is doing, which is running this weird quasi-presidential campaign as a Joe Biden surrogate to make himself stronger for 2028 or look like a strong alternative if something happens and Biden has to drop out.
If you’re staff around Joe Biden, you’re going to go up to Joe Biden and tell him he’s got to drop out? I think you should. The only way he drops out is if the people he trusts most can collectively persuade him to do so.
Biden is a patriot, a very decent man who cares a lot about the country. He’s been in public service his whole life. I do think at some point that demands he looks at this situation with a little bit more self-awareness and realism than he has.
It was his decision to run again, and he shouldn’t have made it. Does he want to be Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who did amazing things for the country, did amazing things for liberalism but wiped out that legacy and more by refusing to retire while Democrats still had the Senate?
People saw that coming. I was one of many people who wrote a piece saying Ruth Bader Ginsburg should retire, and she didn’t. And the cost of that, arguably, was Roe. And Joe Biden, too, might end up in the same position. If Trump is as dangerous as he says he is, then Biden has to help the party figure out how to beat him.
Douthat: If Ruth Bader Ginsburg had become incapable of being a Supreme Court Justice, her clerks would have written her opinions for her, and it wouldn’t have been ideal, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
Joe Biden is in charge of America’s nuclear weapons. Joe Biden is in charge of the Pax Americana at its greatest moment of strain in generations. Joe Biden is in charge of the United States of America at a moment when a bunch of kooky but quite smart people think we’re about to take some kind of quantum leap in terms of what artificial intelligence is going to do. If the choice is between the two men you saw onstage, are you choosing Biden for that?
Klein: Yes, absolutely. For two reasons: One is that the thing you just said about Ginsburg is also true for presidents. I don’t think Biden is senile, and I think in general he’s been making good decisions, but they are surrounded by staff, and they are surrounded by agencies, and who you nominate to positions matters.
So, one, absolutely. I’ve watched how Joe Biden has governed in the past couple of years. I saw how Donald Trump has governed. I also see what Donald Trump is proposing. I see what Joe Biden is proposing. I mean, Trump’s 10% tariff on everything plan is genuine lunacy.
Douthat: Donald Trump’s 10% tariff on everything plan is a bad idea. But having the Joe Biden we saw onstage two years further on in the midst of a major world crisis seems to me objectively more dangerous.
Klein: Look, so far, in my view, Biden has not dramatically mishandled or even really mishandled at all a major crisis. I mean, I have my disagreements with him on Israel policy, but the —
Douthat: I’ve been an apologist for the Biden foreign policy. I think he did the right thing getting out of Afghanistan, as badly as it went. I interviewed J.D. Vance recently and tried to make the case to him that Biden’s Ukraine policy has been actually pretty restrained and reasonable. I can make the same case that you’re making. But again, there is a role that the presidency plays in the world system that depends on the guy being there. And I think we’re in danger of understating the extent of the limitations that we saw from Joe Biden and what it implies for just like the morality of putting him back in charge, independent of the question of “How do you beat Trump?”
Cottle: So you’re worried that Vladimir Putin watches the debate and is like, “Oh, yeah, I can just steamroll him.”
Douthat: I mean, aren’t you worried about that?
Klein: International politics isn’t a fistfight. Like, I really think this is sort of getting a little bit too into the pomp of a debate. They’re not like — the way you do international politics is not Putin and Joe Biden go in a backroom and, you know, like have a bare-chested wrestling match — as much as Putin might enjoy politics’ working out that way.
Douthat: It’s not that, but it’s not not that completely.
Klein: I think it is not not that, but I — or whichever number of negatives I need — but I, look, if you’re asking me who on the debate I would choose to be president, you’re asking me, as Joe Biden says, to not compare him to the Almighty but to the alternative. My view is that Democrats should not make this that easy.
I don’t think Joe Biden should be running.
Do the two of you actually think if you’re the Democratic Party, you go to a convention and you just sort of open this up on the floor and try your best, or do you try to coronate Kamala Harris? What are you actually saying should happen?
Douthat: I’ve ranted — I’ll let Michelle handle that one.
Cottle: I think that they should have a plan in place before they get to the convention. I mean, if they wanted to go down this road, they need to do a lot of legwork and a lot of organization before you get it to the convention and just throw it open. I think that’s not how it works anymore. I think you would have to have made some deals and agreements. I mean, the party has a good farm team, but I don’t think you can just leave it to God on convention week.
Douthat: I think that, of course, if you’re running the Democratic National Convention, you obviously want to have some kind of plan. But the worst-case scenario for — say Biden does his duty, and I think it is his duty, and stands aside — if he stands aside and endorses Harris, then it’s just going to be Harris, right? Say he stands aside and doesn’t endorse Harris, or say you go to the convention and it’s the worst-case scenario and it’s chaos and so on, still, at the end point one of two things happens: Either Harris emerges as the nominee, still probably the most likely scenario, or one of the Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer group somehow catches fire through some uncertain process and they become the nominee.
Neither of those is, like, the apocalypse for the Democrats. Nobody likes the unknown, but it’s not like Dean Phillips is going to walk out of the convention as the nominee.
Douthat: I would feel more comfortable now with Kamala Harris than with Joe Biden.
Cottle: But is that who you would feel most comfortable with?
Douthat: I mean, I think Josh Shapiro is a fairly impressive guy among the Democrats, if you’re asking me to just like randomly pick the Democratic nominee. Sure, Josh Shapiro.
Cottle: What about you, Ezra?
Klein: If Joe Biden comes out and says: “Look, like this is a very hard moment for me, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a liability to something bigger than me if I run again. I have great faith in the Democratic Party. I have great faith in the many amazing people who have served in my administration — Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, so on — and I’m going to finish out my term and do the best I can on the crises I’m facing, and the Democratic Party’s going to pick a new candidate.” I think we would see, right?
And I think that it would be up to people to give speeches. And we could see if, you know, Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary and former Rhode Island governor, is able to catch fire. I do — before we go too far down this path, though — want to at least take a minute and push the Biden apologist line here and see what you think of it.
Cottle: If you say that he had a cold, I’m going to scream.
Klein: If I’m a die-hard Biden guy, here’s what I would say: This was a bad night. This is not who he is. This is not the guy we see in private. It’s not the guy you saw at the State of the Union. It’s not the guy you see in a lot of the speeches. And he just got kind of knocked back. But, you know, he is the incumbent. The economy is improving. He’s going to get better. This is going to knock some clarity into him, I guess.
And in the same way that people didn’t completely lose their marbles after Obama had a bad debate and fell behind Romney in the polls, they shouldn’t do that with Joe Biden now, and all this debate stuff is — as people always would say at me — Aaron Sorkin fan fiction. And the party’s got Biden, and they’ve got to figure out what to do with him, and he can still have a big comeback at the second debate, which we’re definitely going to have.
Cottle: Because Trump’s going to be up for that one. When everybody freaked out over Obama’s bad performance back then, I was like, “Oh, that’s a bit much.” The problem as I see it this time is that this so fits the narrative of “Joe Biden is too old and unfit.” The best joke I saw going into this debate was that it was a wellness check for both of these guys, and I do not think the test results came back glowing. The attack is always bad or the misstep is always bad when it fits with what people are inclined to believe anyway.
Douthat: I mean, but Obama lost a debate to Romney, like on points. That was just not what we watched here. We’re not talking about how Trump landed some punches and Biden didn’t exactly have a great response. You could say it’s Ronald Reagan in the first debate with Walter Mondale, where Reagan seemed a little more out of it.
Cottle: Yep. Had a frozen moment. Do you really think any of this is going to happen? I tend to think we can talk about this all night long and ain’t nothing big going to shift. The Biden people are going to come out, they’re going to say: Everybody’s being too hysterical, these things don’t matter, he’s up for the job, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
Douthat: It’s pretty hard for a Democratic president to soldier on when he loses the media and the intelligentsia. There are going to be conservatives who are saying Trump did too well, because he’s going to knock Biden out of the race and the Democrats will nominate someone who can beat him.
Klein: I don’t believe if you gave all the top Democrats right now truth serum and asked them if Biden was going to win, they would tell you “yes”. We will see whether they can act in a coordinated way to do something difficult, which is persuade this guy that he shouldn’t run again and risk becoming the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of this election and destroying his legacy and handing this back to Donald Trump.
If they can get him to stand aside, can they use the party and the convention to try to choose a ticket strategically? If they don’t believe it’s Kamala Harris, that is politically tricky but not the end of the world. In 2016 the vice president did not get the nomination; the party strategically organized around Hillary Clinton, not Joe Biden. That was probably a strategic mistake back then. But nevertheless, sometimes the vice president does not get the nomination.
If they don’t believe it’s her because she’s not able to impress people in a kind of run-up period, then so be it. And maybe she would impress everybody in a run-up period. I do think she’s somewhat underrated. But we’re going to see: Is the Democratic Party a party, or is it just Joe Biden? Just whoever’s in charge at that moment?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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