President Joe Biden is no longer running for reelection in 2024.
In a historic decision to step aside, Biden joins Lyndon B. Johnson as the only modern president to willingly forgo a chance to serve another four years.
Biden announced on social media that “in the best interest of my party and the country” he will relinquish his hold on the Democratic Party’s nomination. In a later post, he gave his “full support and endorsement” to Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic nominee.
“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote in a letter to the nation on Sunday.
Biden said he plans to address the nation about his decision “later this week.” The president tested positive for Covid-19 last Wednesday.
Even as Bidenworld trumpeted calls for party unity and turning the page on Sunday afternoon, behind the scenes, the president also stands down under a thick air of intraparty feuding and aggressively hurt feelings.
Just days prior to Biden bowing out, a person close to president said they, along with others in the Biden inner orbit, were “so fucking livid” at the sustained drive among other elite Democrats to pressure Biden out of the race as quickly as possible, including while the president has been ill with Covid. “He is still their leader, and he’s earned more respect than this,” the source added.
Numerous other Democratic sources on Capitol Hill and well-connected liberal political operatives had been telling Rolling Stone since Thursday that it was widely expected to be a matter of just a handful of days before Biden would bow out of the general election against Trump, citing Biden and his White House senior staff’s growing receptiveness to the panic among his prominent allies.
Before the weekend was done, those allies and doom-predicting Dems got their wish.
The move to withdraw comes weeks after Biden, 81, delivered a catastrophic performance during a June 27 debate with Donald Trump in Atlanta, in which the president was unable to effectively make the case against Trump on key issues like abortion, or for his own candidacy. At one point, Biden seemed to completely lose his train of thought, ending an answer about a question about the national debt by claiming nonsensically that he’d “finally beat Medicare.” He came across, indelibly, as the right wing has long caricatured him: a politician who’d not only lost a step, but command of his most critical capacities.
Biden followed that debate debacle with a passable teleprompted rally the next day in North Carolina, but it wasn’t enough to assuage concerns from Democratic lawmakers, donors, and voters, an increasing number of whom called for the president to step aside in the ensuing weeks. Biden repeatedly insisted he was staying in the race. He told George Stephanopoulos that he wouldn’t step down unless the “Lord Almighty” came down and told him to. He told reporters during a solo press conference at the NATO summit the following week that he’d only leave if his closest aides told him there was no way he could win. He told Lester Holt the week after that that nothing had changed and he was in it to win it.
Biden dismissed concerns about his physical and mental fitness for office, but these appearances weren’t without their pauses, stumbles, and outright gaffes. Biden’s polling numbers sank, and in mid-July an Associated Press survey found that two-thirds of Democratic voters felt he should step aside. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s power players — including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, along with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — reportedly worked behind the scenes to convince him to drop out of the race.
The move to withdraw places a bookend on an extraordinary career in American politics, and a presidency that stands as one of the most consequential since Johnson’s. The list of Biden’s signature accomplishments (or, as he might dub them, “BFDs”) is long. It includes:
- The largest climate investment in history, the Inflation Reduction Act, which is marshaling as much as a half-trillion dollars to support the deployment of clean energy, electric cars, home efficiency upgrades, carbon-smart agriculture, among many other features, and has the country on a path to cut peak emissions in half by 2030.
- A generational investment in infrastructure, providing $1.2 trillion in long-delayed federal funding for roads, bridges, airports, levees and more.
- Placing the first Black woman justice on the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson.
- The CHIPS Act, which is helping revive America’s high-tech microchip manufacturing — an insurance policy against the kind of global supply chain havoc produced by the pandemic.
- Passage of a 15 percent minimum tax on large corporations.
- Providing Medicare, finally, with the ability to negotiate the cost of a suite of expensive drugs, and imposing a cost cap on insulin for seniors.
- Debt relief and loan forgiveness totalling more than $160 billion for millions of student borrowers.
- Ensuring the solvency of the U.S. Postal Service.
- Rescuing the pensions of nearly a million retirees.
- Marshaling the world to support Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion.
Apart from these key victories, Biden also led America through a paradoxically painful, booming recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. The recovery has featured historically low unemployment and steady economic growth, as well as the price shocks of sustained high inflation. The pinch has been felt daily at the grocery store, the gas pump, and the fast food drive-through. It has also been experienced in the cost of borrowing, with elevated mortgage and car-loan rates, as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates aggressively in an attempt to lower inflation. Despite rising wages, these soaring costs contributed to a widespread sense of consumer malaise — including more than half of Americans believing the country was in a recession — that was not matched by macroeconomic data that have consistently marked a strong economy.
Biden’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war has also proved divisive, particularly within his own party. Following the Oct. 7 attacks, Biden has stood staunchly with Israel, even as the war waged by the Netanyahu government, ostensibly against Hamas militants, has brought international condemnation for killing tens of thousands of civilians.
Biden currently has some of the lowest approval ratings of his presidency.
Biden said during his 2020 run that he sees himself as a “bridge” to the next generation of leaders, who are the “future of the country.” He would go on to save American democracy by defeating Trump later that year. His decision to withdraw from the 2024 race signals an inverse of that proposition: His physical frailty and faltering mental capacity have become a threshold issue for too many voters — and his candidacy risks tipping the election to the openly authoritarian Trump. Now emboldened by a Supreme Court that would put few bounds on his despotic ambitions, having now placed the presidency beyond the reach of criminal law, Trump’s fascist fantasies could easily become America’s horrific reality.
This is a breaking story and will be updated as more information is released.
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.