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.
SACHA LECCA
SACHA LECCA
SACHA LECCA
SACHA LECCA
SACHA LECCA
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.