Evelyn Reynolds

Joe Biden says only “the Lord almighty” could make him quit his re-election bid. “I am not going anywhere,” he insisted in a surprise call to a morning talkshow on Monday, having warned party colleagues off further discussion in a letter. Anyone wanting him to step aside, he said, should “challenge me at the convention” in August. Perhaps he would better understand the problem if he had watched his disastrous debate appearance. But if the president is still in denial, far fewer lawmakers, donors and supporters believe that his candidacy is sustainable amid mounting concern about his capabilities.Resilience is a virtue. Mr Biden has shown it in spades, and it has served him and his country well. His grit and application helped to save the United States from a second Trump term, and to recover from the first. But knowing when to quit matters too. In 2020, Mr Biden described himself as the “bridge” to a new generation of leaders. Stepping aside now would be a belated act of dignity and wisdom. Clinging on as the Democrats head towards November in a doom‑spiral of division and recrimination, leading to Donald Trump’s return to the White House, would for ever tarnish his name.Mr Biden’s inner circle is clannish. As Congress reconvenes for the first time since the debate, he needs to listen to other sympathetic voices. It’s not only self-described “friendly pundits” who have urged him to give up his candidacy. It’s also donors and elected lawmakers, both publicly and (in the case of more influential figures) privately. Even a senior White House official reportedly agrees. Party elders have avoided ringing endorsements.Mr Biden, borrowing Mr Trump’s rhetoric, blames “elites” for hobbling him. While some grassroots supporters remain staunch, others want him to call a halt. There is no doubt that the discussion is damaging. But all those calling on him to step aside understand what is at stake. It is precisely because they dread defeat – not only from self-interest but for the sake of their country and its democracy – that they demand action. They believe Mr Biden cannot now beat Mr Trump. Another candidate might – no more than that. It is a gamble, but less so when the alternative looks like odds-on defeat.Every appearance will be pored over for signs of physical frailty and cognitive incapacity. Further suggestions of declining abilities will surface. One Democratic congressman is said to have told colleagues that the president “has trouble putting two sentences together”. Any doubt voiced by a Democrat will be replayed endlessly in attack ads. While Mr Biden has defied expectations before, electors know that physical and mental decline in older people can be cruel and swift. No number of “good days” will erase the bad.Many Democrats hope for a coronation for Kamala Harris, the vice-president. Even if Mr Biden stepped aside, a contested convention with candidates taking chunks out of each other might damage the eventual nominee. Others believe that a contest would generate excitement and dominate the media, denying airtime to Mr Trump. It would allow the party to test candidates and avoid committing to another one who proves not to be up to the task. Either way, the route ahead would be thorny. But it’s hard to see the party returning to the path of silent political loyalty. That’s how it ended up here. More

The Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said she would not run for the Democratic nomination for president this year even if Joe Biden cedes to growing pressure and steps aside.“It’s a distraction more than anything,” Whitmer told the Associated Press, in an interview to promote her new memoir, True Gretch, which will be published on Tuesday.“I don’t like seeing my name in articles like that because I’m totally focused on governing and campaigning for the [Biden-Kamala Harris] ticket.”Whitmer was referring to a Politico report last week, which said that after Biden’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump in Atlanta in June, Whitmer called the president’s re-election campaign chairperson, Jen O’Malley Dillon, to say Michigan – a battleground state – was no longer winnable.In her immediate response to that report, Whitmer said she was “proud to support Joe Biden as our nominee and I am behind him 100% in the fight to defeat Donald Trump”.Politico said its source was “someone close to a potential 2028 Whitmer rival for the Democratic presidential nomination”.Speaking to the AP, Whitmer said: “I think it’s frustrating that there are news outlets that will publish something that a potential future opponent’s staff person would say.”Few doubt Whitmer will run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. Other governors thought likely to run for that nomination include Wes Moore of Maryland, Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.Biden is attempting to quash calls for him to quit from those who believe that at 81 he is too old and infirm to campaign and govern effectively. The volume of those concerns amplified considerably after his 27 June debate with his presidential predecessor.On Monday, Biden lashed out at “elites in the party”, telling MSNBC: “If any of these guys don’t think I should run, run against me. Go ahead. Announce for president – challenge me at the convention!”Whitmer says she will not do that but her ambitions remain on display.As the Guardian revealed last week, her book ends with a passage from Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the Arena” speech, about the need for leaders to take action.Speaking in Paris in 1910, the 26th president said in part: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”In her book, Whitmer adds: “Though these words were written more than a hundred years ago, they’re just as true today – except for two things. The ‘man’ may be a woman. And she may just be wearing fuchsia.” More

On 1 July 2024, the US supreme court, after an unconscionable half-year delay that it laughably described as “expedited” treatment, handed down Trump v United States, the immunity ruling placing American presidents above the law by deeming the president a “branch of government … unlike anyone else.” The court’s delay guaranteed that Donald Trump would face the electorate in 2024 without first confronting a jury of his peers instructed to decide, and thus inform voters, whether he was guilty of trying to overthrow the 2020 election.Famously, the English immigrant Thomas Paine advocated that we revolt against the Crown to form an independent country and frame a constitution to prevent the rise of a dictator “who, laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented … [and] sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge”. To that end, Paine asked: “Where … is the King of America?” And he replied: “In America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”In the court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John G Roberts, Jr betrayed that promise and the Constitution that embodied it. He pretended that granting lifelong immunity from accountability to the nation’s criminal laws didn’t place the president “above the law”. In majestic circularity, he announced that the “President is not above the law” because it is the law itself that implicitly contains that immunity, to preserve “the basic structure of the Constitution from which that law derives”.But the idea that we need an unbounded chief executive to make the separation of powers work is grounded neither in theory nor in experience and contradicts the axioms of checks and balances. Worse still, the court’s decision delivers not a genuinely unbounded executive but one bound by whatever limits the court itself invents as it fills in the gray areas in its anything but black-and-white ruling. So it’s an imperial judiciary this court delivers in the guise of an imperial executive, not surprising for a court that just last week dismantled the administrative state by substituting itself for the panoply of expert executive agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo.The three dissenting justices objected, without rebuttal by the majority, that no prior president has needed this novel immunity from generally applicable criminal laws to operate as “an energetic, independent executive”, an objective the court placed above all else. The majority professed worry about “an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself, with each successive President free to prosecute his predecessors, yet unable to boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties for fear that he may be next”. But it said nothing to justify that worry – or to explain how the newly concocted less-than-absolute shield of presidential immunity could hope to solve the problem it conjured. After all, if we elect presidents unprincipled enough to direct their attorneys general to persecute their predecessors on trumped-up charges of abusing their official powers, there’s nothing to stop them from fabricating purely private – and, under the court’s new rule, non-immune – crimes by those predecessors.Beyond those glaring flaws in the majority’s reasoning, Roberts snidely accused the three dissenting justices of “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals” that neither the majority opinion nor either of the two concurring opinions troubled to refute.What to make of the majority’s confusing instructions to the court trying Trump for the federal crimes through which he is alleged to have sought to overturn the 2020 election and the lawful transfer of power for the first time in our history? Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett, partly concurring and partly dissenting, wrote in no uncertain terms what the majority should have made clear but didn’t: “The President’s alleged attempt to organize alternative slates of electors … is private and therefore not entitled to protection … While Congress has a limited role in that process, see Art II, §1, cls 3-4, the President has none. In short, a President has no legal authority – and thus no official capacity – to influence how the States appoint their electors.” The majority should’ve endorsed Barrett’s brisk conclusion: “I see no plausible argument for barring prosecution of that alleged conduct.”The majority also offered no cogent reason to disagree with Barrett that, “beyond the limits afforded by executive privilege”, the US constitution doesn’t “limit the introduction of protected conduct as evidence in a criminal prosecution of a President”. As she and the three dissenters persuasively argued, the constitution “does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable” even if it does immunize them from prosecution on the basis of those circumstances. Bribery, a federal crime, makes the point perfectly. It’s nonsensical to hold, as the majority does, that a president who performs an official act like issuing a pardon in return for a bribe may be prosecuted for the bribe but may prevent the jury from learning about the backroom presidential conversations surrounding the pardon. The majority’s rejoinder that the pardon itself may be introduced in evidence as an official record is no answer at all.Indeed, the whole journey on which the majority embarks is misdirected. As dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued, it’s “cold comfort” to learn that “the President is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity … like anyone else”, because the “official-versus-unofficial act distinction” is both “arbitrary and irrational, for it … is when the President commits crimes using his unparalleled official powers that the risks of abuse and autocracy will be most dire”. She is right that vesting the president with uniquely sweeping powers and duties “actually underscores, rather than undermines, the grim stakes of setting the criminal law to the side when the President flexes these very powers”.I’ll let others sort through the tangled puzzles the court has left in its wake absent meaningful guidelines for distinguishing between the various categories of presidential conduct it enumerates. My main takeaways from this shameful decision are three: first, there is a compelling need for supreme court reform, including a plan to impose an enforceable ethics code and term limits and possibly create several added seats to offset the way Trump as president stacked the court to favor his Maga agenda; second, we should start planning for a constitutional amendment of the sort I have advocated in the New York Times to create a federal prosecutorial arm structurally independent of the presidency; and third, we need a constitutional amendment adding to Article I, Section 9’s ban on titles of nobility and foreign emoluments a provision expressly stating that nothing in the constitution may be construed to confer any immunity from criminal prosecution by reason of a defendant’s having held any office under the United States – and a provision forbidding use of the pardon power to encourage the person pardoned to commit a crime that the president is unable to commit personally.Amending the constitution to address problems the supreme court creates needn’t take long. When the court prevented Congress from lowering the voting age to 18 in state along with federal elections in Oregon v Mitchell, it took under seven months for us to adopt the 26th amendment to repair that blunder. And the court can overturn its own egregiously wrong decisions quickly, as it did in 1943 when it overturned a 1940 ruling letting states force children to salute the flag against their religious convictions in West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette. As Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote: “Wisdom too often never comes, so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.” Trump v United States isn’t just unwise. It’s a betrayal of the constitution. Overturning it should be an issue in this November’s election.
Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School More

Washington is bracing for what may be one of the most politically significant weeks in recent memory, as the US Congress reconvenes Monday and leading Democratic lawmakers will face pressure to reveal openly if they plan to stick with Joe Biden as their nominee for re-election.Pressure continued to mount on Sunday as some prominent House Democrats reportedly told caucus leader Hakeem Jeffries in a virtual meeting that they believe the president should step aside in the race after his poor debate performance against Donald Trump and an underwhelming ABC interview.The Senate and House of Representatives will both be in session in Washington simultaneously for the first time since the debate, during which Biden struggled to make his points, became muddled and couldn’t effectively parry a litany of attacks and lies from the former president.This drew renewed scrutiny to Biden’s ability to serve as president for another four years as, at 81, he is already the oldest president in US history and had been suffering in the polls over questions over his mental fitness and stamina.Lawmakers’ return to Capitol Hill could pressure party leaders known to be influential with Biden, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, as well as Jeffries, to signal definitively if they think Biden should stay in the race, and also give those urging him to quit the opportunity to rally support.“I think that he’s got to go out there this week and show the American public that he is still that Joe Biden that they have come to know and love. I take him at his word. I believe that he can do it, but I think that this is a really critical week. I do think the clock is ticking,” Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told CNN in an interview Sunday morning.But later, reports began surfacing that in the afternoon meeting with Jeffries, Congressmen Jerry Nadler of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland were apparently among a significant clutch of lawmakers who told Jeffries that Biden should leave the presidential race, with the New York Times reporting this was the consensus. Jeffries has not revealed his hand.In the days since the debate and ABC interview, a small number of Democratic congressman have openly called on Biden to step down, and other reports emerged that Virginia senator Mark Warner was looking to assemble a group of Democrats from the upper chamber to encourage Biden to quit his crisis-hit re-election campaign. That had been expected to lead to a key private meeting for senators with Warner on Monday but the effort is now more likely to continue with smaller-scale conversations after too much became public, the Associated press reported late on Sunday.Biden spent Sunday campaigning in Pennsylvania, where the state’s Democratic senator John Fetterman likened Biden’s struggles to his own recovery from a stroke and said: “I know what it’s like to have a rough debate, and I’m standing here as your senator.”Biden insisted to supporters in Philadelphia that he was the person to reunite America in a second term. Last Friday to ABC he said his debate performance was “a bad night”, while downplaying the importance of his low approval ratings and insisting he is capable of doing the job.But there were more questions on Sunday and those will only mount this week.“The interview didn’t put concerns to rest. No single interview is going to do that,” Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who is expected to win election as California’s senator in November, said on NBC News.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Either he has to win overwhelmingly, or he has to pass the torch to someone who can. It’s as simple as that.”Schiff said Vice-President Kamala Harris could beat Trump decisively and some House lawmakers reportedly also told Jeffries in their virtual meeting that Harris was the most likely person to take over the nomination. The House Democratic caucus is expected to meet in person Tuesday.Biden’s exit from the race would be a historic upheaval that the United States has not seen in decades, and could kick off a vigorous contest ahead of the party’s convention six weeks from now in Chicago where the nominee is traditionally anointed.The last president to decline to seek re-election was Lyndon B Johnson, who abandoned his campaign in 1968 amid the carnage of the Vietnam War, slumping approval ratings and concerns about his own health. More

As European leaders and top defense officials from 31 Nato countries descend on Washington next week, all eyes will be focused firmly on Joe Biden, whose faltering performance at last month’s debate has added to concerns about the country that some Europeans already described as their “unpredictable ally”.The US president has hoped that his leadership at the summit will rescue his campaign against Donald Trump amid concerns about his age and mental acuity. In a primetime interview on US television this week, he said: “And who’s gonna be able to hold Nato together like me?… We’re gonna have, I guess a good way to judge me, is you’re gonna have now the Nato conference here in the United States next week. Come listen. See what they say.”But in private conversations, some European officials and diplomats have expressed concerns about his “shaky” public appearances and worries about the high likelihood of a second Trump term. Several foreign officials questioned whether Biden would remain in the race through next week.“You can’t just put the genie back in the bottle,” said one European diplomat of the questions concerning Biden’s age. “It is one of the big issues [around the summit].”Officials who normally focused on security policy said they would pay close attention to Biden’s behaviour during his public appearances at the Nato summit, including a speech in the Mellon Auditorium on Tuesday and then meetings with the other member and partner countries on Wednesday. Some expressed confidence in his team, including Jake Sullivan, US national security adviser, to manage major crises, but said that the question of Biden’s political future had taken a toll.Several foreign officials said that Biden’s slump in the polls would compound problems from this year’s bruising fight in Congress over the $60.8bn in military aid to Ukraine and make it less likely for the administration to take bold action.“The issue with his age has become a major concern … a distraction from other real issues [for Nato],” said a European official. One administration official told the Washington Post that the summit has “gone from an orchestrated spectacle to one of the most anxious gatherings in modern times”.US officials have insisted that Biden is mentally acute, especially pointing at his handling of national security issues such as the Russian war on Ukraine.A long piece detailing concerns about Biden’s mental state in the New York Times included aides describing his forceful warnings to Benjamin Netanyahu not to launch a massive counterattack against Iran as an example of his good health.“Look, foreign leaders have seen Joe Biden up close and personal for the last three years,” said a senior administration official. “They know who they’re dealing with and, you know, they know how effective he’s been.”But that article also said that G7 leaders were concerned about Biden’s physical condition, quoted a European official who said Biden was sometimes “out of it”, and quoted two officials who struggled to say they would put Biden in the same room as Vladimir Putin.“I’ve heard multiple times [US officials] talking about how he’s very sharp,” a European official told the Guardian. “But he can’t be great just part of the time, he needs to be on his game all of the time.”Some have gone public with their concerns. “They certainly have a problem,” said Polish prime minister Donald Tusk after last week’s debate. “Yes, these reactions are unambiguous. I was afraid of that. I was afraid … in the sense: it was to be expected that in a direct confrontation, in a debate, it would not be easy for President Biden.”Especially following the debate, many European diplomats are bracing for a second Trump administration. The former president has openly flirted with the idea of pulling out of Nato and personally harangued members of the alliance who failed to reach a 2% spending benchmark. He has also indicated that he may withhold further aid to Ukraine.Since early in the campaign, European diplomats have sought to understand Trump’s policies, sending envoys to his campaign or conservative thinktanks like the Heritage Foundation who have produced voluminous briefings about what a second-term Trump administration’s foreign policy could look like.But Trump’s foreign policy vision remains unclear, they said, subject to his own whims, and will likely be decided at the last minute. (In a surprise on Friday, he disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, often touted as a 900-page road map for his administration’s agenda, saying he “had no idea who they are”.)skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You meet a lot of people who will tell you that they know what Trump is thinking, but no one actually does,” said one European official.Ahead of the election, officials from Nato countries have sought to “Trump-proof” military aid by having the alliance take over coordination of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group from the US. European countries have also pushed for language in a final Nato communique that would proclaim the “irreversibility” of Ukraine’s accession to the alliance.“On managing the unpredictability of the US ally … again, it’s not new,” said a European official. “It’s clearly a sentiment which is shared among European allies, that we need to be prepared for the unpredictability of the US ally.”In a policy brief, Camille Grand, a former Nato assistant secretary general who is now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that leaders should prepare to “defend Europe with less America”.“Even setting aside the outcome of the US presidential election this year and the need to Trump-proof Europe, there is a fundamental and deep trend in US security policy that suggests Europe will have to become less reliant on US support for its security,” he wrote.Planners want to avoid a repeat of last year’s summit in Lithuania, when Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy tweeted that the lack of a timetable for the country’s accession to Nato was “absurd” after learning of last-minute discussions between other leaders.“The US team has been making absolutely sure that there wouldn’t be too many or any open issues at the summit to avoid what happened in Vilnius,” Grand said in an interview.“It’s meant to be a smooth summit and a celebration and an opportunity for Biden to shine, then I guess what the European leaders will be watching in light of the debate is, how is Biden? Is he truly leading? So they will have an eye on him, but I think they will all, at least most of them … rather be in the mood to strengthen him than the opposite.” More

It was 17 years ago that Joe Biden ⁠– having just launched a second, hopeless bid for the presidency, his first having been toppled, 20 years earlier, by his habit of talking nonsense ⁠– infamously offered Barack Obama a compliment he thought magnanimous: “You got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he told the New York Observer. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” It was the political gaffe as art form ⁠– at once a casually, shockingly ugly assessment of Black leaders and candidates like Jesse Jackson and Shirley Chisholm and a condescending slight against the party’s fastest rising star, who was more than merely “articulate”. His many failures aside, Obama won that primary, and the presidency, on his extraordinary gifts as a communicator.On Friday, Obama tried, rather wanly, to put those gifts to use on the behalf of his friend and former rival one more time. “Bad debate nights happen,” he posted on X after the debacle the night before. “Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.” It was more than a “bad debate night”, though, as all who tuned in saw for themselves. After months of speculation and argument about his condition and in what could be the final, gutting irony of his political career, Biden proved unprecedentedly and perhaps fatally inarticulate. Since he took office, Biden and his backers have labored mightily to convince the American people he’s well enough not only to take on the duties of the presidency but to save American democracy. As it stands today, it’s doubtful he can even save himself.It’s been reported now that Obama and other party leaders, their initial displays of support aside, have been harboring doubts about Biden’s viability as a candidate; the Democratic omertà has only been broken within the last few days. The critical question is why there wasn’t movement to encourage Biden to drop out sooner. Leaks have been flooding out about the Biden team’s extraordinary insularity and insecurity, but what’s happened with Biden doesn’t outwardly seem terribly different from the way Hillary Clinton coasted to the nomination with only Bernie Sanders in opposition in 2016 or the inertia that kept Dianne Feinstein and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in their posts even as their age became a liability.It’s clearly difficult for Democrats to dislodge their most important figures even when political realities suggest that they should; all told, the Democratic party is best understood less as a political party organized to enact or protect specific policies than as a professional association committed to protecting its most valued members.Until now, that included Biden. Years of disdain from the party’s leadership were set aside after he beat Trump in 2020 ⁠– while there was open conversation that year about the unlikeliness of a second term, no one in the party wound up pushing seriously for a primary or a replacement even as his poll numbers slid and questions about his health emerged. It became clear that Democrats would only topple him in an emergency. After his debate performance, he finally presented them with one. And part of the alarm now gripping the party stems from the realization that Biden’s state might cost the seats of moderate Democrats in Congress, who may have to spend their campaigns parrying questions about his health. On Tuesday, Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat in a district Donald Trump won by seven points in 2020, published an op-ed in response to Biden’s debate performance saying he’d be fine with Trump winning the election. “Unlike Biden and many others, I refuse to participate in a campaign to scare voters with the idea that Trump will end our democratic system,” he wrote.Golden will remain a Democrat in good standing. They need him, vital as candidates like him are to the Democratic task of securing safe, stable and comfortable majorities that achieve as little major policy change as moderates can manage to constrain them to. The Democratic party, in other words, tolerates figures like Golden because it’s governed less by vision than by fear. It was fear that put Biden over Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. It was fear that prevented a serious field of alternative candidates from mounting primary challenges against Biden. And it’s fear, swollen into a full-blown panic, that’s shaping the party’s harried actions and deliberations now.There is, in fairness, much to be afraid of. Contrary to the slander of party moderates, serious progressive critiques of the Democratic establishment under Biden have been leveled precisely because the left gravely understands what another Trump term could mean for the country. Up until now, part of the Democratic party’s strategy for avoiding one has been to concede ground to the right ⁠– unable to alter perceptions on Biden’s age and inflation, it’s spent the last few months trying to look tough on undocumented immigration and student protests.That hasn’t worked and neither have the hits against Trump. The debate was supposed to turn the tide. Instead, it clarified the risk the Democratic party now faces ⁠– not only that it might lose to Trump but that it might lose in a way that will damage the party and the country in the long run, bolstering the power of a right now indisputably tilting towards fascism. Democrats simply cannot spend the next four months insisting to the American people that Joe Biden is fit for another four years as president. Doing so would push Americans more deeply into the political nihilism that has made Trump an attractive prospect for so many and that has, rightly or wrongly, encouraged many more Americans to disengage from a political system they see as hopelessly tainted by dishonesty and corruption. It would, in sum, continue the corrosion of the faith in politics Biden promised to help restore in the first place.Instead, the Democratic party should prove to justifiably cynical voters that it’s capable of leveling with them and making a thorny decision in the country’s best interests. That alone won’t inspire confidence, but offering more than a purely defensive vision for the party and the country’s future might help. As it stands, the major items on what may or may not be Biden’s second term agenda haven’t been defined. Meanwhile, on the right, the platforms released by the Trump campaign and the Heritage Foundation, along with the conservative supreme court’s rulings ending Chevron deference and bolstering presidential immunity, have offered up horrifying glimpses of the vision that will prevail in America if Democrats can’t develop and sell a better one.The right knows where it wants to take the country in the next four years and the next 40; it’s willing to play the long game to get there. And there’s no reason whatsoever why the left shouldn’t take up a competing project at least as bold and ambitious: a plan not just to save the institutions of the republic we call “American democracy” by habit in the near term, but to make American democracy fully real at a moment in which we have every reason to doubt the American people ⁠– not just a subset of them, and not just the wealthy ⁠– truly rule.But Democrats will be impotent and unconvincing messengers on democracy as long as they remain beholden to the feudal political culture this crisis has exposed for all to see. If the party that let Biden glide to this point is democracy’s last line of defense ⁠– a collection of now tittering and feuding fiefdoms and cliques united less by solid goals than by mutual self-interest and inertia ⁠– then democracy is done for, plain and simple. It is time for a new candidate, yes. But it is also time for a reckoning.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

“Ask not,” said President Kennedy as he rallied young Americans to volunteer for national service in his inaugural address, “what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy had a stricter rule for the women in his life, as journalist Maureen Callahan reveals in her lacerating exposé: asking nothing in return, they were expected to do what their commander-in-chief required, which meant supplying him with sex whenever and wherever he fancied.As a senator, JFK tried out his priapic power by impregnating a 15-year-old babysitter and positioning an aide beneath his desk to fellate him while he multitasked in his office. As president, he ushered White House secretaries upstairs after work for brief, brusque sessions of copulation and rewarded them with a post-coital snack of cheese puffs; at one lunchtime frolic in the basement swimming pool he instructed a young woman to orally relieve the tensions of a male crony and looked on in approval as she obeyed. His wife, Jackie, whom he infected with a smattering of venereal ailments, lamented that his assassination deprived her of the chance to vent her rage at him. Nevertheless, she embraced his naked body before it was placed in a casket at the Dallas hospital, bestowing a final, perhaps frosty kiss on his penis.JFK’s conduct mimicked the tom-catting of his father, Joseph, who kept his wife, Rose, permanently pregnant while he took up with movie stars such as Gloria Swanson – whom he raped without bothering to introduce himself at their first meeting – and Marlene Dietrich. Not to be outdone, JFK shared Marilyn Monroe with his brother Bobby, his attorney general. Appointed ambassador to the UK in 1938, Joe declared democracy to be defunct and hailed Hitler’s new world order. He particularly admired Nazi eugenics, which weeded out human specimens he found “disgusting”, and he applied the sanitary theory to his own family. His daughter Rosemary seemed emotionally volatile and looked too chubby to appear in press photographs; deeming her a “defective product”, he had her lobotomised, which left her “functionally a two-year-old”. His wife was not consulted about the operation.View image in fullscreenA “negative life force”, Callahan suggests, was passed down from Joe to his descendants. The promiscuous Kennedy men had scant liking for women; with no time for pleasure, they practised what Callahan calls “technical sex”, short-fused but excitingly risky because this was their way of both defying and flirting with death. During the showdown with Russia over Cuban missiles, JFK installed a nubile minion in his absent wife’s bedroom for amusement while he diced with “nuclear oblivion – a catastrophe of his own making”.The same sense of existential danger elated JFK’s son John, a playboy princeling who loved to show off his genitalia after showering at the gym. Callahan argues that for John Jr “dying was a high”, an orgasmic thrill that he insisted on sharing with a female partner. “What a way to go,” he marvelled after almost killing a girlfriend when their kayak capsized. In 1999, he bullied his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister into flying with him on a private plane he had not qualified to pilot; in bad weather he was baffled by the instrument panel, and all three died when the tiny Piper Saratoga spiralled into the ocean. The accident, in Callahan’s view, was “a murder-suicide”.View image in fullscreenAn angry sympathy for the women “broken, tormented, raped, murdered or left for dead” by the Kennedys inflames and sometimes envenoms Callahan’s writing. Her account of Rosemary’s unanaesthetised lobotomy left me reeling. It’s equally painful to read about the agony of Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in Ted Kennedy’s overturned car at Chappaquiddick in 1969 while he wandered off to arrange for a fixer to finesse press accounts of the calamity: upside down, she contorted her body for hours to gasp at a dwindling pocket of air. Carolyn Bessette tormented herself to qualify as a blond Kennedy consort, enduring a makeover that left her scalp scorched by bleach. In case cosmetic scars seem trivial, Callahan adds a terse allusion to the state of Bessette’s corpse, severed at the waist by her seatbelt in the plane that John Jr so air-headedly crashed.After all this carnage, the book tries to conclude with a quietly triumphal coda. Liberated by the death of her second husband, Jackie Onassis took a low-paid job with a Manhattan publisher, which allows Callahan to imagine her anonymously merging with the crowd on her way to work, “just another New York woman on the go”. That, however, is not quite the end of the dynastic story. Jackie’s nephew Robert Kennedy Jr is a candidate for president in this November’s election, despite possessing a brain that he believes was partly eaten by a worm, a body that houses the so-called “lust demons” he inherited from his grandfather, and a marital history that gruesomely varies the family paradigm: the second of his three wives, in despair after reading a diary in which he tabulated his adulterous flings and awarded them points for performance, killed herself in 2012.View image in fullscreenBut the longest shadow is cast by Ted, promoted as the family’s presidential heir apparent in 1980 even though he was “the runt of the litter, kicked out of Harvard for cheating” and a flush-faced alcoholic into the bargain. A psychiatric assessment quoted by Callahan discerns in sloppy, greedy Ted a “narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed”. Sound familiar? That diagnosis makes Trump an honorary Kennedy, with Boris Johnson as a kissing cousin. I sniffed a further connection when Callahan describes Ted arriving drunk at a royal dinner in Brussels with an equally plastered sex worker as his date; the pair appalled the company with their intimate antics, which at one point included urinating on an antique sofa. Could this episode have been reimagined in Christopher Steele’s debunked 2016 dossier where, without evidence, Trump is said to have watched sex workers in a Moscow hotel defile a bed in which the Obamas had slept by drenching it in a golden shower?Invented or not, such tales are fables about the pathology of politics. Forget the pretence of public service that these damaged men spout as they tout for votes. They seek electoral office because it licenses them to act out their fantasies – to randomly grab pussies or shoot passersby on Fifth Avenue with utter impunity. Having power over others makes up for their own quaking impotence, and all of us, not only those betrayed wives and disposable lovers, are their abused and casually obliterated victims. More

Reports are coming through from the virtual meeting that House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has been holding with fellow Democratic representatives, and it’s not looking good for Joe Biden.High-profile congressmen Jerry Nadler of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are reportedly among a clutch of Democratic lawmakers who told Jeffries, the most senior Democrat in the House, that Biden should leave the presidential race, CBS’s Ed O’Keefe has posted on Twitter/X.He also includes congressmen Takano, Adam Smith, Morelle, Himes and Beyer.The Guardian has not independently verified this reporting.Hello again, US politics blog readers, we’re going to close this blog now after a lively day and we’ll be back on Monday morning, Washington DC time. All of today’s stories on Joe Biden are on this Guardian US page.Congress is back in session tomorrow and it will be another news-filled day at the start of what could be a make-or-break week for the US president’s re-election campaign, so do rejoin us then. This follows late developments this afternoon coming out of a virtual meeting between some House Democrats and their leader in that chamber, Hakeem Jeffries.Here’s where things stand:
High-profile congressmen Jerry Nadler of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are reportedly among a clutch of Democratic lawmakers who told Jeffries, the most senior Democrat in the House, that Biden should leave the presidential race.
More Democratic representatives, including Mark Takano of California, Adam Smith of Washington state, Jim Himes of Connecticut, Joe Morelle of New York and Susan Wild of Pennsylvania also reportedly told Jeffries they want Biden to quit the race. Maxine Waters and Bobby Scott reportedly said they support him. Jeffries did not reveal his hand.
Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are now in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for the third stop on this campaign swing through the swing state.
Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham believes both Joe Biden and Donald Trump should take a cognitive test. The South Carolina senator said that anyone standing for president and anyone in the line of succession should be subjected to a cognitive exam.
Biden heard words of encouragement from Pennsylvania Democratic US senator John Fetterman on his trip to the state today. Fetterman won office two years ago despite his own struggles in a debate against his Republican opponent. “I know what it’s like to have a rough debate and I’m standing here as your senator. There is only one guy that has ever beaten Trump and he is going to do it twice and put him down for good,” the senator said.
Biden told congregants at a church in Philadelphia this morning: “We must unite America again. That’s my goal. That’s what we’re going to do.” The supportive churchgoers chanted “Four more years!”
We can now add Pennsylvania congresswoman Susan Wild to the list of lawmakers who reportedly told House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries in a virtual meeting today that Joe Biden should quick his re-election campaign, CNN reports.Representatives Maxine Waters and Bobby Scott reportedly told Jeffries they continue to support Biden as the presumptive nominee, as the caucus split, the outlet reported.Many apparently agree that Kamala Harris should become the nominee instead.Reports are coming through from the virtual meeting that House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has been holding with fellow Democratic representatives, and it’s not looking good for Joe Biden.High-profile congressmen Jerry Nadler of New York and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are reportedly among a clutch of Democratic lawmakers who told Jeffries, the most senior Democrat in the House, that Biden should leave the presidential race, CBS’s Ed O’Keefe has posted on Twitter/X.He also includes congressmen Takano, Adam Smith, Morelle, Himes and Beyer.The Guardian has not independently verified this reporting.Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden are now in Harrisburg for another event.The city is the state capital of Pennsylvania, about 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia, where the US president addressed a church service this morning.In between he stopped at a campaign office, as hit the swing-state in an ongoing mini-blitz to persuade Democrats he is up to being their nominee for re-election this November.Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham believes both Joe Biden and Donald Trump should take a cognitive test.The South Carolina senator told CBS on Sunday that anyone standing for president and anyone in the line of succession should be subjected to a cognitive exam.After Biden’s flop in the first presidential debate of the 2024 election, against Trump late last month, Graham said earlier today: “This is a wake-up call for the country. We need to make sure that the people who are going to be in the line of succession are capable of being commanders in chief under dire circumstances.”He added: “I’m offended by the idea that he shouldn’t take a competency test, given all the evidence in front of us,” Graham said, adding that he thinks Biden is in denial and that’s dangerous.Graham said: “What I’d like to see is President Biden take a cognitive test.” Asked if Trump should, too, Graham said: “Yes, yes, I think both.”Meanwhile, there’s some big news breaking in France, where the hopes of the far right and their leader Marine Le Pen appear to have been dashed by resurgent support for leftwing parties in a snap election.We have a live blog covering the results as they come in, and you can follow it here:During his unscheduled stop at a Philadelphia campaign office, Joe Biden heard some words of encouragement from Democratic senator John Fetterman, who won office two years ago despite his own struggles in a debate against his Republican opponent.The senator’s performance in the debate against Mehmet Oz was hampered by the auditory processing disorder that afflicted him after suffering a stroke. Fetterman nonetheless defeated Oz in the 2022 midterm elections, and, as he appeared alongside the president today, compared his comeback to Biden’s current troubles following his tired performance at his first debate against Donald Trump.“I know what it’s like to have a rough debate and I’m standing here as your senator,” Fetterman said.“There is only one guy that has ever beaten Trump and he is going to do it twice and put him down for good.”Here’s a look back on Fetterman’s own struggles in his Senate campaign:Joe Biden has made an unscheduled stop at the Roxborough Democratic Coordinated campaign office in Philadelphia.He is joined there by Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator John Fetterman, and the city’s mayor Cherelle Parker.Here are some more images from inside the event at the church in north-western Philadelphia a little earlier.Addressing the congregation.Mingling:More:Here are some images related to Joe Biden’s appearance in Philadelphia on Sunday, to speak at a church.A handful of people outside held signs urging the president to drop out of his re-election campaign.And this:Biden meets voters. More