Why Did Democrats Let Biden Keep Running in 2024?

UNCHARTED: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, by Chris Whipple

Over St. Patrick’s Day weekend in 2024, President Joe Biden hosted the traditional gathering of Irish and Irish American politicians in the White House. This was home ground for Biden, the most ostentatiously Irish figure ever to occupy the Oval Office. He should have been able to schmooze his way through it on autopilot. Yet he had to use a teleprompter for his remarks. Even in the friendliest and least stressful of public environments, he could not risk the possibility of losing track of what he was saying.

In his lively, engaging but sometimes frustrating chronicle of the 2024 presidential election campaign, Chris Whipple records the incredulity of one of those at the gathering, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff Bill Daley: “If the president needed a script for a small gathering of Irish guys, how would he survive the rigors of a campaign? ‘How are they letting this thing go on?’ he thought. ‘This is crazy.’” Elsewhere in Whipple’s narrative, Daley expresses his anger at those around Biden in rather more earthy terms:“Every freaking one of them had no balls.”

Whipple’s previous book, “The Fight of His Life” (2023), is a sympathetic account of Biden’s first two years in office, written with the obvious cooperation of his inner circle. It is thus unsurprising that “Uncharted” is most vivid when recreating the drama of the president’s stubborn refusal to realize that he was in no condition to stand against Donald Trump last November. Yet this strength also underlines the book’s limitations: It never quite manages to answer Daley’s question. How did they let this thing go on?

The tragedy for America — and for the world — is not that the Democratic Party was deluded about what was at stake in the 2024 race. It is that it was all too cleareyed in its perception of what a triumphant return for Trump would mean for democracy in America. Admittedly, this did not require any great foresight; Trump’s first term had given ample warning of the looming disaster of a second coming emboldened by absolute impunity and embittered by a thirst for vengeance.

This awareness brings to mind T.S. Eliot’s line: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” For anyone who is outside the MAGA bubble, the first and best half of Whipple’s book is a voyage into the unforgivable. He shows in vibrant detail that some of Biden’s closest advisers were in little doubt about the heavy toll old age had taken on his capacity to perform as president in 2024, let alone to convince voters that he was in fine shape to do so until 2029. They persisted regardless in feeding his delusions until, as it turned out, it was too late to stop Trump. History will not be kind to them.