Something struck him. The president looked a little … different. He showed the phone to his girlfriend nearby.
“She immediately flagged it, like, ‘Why is he orange?’”
Domalewski, a data analyst from San Francisco, started thinking about the crab. Specifically, about a weird natural phenomenon that scientists have been observing for a while now, that certain species, over millions of years, eventually develop hard shells and take on the body shape of crabs.
“Now it’s like, between the orange tan, the fact that his son who has a controversial reputation has become a key adviser, and the whole doubling down and attacking the media … is it like every politician eventually evolves into Trump?”
Scientists also estimate the Earth to be some 4.5 billion years old, but at the present moment, Biden, in his 82nd year of life, is facing the most crucial decision of his 54-year political career. Since the president’s halting, low-energy debate performance in late June, there have been calls from his fellow Democrats, including 22 members of Congress, for the president to relinquish the ticket and allow someone else to face Trump in November.
At least to some, the way Biden has responded to this self-inflicted wound to his candidacy, and the slow mutiny within his party, has borne a resemblance — skin-deep, perhaps, but noticeable — to his 78-year-old rival.
Biden phoned into MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” a favorite show for members of the party and himself, to rail against “the elites in the party” for urging him to step down, an echo of Trump’s habit of calling into “Fox & Friends” or “Hannity” to let loose on his topic of choice. Granted, he has acknowledged his failure at the debate (not very Trumpy), but some people also see him clinging to a stubborn belief that, to quote a certain someone, I alone can fix it. At a news conference Thursday, Biden — who 85 percent of registered voters think is too old to serve another term as president, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll — said he wouldn’t step down from the ticket even if his advisers were to give him data that showed Vice President Harris outperforming him against Trump. (That poll still has him in a dead heat nationwide with Trump, who 60 percent of respondents said was too old.) “I think I’m the most qualified person to run for president,” Biden said. “I beat him once and I will beat him again.”
“He’s being Trump-like in that he’s not listening,” says Jason Palmer, the only Democrat who has beaten Biden at anything this year by winning the primary in American Samoa before dropping out.
“Donald Trump sometimes gets into a bluster and just says, ‘I’m the only one that could do it.’ And some of the sentences I heard from Joe Biden in the George Stephanopoulos interview sounded like, ‘I’m the only one who can keep NATO together, can protect the free world.’ You know, thinking you’re the only person is not the right way to run for president.”
(No, Palmer won’t run again if Biden drops out.)
In his interview after the debate debacle, Stephanopoulos put a fine point on it: “The heart of your case against Donald Trump is that he’s only out for himself, putting his personal interests ahead of the national interest. How do you respond to critics who say that by staying in the race, you’re doing the same thing?”
“Oh, come on,” Biden responded with a chuckle. “Well, I don’t think those critics know what they’re talking about.”
Lauren Hitt, a Biden campaign spokesperson, wrote in an email statement, “Donald Trump is a convicted felon who tried to overthrow our democracy, promises to jail and prosecute his enemies, and threatened violence when he loses the election — anyone engaging in this false equivalency has truly lost the plot.”
And at his news conference, Biden also said “there are other people who could beat Trump, too,” but that it would be “awful” to start from scratch.
Meanwhile, some Democrats have been airing their real thoughts about the president in anonymous quotes in the press while declining to break with him publicly — yet another echo of Trump days past and present, when Republicans would behave likewise. “I wish I was more brave,” an anonymous Democratic state party chair reportedly admitted to NBC News this week.
Let’s be clear. None of these people think Biden and Trump can be compared to each other in terms of policy, character or their vision for the America they’d like to run. Their conflict comes from a place of fundamental agreement: that a man like Trump — actually like him — should not occupy the Oval Office.
For Brian Beutler, who writes the Substack newsletter Off Message and would like to see Biden step down, the way the president and his supporters have reacted to the threat to his candidacy (and, possibly, his legacy) underscores how unusual and distressing this is for a career politician who has always exhibited a decorous respect for Washington institutions and political relationships. It speaks to the desperate spot Biden is in, he says.
“Any leading politician who’s facing a rebellion from within their own party is going to reach deep into their bag of tricks for ways not to lose control of the situation,” Beutler says, “and that’s what Biden’s doing.”
Still, any comparisons to Trump are limited. Whatever counsel he might be getting from his son, it’s not like Biden is trying to give Hunter a security clearance and naming him senior adviser, Beutler pointed out, as Trump did with his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Meeting criticism with defiance and bravado arguably worked for Trump, who is cruising to the nomination and remaking the party in his own image. In Trump’s case, the idea was “to bypass the Republican Party,” says Kathryn Cramer Brownell, an associate professor at Purdue University who studies politics and pop culture, “and kind of present his message in a way that he could control, that it was more unfiltered — not relying on journalists or anyone else to convey his message, but trying to take ownership of it.”
The question is whether this particular way of trying to own the narrative would work for Biden. It’s one that his future in the race depends on.
If Biden were to step down, Beutler envisions a much more diplomatic exit than what you’d expect from Trump. He can’t really imagine Biden taking down names and trying to get members of Congress to lose their primaries — the type of vengeance Trump has sought against Republicans who have gone against him. “He will do it the way he’s kind of done everything: by accommodation and in a considerate way,” Beutler says. “And the parallel between him and Trump then will totally break down.”
For now, Biden is staying in. Former president Trump, calling into one of his own favorite cable shows this week, offered his own analysis of the situation.
“He’s got an ego,” Trump said, sounding very much like his own critics. “And he doesn’t want to quit.”
