Will Biden drop out? Who replaces him?

Trump rally shooting upends Democrats' crisis over Biden candidacy

Congressional Democrats' all-consuming angst over President Biden's candidacy has taken an abrupt backseat in lawmakers' minds in the wake of an assassination attempt against former President Trump.

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What to watch: Most lawmakers who spoke to Axios said it is too early to say whether the cessation in tensions will last until the Democratic National Convention next month.

But the second senior House Democrat offered one reason for why it might: "We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency."

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on X: "If you’re a “senior Democrat” that feels this way, you should absolutely retire and make space for true leadership that refuses to resign themselves to fascism.
This kind of leadership is functionally useless to the American people. Retire." / X

lpetrich said:

Trump rally shooting upends Democrats' crisis over Biden candidacy

Congressional Democrats' all-consuming angst over President Biden's candidacy has taken an abrupt backseat in lawmakers' minds in the wake of an assassination attempt against former President Trump.

...
What to watch: Most lawmakers who spoke to Axios said it is too early to say whether the cessation in tensions will last until the Democratic National Convention next month.

But the second senior House Democrat offered one reason for why it might: "We've all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency."

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on X: "If you’re a “senior Democrat” that feels this way, you should absolutely retire and make space for true leadership that refuses to resign themselves to fascism.
This kind of leadership is functionally useless to the American people. Retire." / X

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They all need to shift their investments around.

pood said:

Michael Moore on Biden.

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As usual, Michael Moore is spot-on.

Biden was not well. Biden did not possess the faculties he needed. Something was wrong. Did nobody see this in the days leading up to the collapse? Did not a single person raise their voice to ask, “Maybe we shouldn’t do this to him?”

But they did do it to him. And the repercussions that we, the world, and the generations after us will have to suffer through are not even part of the discussion this week. It’s all about making sure he stays in the race — and nothing about the risk to his life he is facing as they push him to soldier onward.

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After Trump shooting, Democratic effort to replace Biden comes to a standstill - "After the shooting at the Trump rally, the Biden campaign tried to cut back campaign activity, including taking down television ads, a campaign official said."

Numerous Democrats said Saturday the assassination attempt at former President Donald Trump's rally in Pennsylvania would put a halt to any efforts to replace President Joe Biden. At least for now.

“I think it’s over,” a Biden ally said. “You just lose all momentum.”

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“It’s likely the effort to dislodge Biden has ended. He’s not going to voluntarily step aside in this moment,” the second ally said. “Biden demonstrated he’s going to fight.”

It all came against the backdrop of a growing chorus of lawmakers who called on Biden to step aside from seeking the nomination. That was on top of scores of donors who turned off the spigot after a debate at which Biden repeatedly faltered, at times struggling to even finish sentences. Last week, even those who were part of Biden's re-election efforts expressed doubts that Biden had a path.

All along, critics were pressed for time if they were to try to oust Biden from his perch. The Democratic National Convention is scheduled in mid-August, and a virtual vote for the nomination is expected to take place weeks earlier.

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Swammerdami said:

pood said:

Michael Moore on Biden.

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As usual, Michael Moore is spot-on.

Biden was not well. Biden did not possess the faculties he needed. Something was wrong. Did nobody see this in the days leading up to the collapse? Did not a single person raise their voice to ask, “Maybe we shouldn’t do this to him?”

But they did do it to him. And the repercussions that we, the world, and the generations after us will have to suffer through are not even part of the discussion this week. It’s all about making sure he stays in the race — and nothing about the risk to his life he is facing as they push him to soldier onward.

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Maybe they did. Biden is a big boy and can speak up for himself. I'm sure he was at least capable of that. If not, it again calls into question his fitness. No one should know better than he if he is in any condition to perform.

TV and credit cards said:

Swammerdami said:

pood said:

Michael Moore on Biden.

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As usual, Michael Moore is spot-on.

Biden was not well. Biden did not possess the faculties he needed. Something was wrong. Did nobody see this in the days leading up to the collapse? Did not a single person raise their voice to ask, “Maybe we shouldn’t do this to him?”

But they did do it to him. And the repercussions that we, the world, and the generations after us will have to suffer through are not even part of the discussion this week. It’s all about making sure he stays in the race — and nothing about the risk to his life he is facing as they push him to soldier onward.

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Maybe they did. Biden is a big boy and can speak up for himself. I'm sure he was at least capable of that. If not, it again calls into question his fitness. No one should know better than he if he is in any condition to perform.

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At the end of Mike's long post, he said:

And in 2020, he knew, even if most of his supporters weren’t sure about her as his VP, and even if her platform was essentially Bernie’s, that she was the one — and the first of many women and people of color who would lead us to our better selves.

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That sounds nice. Just like his comment which can be boiled down to "it's okay grandpa, we're going to put you in a nice apartment with people around to take care of you."

But it ignores a simple fact. In 2020, Democratic voters rejected Harris as a Presidential candidate. They're still "not sure" about her as VP, and the administration seemed to grasp that, keeping her profile relatively low. Now you're going to tell the Democratic Party: "We know you didn't want her 4 years ago, and you're not that hot on her now, but she's gonna be your candidate and you're gonna have to deal with it."

And you thought Hillary lost because too many Democratic voters stayed home? Oh boy...

The other thing is that right now the Republicans are united and energized by their God-king almost getting Second Amendmented. They're going to raise a metric shit ton of money, and this nice little thing where Trump has "been changed by his experience" will wear off super quick and they'll go right back to "Biden is a pedophile, a senile old man, and also an evil mastermind." If the Democrats turn on Biden, they're going to exploit that and make their opponents seem weak and in disarray...which they are. If Harris becomes the nominee, there will be a chorus of dog-whistles and probably some good old fashioned blatant racism.

Moore did a good job (before he really started the hand-wringing) of making the case that the Democrats need to make forcefully over the next few months. Biden spent:

3 years of being the most progressive President of my lifetime. That’s right, my friends, there has been more action taken, through executive orders and legislation, to protect the environment, more government officials appointed who are, in their heart of hearts, Democratic Socialists, more serious funding to lift millions out of poverty, more support for labor unions, libraries, single mothers and college students deep in debt. And he has had this fervent, almost religious zeal to fight greed and obscene profits due to a true compassion he has for those dealt a bad hand in life — and he has had more of all of that than all the good presidents like Kennedy, Obama, and Carter were able to muster.

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Yes, he does seem to be slowing down physically, though I don't think (as Moore does) that he's had a stroke or is suffering from dementia. Yet he also has a record to run on, while Trump has "I got shot." Well Donny, there are grade school kids who've had it worse than you.

Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race? | Rebecca Solnit | The Guardian - Sat 6 Jul 2024 10.00 EDT - Rebecca Solnit - "Yes, Biden had a bad debate – but so did Trump. The media is once again repeating the mistakes of 2016"

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic.

...
“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media knows how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the republic. So for the most part they don’t.

...
Although the Biden administration seems to have run extremely well for three and a half years, with a strong cabinet, few scandals and little turnover, a thriving economy and some major legislative accomplishments, the narrative the punditocracy has created suggest we should ignore this record and decide on the basis of the 90-minute debate and reference to newly surfaced swarms of anonymous sources that Biden is incompetent.

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Heritage Foundation preparing for legal battles if Biden pulled from nomination | Fox News - June 29, 2024 10:38am EDT - "At least three swing states — Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — could restrict Biden's removal from the ballot"

What nastiness.

Important dates in the 2024 presidential race - Ballotpedia

Deadline to run for president, 2024 - Ballotpedia
Most of the deadlines for the primaries were late last year or early this year, and most of the deadlines for independent candidates are in this month or the next one (July, August).

I think Michael Moore is a real asshole and that rant of his isn't going to help the Democrats. He doesn't even know what a "mini stroke", actually called an tia, transient ischemic attack, is. TIAs don't do any permanent cognitive damage at all, although sometimes they can be precursors to actual strokes, aka CVAs, cerebral vascular attacks. Where did Moore get his medical degree when did he do an MRI or Cat scan on Biden? For that matter, even strokes don't always cause any cognitive impairment. I've had patients who has some minor physical damage from them, but were sharp as a tack. Is Moors sure, he hasn't had some cognitive brain damage himself? He doesn't look very healthy to me, at least not compared to Biden.

I doubt it matters who runs against Trump at this point, but if enough Dems who hold public offices want him to leave the race, they need to have a private "come to Jesus meeting", as it's often referred to in the South, with him and point out why he'd be better off retiring instead of putting himself and the party through a lot of unnecessary stress. All this pearl clutching and exasperation over Biden is only helping Trump. Get your act together Democrats and support. your candidate, even if it's a Biden/Harris ticket.

lpetrich said:

Heritage Foundation preparing for legal battles if Biden pulled from nomination | Fox News - June 29, 2024 10:38am EDT - "At least three swing states — Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — could restrict Biden's removal from the ballot"

What nastiness.

Important dates in the 2024 presidential race - Ballotpedia

Deadline to run for president, 2024 - Ballotpedia
Most of the deadlines for the primaries were late last year or early this year, and most of the deadlines for independent candidates are in this month or the next one (July, August).

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Biden can't be pulled from the ticket. He'd have to leave voluntarily.

southernhybrid said:

I think Michael Moore is a real asshole and that rant of his isn't going to help the Democrats. He doesn't even know what a "mini stroke", actually called an tia, transient ischemic attack, is. TIAs don't do any permanent cognitive damage at all, although sometimes they can be precursors to actual strokes, aka CVAs, cerebral vascular attacks. Where did Moore get his medical degree when did he do an MRI or Cat scan on Biden? For that matter, even strokes don't always cause any cognitive impairment. I've had patients who has some minor physical damage from them, but were sharp as a tack. Is Moors sure, he hasn't had some cognitive brain damage himself? He doesn't look very healthy to me, at least not compared to Biden.

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I met Mike back in the 90s when he spoke at a radio conference. He actually worked at a station in Flint. We talked about that a bit, and traded a few emails back and forth, but he's changed a lot since then. He was a happy warrior who used humor to make his points (TV Nation was brilliant), but then he won an Oscar and started taking himself way too seriously. He certainly has no business diagnosing strokes, and yeah, it doesn't always cause cognitive impairment. Will Shortz, NPR's "Puzzle Master" had one awhile back, but he's returned to Morning Edition Sunday, and while you can hear that his speaking voice was affected (well, I can), his considerable cognitive ability hasn't slowed down one bit.

If Biden was really as impaired as Moore and others have said, then we surely would have heard more rumblings about it from the NATO summit. IIRC, our allies were adept at expressing their feelings about Trump without actually saying it, so if any of them (Orban?) had serious doubts about Biden's ability to lead the alliance, we'd know about it by now.

Ford said:

If Biden was really as impaired as Moore and others have said, then we surely would have heard more rumblings about it from the NATO summit. IIRC, our allies were adept at expressing their feelings about Trump without actually saying it, so if any of them (Orban?) had serious doubts about Biden's ability to lead the alliance, we'd know about it by now.

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I don't think this necessarily follows. You need to remember that Trump's brash and boastful demeanour commanded very little respect whereas it would be the height of disrespect for any foreign leader to draw attention to Biden's obvious frailty.

lpetrich said:

Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race? | Rebecca Solnit | The Guardian - Sat 6 Jul 2024 10.00 EDT - Rebecca Solnit - "Yes, Biden had a bad debate – but so did Trump. The media is once again repeating the mistakes of 2016"

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic.

...
“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media knows how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the republic. So for the most part they don’t.

...
Although the Biden administration seems to have run extremely well for three and a half years, with a strong cabinet, few scandals and little turnover, a thriving economy and some major legislative accomplishments, the narrative the punditocracy has created suggest we should ignore this record and decide on the basis of the 90-minute debate and reference to newly surfaced swarms of anonymous sources that Biden is incompetent.

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None of this, in fact, is true. The mainstream media, especially the giants like the NY Times and WaPo, have been skewering Trump for years and years and years. As I pointed out in other posts, MAGATs. DON’T. CARE. Any revelation by the mainstream media is dismissed as propaganda from the “lamestream” media by tens of millions of Americans.

The news media is covering the Biden story because IT IS NEWS. That’s what the news media does — it covers, um, NEWS.

As to pundits — talking heads who offer opinions — they are all over the map. This is exactly what you would expect in a nation that remains a semblance of a democracy, a rainbow of voices.

Ford said:

Yes, he does seem to be slowing down physically, though I don't think (as Moore does) that he's had a stroke or is suffering from dementia. Yet he also has a record to run on, while Trump has "I got shot." Well Donny, there are grade school kids who've had it worse than you.

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Thank you for inadvertently reminding us all of the gun problem plaguing too many US schools - children being shot.
And Trump did get shot.

Tigers! said:

Ford said:

Yes, he does seem to be slowing down physically, though I don't think (as Moore does) that he's had a stroke or is suffering from dementia. Yet he also has a record to run on, while Trump has "I got shot." Well Donny, there are grade school kids who've had it worse than you.

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Thank you for inadvertently reminding us all of the gun problem plaguing too many US schools - children being shot.
And Trump did get shot.

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He did. And suddenly they're like "where is all this violence coming from?" And it's more than just schools.

We're five years on from when a gunman shot up a WalMart near the mall in El Paso where I used to shop. Seven years on from the time I stayed up all night waiting for updates from my friends who were in the Las Vegas shooting. There are Columbine survivors who are in their 40s. When I see people talking about Trump like "he's so brave," I want to puke. He had Secret Service agents mere feet from him who protected him within seconds. Uvalde students had to wait hours for police to finally get the nerve to enter the school.

But apparently we're going to hold up Trump as some sort of hero/martyr. I hate this timeline.

Ford said:

I met Mike back in the 90s when he spoke at a radio conference. He actually worked at a station in Flint.

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I used to listen to his radio show every Sunday morning. He was very influential to my political beliefs.

Ford said:

He did. And suddenly they're like "where is all this violence coming from?"

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When the next words out of his mouth after being shot are "Fight! Fight! Fight!" the answer that question seems pretty fucking obvious to me. We've turned our popular culture into one big dogfight. And as in this case, the audience is in as much if not more danger than the target.

Politesse said:

Ford said:

He did. And suddenly they're like "where is all this violence coming from?"

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When the next words out of his mouth after being shot are "Fight! Fight! Fight!" the answer that question seems pretty fucking obvious to me. We've turned our popular culture into one big dogfight. And as in this case, the audience is in as much if not more danger than the target.

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A good reminder that words have consequences for any and all that utter them. No matter whom they be.

pood said:

lpetrich said:

Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race? | Rebecca Solnit | The Guardian - Sat 6 Jul 2024 10.00 EDT - Rebecca Solnit - "Yes, Biden had a bad debate – but so did Trump. The media is once again repeating the mistakes of 2016"

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic.

...
“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media knows how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the republic. So for the most part they don’t.

...
Although the Biden administration seems to have run extremely well for three and a half years, with a strong cabinet, few scandals and little turnover, a thriving economy and some major legislative accomplishments, the narrative the punditocracy has created suggest we should ignore this record and decide on the basis of the 90-minute debate and reference to newly surfaced swarms of anonymous sources that Biden is incompetent.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

None of this, in fact, is true. The mainstream media, especially the giants like the NY Times and WaPo, have been skewering Trump for years and years and years. As I pointed out in other posts, MAGATs. DON’T. CARE. Any revelation by the mainstream media is dismissed as propaganda from the “lamestream” media by tens of millions of Americans.

The news media is covering the Biden story because IT IS NEWS. That’s what the news media does — it covers, um, NEWS.

As to pundits — talking heads who offer opinions — they are all over the map. This is exactly what you would expect in a nation that remains a semblance of a democracy, a rainbow of voices.

Click to expand...

The thing about news is that it is new, it's in the name, but the alleged news about Biden is several weeks old. It is also a matter of spin.
Take the alleged Trump critical coverage. There is a lot of new material continuously that they could concentrate on, but it is either ignored or watered down, just reported on at best on one day, and/or buried on page ten or whatever.