In mid-June, former President Barack Obama held a Biden campaign fundraiser with Hollywood star and political activist George Clooney in Los Angeles. It was two weeks before President Joe Biden’s first debate with Donald Trump and two months from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where delegates planned to officially nominate Biden as the candidate to take on Trump for a second time. During the event, Obama escorted a lost, wandering and frozen Biden off of the stage. The video went viral.
The spectacle took place against the backdrop of a bomb dropped by Special Counsel Robert Hur in February.
"We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," Hur wrote in a lengthy report, explaining why Biden wasn’t being charged for mishandling classified information. "Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness."
Hur’s statements were strongly refuted by the White House, with Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisting Biden “runs circles” around his staff and categorized questions about his mental fitness as “cheap fakes” conspiracy theories.
Then in late June, Biden took the debate stage with former President Donald Trump. The veil was off and the entire country could see what the White House had been hiding: the Emperor had no clothes. Biden was cooked and the fallout was immediate.
Behind the scenes, Obama started making moves and handed out the knives for placement in Biden’s back. It was a gamble he, and his circle of influence, hoped would pay off.
On July 10, Clooney published an op-ed in The New York Times calling for Biden to drop out.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe 'big F-ing deal' Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote. “As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, whom we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question…Is it fair to point these things out? It has to be. This is about age. Nothing more. But also nothing that can be reversed. We are not going to win in November with this president.”
The pressure kept building, with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Democrats on Capitol Hill piling on.
On July 21, after nearly two weeks of insisting he could beat Trump and that he was staying in the race, Biden left the campaign through a letter posted on X. Vice President Kamala Harris, a woman who had to drop out of the 2020 race for the White House before a single primary vote was cast, quickly became the new nominee.
After a few days of consideration and debate among Democrats over holding an open convention to find a suitable candidate to beat Trump, Obama endorsed her candidacy. Former First Lady Michelle Obama joined him.
But with just 11 days to go until Election Day 2024, Harris keeps falling behind and she’s losing ground. Not just in the swing states, but in the national popular vote. The more the campaign puts her out for interviews and conversations with voters, her popularity decreases.
In recent days, Biden and Obama were caught speaking about the state of the race at the funeral for Ethel Kennedy. They lamented about a weak Harris candidacy, with Biden appearing to say, “I’m stronger than her.”
He's not the only one making that statement.
“What if Joe Biden was the better candidate all along?” The Hill asks.
Obama made a big bet by pushing out Biden. With Election Day approaching and as Trump surges, the gamble may not pay off.