Now we know why Joe Biden is *really* running again

Three words: Donald John Trump

(President Joe Biden)

If you had asked me in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election whether Joe Biden would run for a 2nd term, I would have told you probably not.

And I would have arrived at that conclusion based largely on stuff Biden said during the campaign!

“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said in March 2020 as he was wrapping up his party’s nomination. “There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.”

(He was surrounded by Gretchen Whitmer, Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker at the time.)

A few months before that pronouncement, POLITICO ran a story with this lede:

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term.

While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.

And as far back as 2019, Biden was — quite clearly — waffling about the prospect of running again if he won.

“I feel good and all I can say is, watch me, you'll see,” Biden said in October 2019. "It doesn’t mean I would run a second term. I'm not going to make that judgment at this moment.”

Throughout the first few years of his term, nothing changed. Biden, when asked, would insist he felt good — but that he hadn’t made up his mind on whether to run again.

Then, somewhat suddenly, that changed. The whispers coming out of the White House were suddenly much more forceful — barring a late reversal, Biden was going to seek a second term.

By April, he was officially in the race.

“We — you and I — together we’re turning things around and we’re doing it in a big way,” Biden said. “It’s time to finish the job. Finish the job.”

What changed? Well, now we know — thanks to none other than Joe Biden!

“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” Biden said at a campaign fundraiser on Tuesday, adding that Democrats “cannot let [Trump] win.”

The White House — and Biden himself — tried to clean up the comment almost immediately after he said it. Asked later in the day whether he would be running if Trump wasn’t, Biden responded: “I expect so, but look — he is running, and I have to run.”

I’m reminded here of the great Michael Kinsley — and this line he wrote in particular: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”

That’s, obviously, what we are dealing with here.

The fact is that in the runup to the 2020 election and in the wake of that election, Biden clearly believed that in beating Trump he would excise the former president from the body politic — and that, in so doing, things would return to some semblance of normal.

“The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke,” Biden said on the campaign trail in 2019. “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

Well, no.

Trump never, really, went away. He spent the months after the election insisting it had been stolen from him. And making clear to anyone who asked that he planned to run again in 2024.

Just over two years after losing to Biden — in mid-November 2022 — Trump was back running for president.

“I have no doubt that by 2024, it will sadly be much worse and they will see clearly what has happened and is happening to our country – and the voting will be much different,” he said in announcing his candidacy.

It’s not a coincidence — there are NO coincidences in politics — that just as it was becoming undeniable that Trump was going to run again, Biden’s uncertainty about a 2nd term disappeared.

Which makes all the sense in the world. After all, Biden’s entire first campaign was premised on the idea that a) Trump represented an existential threat to the American way of life and b) he was the only candidate who could beat the incumbent.

As far back as November 2017, those were the guiding forces of a possible Biden campaign. As POLITICO wrote:

Joe Biden thinks it’s critical that Donald Trump not get a second term — and though it’s early, he doesn’t yet see anyone else who could stop that from happening.

So, he’s been telling people privately, that might mean he’ll just have to run himself.

After beginning the year both teasing a 2020 bid and ruling one out — sometimes on the same day — Biden in recent months has shifted unmistakably in favor of running, say multiple people who’ve been in touch with the former vice president and his team.

For the first time in what would be the sixth presidential campaign that he’s either seriously flirted with or launched, Biden sees an argument for a candidacy for which he is the only answer: An elder statesman who can help repair the damage and divisions in the country and around the world, unite the competing wings of the Democratic Party, and appeal to traditional Democratic voters who fled last year for Trump.

And Biden nodded to that reality in a video announcing his candidacy.

“I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time,” he said. “But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation — who we are — and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.”

Biden was drawn into the race by the presence of Trump (sprinkled with some lingering regret that he didn’t run in 2016). It then checks out that one of the prime drivers (if not the prime driver) of Biden’s decision to run again in 2024 was, again, Trump.

Inherent in Biden’s acknowledgement that he might not be running again if Trump wasn’t in the race is this: He does not believe there is anyone else in the Democratic party who could beat the billionaire businessman.

Which, as I have written, I agree with.

Yes, it’s easy to focus on Biden’s middling job approval numbers and concerns in the electorate about his age. But, I think that any other Democrat who would step in for Biden would have at least an equal amount of issues (albeit different issues).

Take Kamala Harris, the vice president — and the person most likely to be the Democratic nominee in a Biden-less race.

Two national polls were conducted last month testing Harris versus Trump. In one, Trump led by 12; in the other his lead was 5. Harris’ approval in an NBC News poll over the summer was just 32%, the lowest rating ever measured for a VP in the survey.

That’s not exactly a rosy outlook!

And while their supporters can make the case for Buttigieg or Whitmer or California Gov. Gavin Newsom, I can guarantee you each of them would have challenges in beating Trump too.

Whether or not you believe that, we now know FOR CERTAIN that Joe Biden does. He is running in 2024 for the same reason he ran in 2020: To stop Donald Trump.