How Nancy Pelosi ripped the Band-Aid from Democrats to force Joe Biden out of office

In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote an influential book entitled The Black Swan: The Effect of the Highly Improbable. Taleb argued that black swan events (e.g., 9/11 or the development of Google) have three criteria in common: they are extremely rare, extremely impactful, and—despite being outliers—explainable and even predictable in retrospect.

Both Donald Trump's felony conviction and Joe Biden's late retreat in favor of a dynamic Kamala Harris will be considered black swans if Harris wins the election. These events were not only improbable and impactful; They were also predictable in retrospect. Why shouldn't a criminal president be held accountable and a frail president not forced to resign? On the other hand, if Trump wins, the trial and passing of the torch to Harris will disappear as “black swan” events, while his near-assassination will count as such.

Should Trump lose the 2024 election, the defining moment will have been his decision on May 15 to agree to Biden's request to debate in June. Biden's team hoped to restart the campaign with an unprecedented mid-year debate. This misjudgment doomed his candidacy. Trump might have doomed his country if he hadn't waited until the fall to hold the debate. Then it would have been too late for the Democrats to replace Biden.

I have a heads up about what could happen. On Father's Day, eleven days before During the historic CNN debate on June 27, I spoke with a senior Democratic senator who told me that if Biden performed poorly in the debate, Democrats would have to find another presidential candidate. Surprised by this, I immediately broke (again) my New Year's resolution not to scheme against Biden.

From the moment the dead president took the stage, the debate ended in fiasco. The idea that he would still be president at age 86 if re-elected in 2028 was troubling to many of his supporters. Trump steamrolled him for half an hour. Biden was so weak that everyone ignored not only Trump's dozens of lies, but also his viciousness, which we now seem to take for granted. He even had the courage to go after Nancy Pelosi for her failure to protect the Capitol on January 6, when he incited his mob to kill her and his vice president and watched television for 187 minutes without requesting help. Biden has said privately that Trump is “a sick idiot” for repeatedly joking about the home invasion that nearly cost Paul Pelosi his life. Why couldn't the president manage to say a less mundane version of this in the debate? Why was he so bad?

The answer was obvious. Age had robbed Biden of what political scientist Richard Neustadt had taught me 45 years ago: the only real power a president has: the power to persuade. He had lost his connection to the American people at least eighteen months earlier. Now it was clear that he couldn't be Harry Truman, who came from behind and defeated Tom Dewey in 1948. He wasn't up to it.

My family couldn't bear to watch the debate until the end. So I did, and I stayed up until 2 a.m. writing the first of three texts New York Times Opinion Pieces advocating an open audition for a new candidate. This afternoon, that Just published a historic editorial calling on Biden to withdraw and calling his nomination a “risky gamble.” Ezra Klein, Crooked Media, James Carville, David Remnick, Michelle Goldberg and Tom Friedman were among the first major voices to insist that the president must resign immediately, with David Axelrod's view that Biden's chances were “very slim” also included had a great influence.