Donald Trump Should Drop Out

My take on the dumb "Biden Should Drop Out" writing genre.

In the last year, an entirely new genre of opinion writing in America has littered political opinion pages with a fatuous and frankly silly argument that the solution to the existential threat Donald Trump poses to the survival of America’s constitutional Republic and our tenuous democracy is right in front of us.

The central predicate of their endlessly smug bleatings is that Joe Biden should drop out of the 2024 Presidential race.

Oh. Just that. What could go wrong?

They’ve all come up with a brilliant observation -- so novel, so clever -- that Joe Biden is Old and Must Go. Leave it to these highly credentialed, Ivy-educated solons to discover a critical fact that no one else had noticed: Joe Biden is 81. Who could have imagined it would take this long for the glorious sweep of their intellectual erudition to alight on this astounding revelation?

You know, except everyone in America.

Essentially the product of elite opinion writers, this dumb trope has burned even brighter of late, as the mental energy to entertain the dreams of a Biden replacement has killed billions of otherwise functional neurons in the promotion of one of the most irritating and feckless political arguments of my lifetime.

The “Should Biden drop out?” stories from otherwise intelligent people writing on the pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Newsweek, Washington Post, and elsewhere all come across as intellectually, politically, morally, and practically flawed, to say nothing of utterly unrealistic.

The genre pretends that Joe Biden is running in a vacuum and isn’t the only man who has beaten Donald Trump. In their minds, a long list of candidates could easily be drop-in replacements for Biden, LRUs ready from day one. In their minds, Democrat X could simply and cleanly pick up the baton of Democratic Party leadership and ascend to the Oval Office without missing a beat in January.

The promoters of this absurdist fantasy are people whose knowledge of campaigns, elections, and government seems to reflect not experience in politics but from excessive viewing of The West Wing and House of Cards. They want to sound canny, clever, and cynical.

Instead, they sound like the writers of a rejected Veep script. This family of writing has a smug, sure, and breezily confident belief that their drawing-room machinations to replace Biden can quickly and easily sweep aside every political reality.

As Lawrence O’Donnell demonstrated in a bravura 28-minute segment, the delta between elite opinion fantasy and reality on this truly bad idea is vast and unbridgeable. The spurious assumptions in these pieces about a Biden replacement fail at practicability, legality, and sensibility, but importantly, they fail politically. Every one falls wildly short of the mark, but it hasn’t seemed to stem the tide of stupidity.

It astounds me, but in a moment where a contest will absolutely be between two old men whose identities we know to a certitude, the intellectual horsepower of America’s knowledge engineer class is so passionately to devoted to forcing Joe Biden to leave the race...and expending almost no energy to arguing why Donald Trump should.

The catalog of Donald Trump’s deficits seems curiously missing from their writings as if they believe he’s so politically puissant inside his MAGA Party that no argument will suffice to influence him. A cynic might argue they just want the clicks, but it couldn’t be that, could it?

With that, allow me to offer a modest inversion of this genre with the argument that Donald Trump should be the one to drop out of the 2024 Presidential race. Here are just a handful of areas of Trump’s weaknesses: