July 21 (UPI) — After weeks of public scrutiny over his fitness for office and internal pressure from his own party, President Joe Biden announced Sunday he is stepping out of the race.
“And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”
The 81-year-old president’s announcement comes after repeated insistences that he would stay in the race despite an increasing number of Democratic lawmakers calling for him to step down.
Biden has been facing pushback from his own party ever since his concerning performance against Donald Trump during the first presidential debate in June in which the president at times seemed confused and struggled to articulate his policies and ideas.
Since then, Biden had been holding campaign rallies from Dover to Las Vegas and hosting high-profile TV interviews in a losing fight to promote the image that conveys that he is capable of commanding the White House for another four years. Most recently, he took an interview with NBC News host Lester Holt, saying his “mental acuity has been pretty damn good.”
“I understand why people say, ‘God, he’s 81 years old. Whoa. What’s he gonna be when he’s 83 years old, 84 years?’ It’s a legitimate question to ask.”
Biden’s resignation also comes amid concerns for his physical health. The White House on Wednesday announced he had tested positive for COVID-19 and was self-isolating but still would be able to carry out his presidential duties.
Biden’s debate performance in June prompted a surge of Democratic voices to urge him to step down and appoint a successor to beat Trump in November.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is running for the late Sen. Diane Feinstein‘s seat, was one of the most recent Democratic lawmakers to break with Biden, arguing that if he loses to Trump, Democrats could lose more than the White House.
“Our nation is at a crossroads,” Schiff said in a statement released Wednesday. “A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy.”
But probably the sharpest blow came from Biden’s former running mate Barack Obama. While he didn’t explicitly call on his former vice president to drop out, he reportedly recently expressed doubt in his ability to keep Trump out of the White House.
Political successes, challenges
Before the debate controversy, Biden’s campaign had to grapple with his diminishing support among young voters due to his support of Israel’s heavy-handed campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
Still, the Biden campaign had harbored hope that voters would rely on the president’s political successes in supporting him at the ballot box in November.
Biden has touted progressive victories during his presidency, including his appointment of Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court in U.S. history.
A major talking point of Biden’s campaign was his administration’s historic $16 billion investment in historically Black colleges and universities, with Biden once jokingly saying, “I’ve got more Morehouse men in my administration than Morehouse.”
One of his first actions in office was to sign the American Rescue Plan Act, which boosted several emergency relief programs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
His multi-trillion-dollar “Build Back Better” infrastructure plan ultimately failed in Congress but aspects of it saw new life with the Inflation Reduction Act, which he signed into law in 2022.
The latter part of Biden’s presidency was marred by the Gaza war that broke out after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel and triggered a brutal response from Israeli forces in the enclave.
Biden continued to support Israel’s campaign despite intense opposition domestically and internationally. The highly-touted Gaza pier that was meant to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid into the enclave ultimately failed when it broke away from the shoreline and U.S. forces were unable to reconnect it.
During its active use, the pier brought in nearly 20 million pounds of humanitarian supplies, according to the Department of Defense.
Family tragedies
Biden first came to Capitol Hill when he was elected to the Senate in 1972. He had two unsuccessful runs for Democratic presidential nominee but got tapped in 2008 by Obama as his running mate and later vice president.
His early days on Capitol Hill were marred by the loss of half his family. Just a few weeks after his arrival to the Senate, his first wife, Neilia Hunter, and their 1-year-old daughter Naomi were killed when their car was hit by a semi-truck. Their sons Beau and Hunter, ages 3 and 2 at the time, were in the car and survived with non-life-threatening injuries.
Now a single father with two injured sons to care for, Biden considered resigning, but was persuaded not to.
Biden in a 2020 CNN interview said the tragedy led him to contemplate suicide, but “what saved me was really my boys.”
In his memoir Promises to Keep, Biden credited his second wife, Jill Jacobs, whom he married in 1977, to re-igniting his interest in politics.
His elder son Beau would grow to become the attorney general of Delaware and serve in Iraq as an officer in the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
Beau Biden died in 2015 from brain cancer, which his father believed was caused by his exposure to military burn pits in Iraq. He was 46.
“Beau just made me promise, he said, ‘Dad, I’m going to be OK, no matter what happens,'” Biden said in an interview. “This was just before he died. He said, ‘Dad, you got to promise me you’re going to be OK.’ He said, ‘Dad, look at me. Look me in the eye, Dad. Give me your word as a Biden, Dad, you’re going to be OK.'”
Son Hunter went on to become a lobbyist and businessman with involvement in Burisma Holdings, a major Ukrainian natural gas company that has been a key focus in House Republicans’ long-drawn-out impeachment probe alleging he used his foreign business dealings to enrich himself and his father.
Hunter Biden, in his memoir Beautiful Things, wrote candidly about his decades of drug and alcohol abuse, which he said arose from the death of his mother and sister.
He recently was found guilty of felony charges from purchasing a gun in 2018 while he was struggling with drug addiction and faces a fall court date in California for felony tax charges stemming from his business dealings.
The president, despite his lifetime of hardship and loss, always maintained a public image of positivity and empathy. Journalist James Traub in the New York Times Magazine wrote, “Biden is the kind of fundamentally happy person who can be as generous toward others as he is to himself.”
Long before his age and mental acuity came into question, Biden had been prone to political gaffes. He always struggled with a stutter, which he said he learned to mitigate at a young age by reciting poetry to himself.
When he announced his third bid for president in 2019, he said he “felt a sense of duty” to prevent a second Trump administration.
See Biden’s announcement letter below.
