It's not quite the same as 2016 because then, we had no incumbent President running. It was a blank slate on both sides.

Yes, Biden had a bad debate – but so did Trump.

"Bad" is not nearly as descriptive of a word as is necessary here. Biden had very low expectations and somehow fell short of them. Even worse, he fell short in the exact, perfect way to feed into Republican talking points about him having dementia, in by far the worst way he or any other president has ever done, at the most important moment, with literally years to prepare for that moment.

I think it's not an exaggeration to say that 2024 Joe Biden is the single worst major party candidate at winning an election in the history of the US. Name someone worse - I know some people have been totally crushed in elections, but you gotta judge those results relative to the competition. Look at all that's happened with Trump during and since the 2016 election. In 2016, there was no Stormy Daniels, no sexual assault verdict, no fraud verdict, no tragicomic failed attempt to steal the election from the very voters who he's asking to vote for him again. Forget 1980 Jimmy Carter, I think current, 99-year-old hospice patient Jimmy Carter would have no problem beating Trump. The fact that Biden is behind proves he's the worst politician in history, and by far.

Because he’s a horrible candidate and I think there’s a good chance he loses to trump. It’s terrifying. If he loses fuck all of you.

Because it worked so well for Humphrey in his 1968 win.

Or they're Republicans and dirty pool is okay by them.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic.

Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.

It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits.

The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.

I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented).

But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

The original article contains 1,298 words, the summary contains 260 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

The natural ramifications of priming the electorate to a binary decision where anyone not supporting Biden has to be jeered as a secret a republican-fascist-russian-chinese-communist .