A few things seem clear, and much else murky, after the seismic shift that occurred on Thursday.
Donald Trump, more because of Thursday than by encouraging public polling of recent weeks, runs as the favorite in the 2024 presidential election. A victory by him in November would mark the greatest political comeback in U.S. history.
There seems a good chance — perhaps not pick-’em odds but something approaching that — that the Democratic Party will nominate someone other than Joe Biden. The rumblings given articulation by Paul Begala, David Axelrod, and other party heavies represent what many Democrats think — age strips Biden of energy and clouds his mind and the prospect of him in the presidency at 86 terrifies — but do not say. Whether more have the courage to say the emperor has no brains signals whether he stays or goes.
It still seems more likely than not that he refuses to bow out and Democrats stick with him. One senses this situation calls for something akin to Barry Goldwater meeting with Richard Nixon to break the news in the summer of 1974 that many Republicans would no longer defend him. Party bigwigs — to include people like Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin, Chris Coons, Jim Clyburn — need to meet with him and tell him to take one for the team and announce that he does not seek a second term.
Biden, a stubborn man angered by allegations of senility, would need to assent to all this. That seems the iffiest proposition of all.
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.
