Joe Biden’s Replacement Must Embrace Economic Populism

Joe Biden is out of the race, and a second Trump term would be a nightmare. To avoid it, Democrats need more than a candidate who can complete sentences. That candidate must put pro-worker policies at the heart of their campaign.

By Ben Burgis, Jacobin

Just over three weeks ago, Joe Biden and Donald Trump met for a debate. The most devastating moment was when Biden said, “I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the … the … the … total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.” Trump responded, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he knows either.” The general impression, even for many erstwhile Biden loyalists, was that if this man were a private citizen, his children would be having a difficult conversation about moving him to an assisted living facility.

Today, he finally threw in the towel. We’ve already heard a lot of pablum about how this was an act of extraordinary patriotism — that Biden sacrificed his personal ambitions for the sake of saving the country from Trump. The reality is that he stubbornly clung to the nomination for weeks after it was abundantly clear to all but his most fanatical loyalists that he was incapable of winning. We’ve also heard a lot of tributes to his presidency that leave out his shameful decision to provide diplomatic cover and material assistance to Israel in its genocidal rampage in Gaza that has displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s population and killed more children than had been killed in all the war zones in the world in recent years.

Joe Biden looks into the distance with a blue curtain hanging behind him

But you don’t have to give Joe Biden praise that he absolutely does not deserve to recognize that it’s good that he dropped out of the 2024 race. A Trump victory would be a disaster. At the debate on June 27, Trump outflanked Biden from the right on Palestine, bizarrely saying that Biden had become a Palestinian — “a bad Palestinian.” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is rooting for a Trump victory, knowing that the former president would give Israel an enthusiastic green light for far worse slaughter than we’ve seen in the past ten months. And all indications suggest that Trump’s return to the White House would unleash a wave of domestic cruelty.