Confined to a spare bedroom in his vacation home and fighting off bouts of coughing from Covid, President Biden was exhausted when he turned in for the night on Saturday, July 20. Whether he slept soundly or fitfully or not at all, people close to him said he took the long hours by himself to mull over the historic decision he was about to make.
He had just been through a brutal two days in Rehoboth Beach, Del., as he huddled with his wife, Jill Biden, and his closest aides, who rotated from a screened-in porch to a sitting area off the dining room.
Steve Ricchetti, the president’s eyes and ears on Capitol Hill, and Mike Donilon, his chief strategist, had shared internal polling with the president that Saturday that mirrored what Americans had been seeing for weeks: Mr. Biden was falling behind, nationally and in key battleground states.
There was still a path to victory, they advised him, but the fight would be ugly. The president would be pitted against his donors, half of his party in Congress and Democratic voters who had concluded that he was too old to win.
For more than three weeks, Biden had insisted he would stay in the race. Only the “Lord Almighty,” he said, could get him to drop out.
But by that Saturday evening, something had shifted.
It was not just about the polls, people close to Biden say. Despite everything, Biden believed he could still claim the Democratic nomination and beat former President Donald J. Trump. Aides say that he still believes that.
What began to change the president’s mind, people familiar with his thinking say, was the realization that if he stayed in the race, he was in for a lonely battle that would rip apart the Democratic Party, the cause he had served nearly his entire life. Would a man who views himself as the ultimate consensus builder in Washington want to wage an intraparty war that would run counter to the fabric of who he is?
That day, Biden asked a key question.
“If we were going to do it,” Biden asked his two advisers, “what would we say?”
A statement was drafted, known only to four other people: the first lady and her closest aide, Anthony Bernal; the president’s son Hunter; and Annie Tomasini, the gatekeeper at the White House and the president’s deputy chief of staff.
But first, he wanted a few hours to think. At 9 p.m. that evening, the president excused himself. It was time to call it a night.
To many outsiders, it seemed almost inevitable that Biden would have to quit the race.
For weeks, polls had shown large majorities of voters desperate for a new choice. Day after day, more Democratic lawmakers publicly called for him to step aside, saying he could not win. Donors canceled fund-raisers and stopped giving money. Hollywood celebrities and liberal TV pundits revoked their endorsements.
Yet those inside the small circle of family members and advisers who were with the president at the very end insist that the story of how Biden went from defiance to acquiescence was not about convincing him that he was destined to lose. That never happened, according to people close enough to Biden to know his thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s decision-making in the final hours.
There was no meeting of the Biden family, as there had been in prior years when Biden had to make big political decisions. Ever since the debate with Trump in Atlanta three weeks earlier raised serious questions about the president’s fitness, his children and grandchildren had said they were behind him no matter what he decided to do next. The circle around Biden in the final days had shrunk to its smallest circumference: just his wife and his closest aides. Hunter Biden, who lives in Los Angeles, called in regularly.
People close to the president said that no one hid the grim realities from him, but that he never stopped believing that he would have been the party’s nominee had he stayed in the race and that he could have beaten Trump. Just a day before he drafted his letter in Rehoboth Beach, Biden received a call from Ron Klain, the president’s first chief of staff, who urged him to stay in the race.
“That’s my intention,” Biden told Mr. Klain on Friday evening.
On Saturday morning, the first lady gathered in the small sitting area off the dining room with Bernal and Tomasini. Dr. Biden had been clear with her husband for days: This is your decision. You need to make a call on your own, but you need to tell us where your heart is, what you are thinking.
Around 4 p.m., Donilon joined Ricchetti at the beach house. Both men had been at the president’s side since the debate, funneling real-time information about the calls for him to step down.
The three men moved to the screened-in porch at the back of the 7,000-square-foot home, close to where the waves crashed onto the beach. Hunter Biden dialed in on speakerphone.
The president’s cat, Willow, was slinking around underfoot.
Donilon and Ricchetti had been around politics a long time and they understood what it meant to have a pathway to victory. There was one, they told the president. The polls were going south, it was true, but by margins that they believed could be made up.
The delegates he won during the primaries were already pledged to him, Ricchetti and Donilon said. It would be almost impossible for someone else to take them away from him if he refused to drop out of the race.
But he was politically isolated, they said.
Too many of his allies wanted him out, and it was only going to get worse.
The president, by this point, was weary. In the weeks since the debate, he had been trying to flip the narrative back to the dangers Trump posed. But nothing seemed to work, even as he waged a war of survival against what he viewed as an unfair campaign to oust him from his rightful spot at the top of the ticket.
Still coughing and hoarse from Covid, Biden was growing more receptive to the calls from his allies that he step aside — though he fundamentally disagreed with their reasoning.
The New York Times
