How Nancy Pelosi Ripped Off the Band-Aid for Democrats to Force Joe Biden Out

In 2007, Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote an influential book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb argued that Black Swan events (e.g., 9/11 or the development of Google) share three criteria: they are extremely rare, extremely impactful, and—in spite of being outliers—explainable and even predictable after the fact.

Both Donald Trump’s felony conviction and Joe Biden’s late withdrawal in favor of a dynamic Kamala Harris will be seen as Black Swans if Harris goes on to win the election. These events weren’t just improbable and impactful; they were also, in retrospect, predictable. Why shouldn’t a criminal president be held to account and a frail president be forced to stand down? On the other hand, if Trump wins, the trial and the passing of the torch to Harris will fade as Black Swan events, while his near-assassination will qualify as one.

If Trump loses the 2024 election, the pivotal moment will have been his decision on May 15 to agree to Biden’s request that they debate in June. Biden’s team hoped to reset the campaign with an unprecedented mid-year debate. That miscalculation doomed his candidacy. Trump might have doomed his own by not waiting until the fall to debate, at which point it would have been too late for the Democrats to replace Biden.

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I got a heads-up on what might happen. On Father’s Day, eleven days before the historic June 27 CNN debate, I spoke to a senior Democratic senator who told me that if Biden did poorly in the debate, Democrats would have to find another presidential nominee. Surprised by this, I immediately broke (again) my New Year’s resolution not to scheme against Biden.

The debate was a fiasco from the moment the cadaverous president walked on stage. The idea that, if somehow reelected, he would still be president in 2028 at age eighty-six was alarming for many of his supporters. For half an hour, Trump steamrolled him. Biden was so weak that everyone ignored not just Trump’s dozens of lies but his viciousness, which we apparently now take for granted. He even had the nerve to go after Nancy Pelosi for not protecting the Capitol on January 6, as he incited his mob to kill her and his vice president and watched TV for 187 minutes without ordering help. Biden has said privately that Trump is “a sick fuck” for repeatedly joking about the home invasion that almost killed Paul Pelosi. Why couldn’t the president have managed to say some less profane version of that in the debate? Why was he so bad?

The answer was obvious. Age had robbed Biden of what the political scientist Richard Neustadt taught me forty-five years ago is the only real power any president has: the power to persuade. He had lost his connection to the American people at least eighteen months earlier. Now it was clear that he couldn’t be Harry Truman, coming from behind to beat Tom Dewey in 1948. He wasn’t up to it.

My family couldn’t bear to watch the debate to the end. I did, and I stayed up until 2 am writing the first of three New York Times Opinion pieces advocating an open audition process for a new nominee. That afternoon, the Times published an historic editorial that called for Biden to withdraw, describing his nomination as a “risky gamble.” Ezra Klein, Crooked Media, James Carville, David Remnick, Michelle Goldberg, and Tom Friedman were among the early big voices insisting that the president must immediately stand down, with David Axelrod’s view that Biden’s chances were “very slim” also highly influential.

While the idea of an open nomination process was always a bit of a pipe dream, it proved to be an effective fantasy. Democrats began to see the debate fiasco as a blessing in disguise, offering them the chance to nominate a fresh young candidate who had not been dented in fractious Democratic primaries. By making the idea of a “blitz primary” seem real, the Times gave Democrats uncomfortable with Kamala Harris permission to speculate about other possible nominees. If big donors had thought their only choices were Biden and Harris, they might have continued to fund Biden, assuring his nomination.

The effort to sideline the president was brutal and it briefly divided the party. But given the stakes, it wasn’t enough just to murmur, “It’s up to him.” Biden had to be gently cajoled in private and pushed harder in public, so that he would finally realize there was “no path,” as political strategists say.

It wasn’t easy. Bess Truman in 1952 and Lady Bird Johnson in 1968 both thought it sensible for their husbands to stand down and said so early in the election season. (When an exhausted LBJ announced he wasn’t running, he was fifty-nine, the same age as Kamala Harris.) By contrast, Jill Biden was all-in on Joe seeking reelection. Hunter Biden, too.

For two weeks, the president seemed to be in denial. He appreciated all of the comparisons to George Washington giving up power but still preferred to be in the company of successful two-term presidents Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, rather than one-termers Carter, H.W. Bush, and Trump, whom he continued to think—against all odds—that he could beat again. On July 5, George Stephanopoulos asked him what he would do if a delegation of congressional leaders came to the White House and asked him to step aside. He confidently predicted that wouldn’t happen, but did not close the door.

The key figure in getting Biden to change his mind was Pelosi, who drew on their forty-year friendship. At first, she thought Biden could survive what he described as his “bad night.” But Pelosi is an institutionalist; she loves the House, and her nightmare of not regaining control of that chamber (when Democrats were so close to winning it back) seemed to be coming true. With Republican control of the presidency, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, who would check Trump’s authoritarian impulses? After Biden under-performed with Stephanopoulos, Pelosi expected that Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill would stage an intervention. “But the men were MIA,” one insider told me. “She wasn’t happy that the only bloody fingerprints on the knife were hers.”

The week of July 8, Pelosi went to the White House amid great secrecy and opened a channel to the president with an I’m-here-for-you tone, followed by several phone chats. When the poll numbers of endangered House Democrats worsened, her concerns deepened. A fly on the wall would have seen a master class in subtle politics, as the former speaker—a velvet-gloved boss for our times—maneuvered with great sensitivity to ease the president of the United States out of power. “She’ll cut your head off and you’ll never even know,” one of her friends told me.

To put pressure on Biden, Pelosi matched her inside game with a subtle public effort. On July 10, she told Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Biden has been a “great president” before saying, “It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run.” Of course Biden had already decided to run, which made Pelosi’s comments an easy-to-decode message for others to resume pushing him to stand down once the NATO summit in Washington ended. This set the stage for George Clooney in public and scores of big donors in private to turn off the money tap.

By the end of the week, the men got more involved, as Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer made sure Biden saw devastating polls that his top campaign aides had been hiding from him or interpreting with confirmation bias. On July 18, Biden tested positive for Covid-19. During his time recuperating at home in Delaware—which overlapped with the coronation of the nearly martyred Trump at his convention in Milwaukee—he saw polls showing him in danger of losing long-blue New Mexico, Virginia, and Minnesota.

Biden’s intimates viewed Covid as the last straw. It took him off the road and seemed to underline the gloom of the moment, with the tide of Democratic opinion that favored a new nominee showing no signs of receding. If the president hadn’t tested positive, he might well have run out the clock, lashing himself to a party that increasingly viewed him as a selfish loser. The White House, the campaign, and the Democratic National Committee were fully on board with this lambs-to-the-slaughter approach and they needed to hold the line for only two more weeks before delegates would nominate Biden by virtual roll call. But with Covid, the endgame began. After denial (on display in inter- views) and bargaining (over which polls to believe), Biden’s grief for the death of his presidency finally moved toward acceptance.

As he weighed this momentous political decision, he cut himself off for more than four days from almost everyone outside his family. The wounds of what he called “Obama’s deal with the Clintons” in 2016 were still surprisingly fresh, and he consulted none of them in this period—an extraordinary decision in itself. He would make this excruciating call without the wisdom of the fellow presidents he had once considered good friends.

In the nine years since Beau’s death, Biden had become much less joyful. The solemnity had its compensations: he was a steady, well-grounded, and philosophical president. Like his friend John McCain, he had seen worse, and the enduring pain helped keep him calm. No one outside the family knows anything about the conversations Biden held in the final four days. He cut off staff, and it’s not clear if he spoke at the end to Pelosi, who told intimates that she would take her conversations with Biden to the grave.

After finalizing his decision with aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti on Saturday, Biden got up Sunday, July 21, and began telling people, including Harris. Senior staff heard the news only moments before the world did. Pelosi found out when she was performing community service with Jon Bon Jovi in New Jersey; Obama was playing golf. Just one hour before withdrawing, Biden was on the phone with the president of Slovenia putting the finishing touches on the largest prisoner swap since the Cold War, more proof that he was still a global leader of great skill and compassion.

When he finally bowed to reality, Biden went out with class. Less than half an hour after he issued a statement withdrawing from the race, he passed the torch to Harris, who moved with impressive speed to unite the Democratic Party behind her. Two days later, Biden’s eloquent Oval Office address included a deft insertion of great presidents into today’s struggle for democracy and decency. He conjured “Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the immortal words that guide this nation. George Washington, who showed us presidents are not kings. Abraham Lincoln, who implored us to reject malice. Franklin Roosevelt, who inspired us to reject fear.” The president never mentioned his former opponent, but it was hard to miss the message: Trump defiled the temple that his transcendent predecessors had built.

The speech reminded me of an ailing FDR—in much worse health than Biden—addressing Congress after returning from the Yalta Conference in 1945, only six weeks before he died. The postwar international order that Roosevelt designed is the one that Biden has done so much to reenergize. It’s the world that Eleanor Roosevelt conveyed to my mother when Mom took her on a tour of Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and that she, and Dad, and my great teachers conveyed to me—a world of alliances, not autocrats; cooperation, not chaos.

As I reviewed why Biden had to stand down, I had a flashback that at first seemed disconnected from the extraordinary story of a political party trying to replace a successful president on the ticket. I thought about how the common experience of so many Americans having gay friends and relatives helped speed support for marriage equality in the early years of the twenty-first century—an issue on which Biden was ahead of Obama. In the same vein, the common experience of gently taking the car keys away from elderly parents helped lead two thirds of Democrats to the conclusion that Biden was too old to run again.

In retrospect, I’m glad I was passionately committed to Biden’s withdrawal, in print and in private conversations. After Pearl Harbor, my father left Purdue and enlisted in the Air Corps, where he flew 31 missions over Nazi Germany and was shot down. He didn’t get to choose when it was convenient for him to go off and fight for democracy, but he did his part. The rest of us don’t have to risk our lives to do what we can to make sure Donald Trump isn’t reelected. Like my father in a single airplane, I played a very small role but it made me feel that I was doing everything I could to help protect democracy.

Excerpted with permission from Jonathan Alter’s American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own (BenBella Books; October 2024)

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