Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) reportedly “ripped the bandaid” on Democrats' finally booting President Joe Biden from the 2024 race.
In a tell-all Vanity Fair article, New York Times contributing opinion writer Jonathon Alter revealed new details in his book about what went down in the moments leading up to Biden’s ousting. He explained that the moment the 81-year-old “cadaverous” president stepped on the debate stage in June, he was a goner and a has-been to the Democratic Party. Alter detailed that the ousting was “brutal, and it briefly divided the party.” However, Alter said that given the stakes, the left couldn’t take the chance of leaving Biden in the race and just crossing their fingers he would defeat former President Donald Trump.
“It wasn’t enough just to murmur, ‘It’s up to him,’ he wrote. “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.”
Alter pointed out that while the rest of the Democratic Party was gunning for Biden to step aside, First Lady Jill Biden and First Son Hunter Biden were all in on his re-election. He noted that the president initially denied his declining health and insisted he was well enough to continue campaigning. However, it was Pelosi that put the final nail in the coffin.
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.
Alter explained that Pelosi began pressuring Biden and “matched her inside game with a subtle public effort.” Every move and word the Democrat spoke was intentional. That same week, Pelosi appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and said that “Biden has been a “great president” and that “It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run.”
Just days later, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) ensured Biden saw the bad polling numbers that his campaign aides had been hiding. Until then, the president thought he was up in the polls and defeating Trump.
Biden then got COVID, the last straw for the Democratic Party. Before he knew it, his own party members had pushed him out of the race.
Alter claimed that Biden spent nearly four days alone, even away from his family and staff, to weigh the decision on whether to exit from the race. The report notes that the president refused to consult his constituents over the situation, pointing out that Biden made the “excruciating call without the wisdom of the fellow presidents he had once considered good friends.”