In mid-May, Joe Biden issued a blustery challenge to Donald Trump, saying he was willing to debate him twice ahead of the US presidential election in November. “Make my day, pal!” Biden said. “Let’s pick the dates.”
The two campaigns quickly settled on June 27 in Atlanta, Georgia. For Biden, it turned out to be one of the most dramatic miscalculations in the history of modern US presidential campaigns: the 81-year-old president performed so poorly against Trump in the debate that he doomed his own re-election hopes.
On Sunday, the president announced he would no longer seek a second term in the White House — the outcome of nearly a month of bitter and damaging debate within the Democratic party about his mental and physical capacity to defeat Trump and then govern for another four years.
“I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country to stand down,” he said.
The decision has brutally ended a half-century long political career in the halls of power in Washington, instantly making Biden a lame-duck president with six months still left to serve as the leader of the world’s most powerful economy.
The outcome will inevitably raise questions about Biden’s hubris and stubbornness in seeking re-election in the first place, despite warning signs that most Americans, including many in his own Democratic party, wanted him to give way to a new generation of leaders.
Now the president will hope his legacy includes the gratitude of his party for a painful personal decision to give Democrats a better chance of defeating Trump — a man Biden considers a threat to US democracy.
Biden’s legacy as president will be debated for years. But the collapse of his re-election campaign will be central to it. While he had suffered political setbacks in the past, including failed presidential bids in 1988 and 2008, the collapse of this year’s re-election campaign will sting most.
It will also be a personal blow for a leader known as much for his stubbornness as he was of view of himself as underestimated. Biden was forced to step out because of his waning physical and mental dexterity, rather than any policy failure.
After entering the White House at age 78, the culmination of decades of striving for the Oval Office, Biden suggested that he would be a “transitional” US president, who would eventually hand over the torch to a new generation of leaders.
In 2022, after a sharp drop in his approval ratings following the fraught withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, there was speculation that he might not run again. But Democratic overperformance in that year’s midterm elections quieted the rumours and a rejuvenated Biden set his sights on a second term in the White House.
Surrounded by his close circle of advisers from his 2020 campaign, including campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon and senior aides Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon, Biden pressed ahead. He was convinced — correctly — that Trump would be the likely Republican opponent this year. Having beaten him once in 2020, he believed he was uniquely able to do so again.
While Biden’s approval ratings continued to languish throughout 2023, his aides were convinced that the numbers would steadily improve as voters compared his accomplishments — including sweeping climate legislation and industrial policy designed to revive American manufacturing — with the chaos of a return to Trump.
After a solid performance in the State of the Union address to Congress in March earlier this year, Biden started to make up some ground on Trump in the polls. But it was never the kind of lead that would have made Democrats comfortable.
He also ran into some unexpected and damaging personal problems. After classified documents dating to his vice-presidency were found in his Delaware home, an investigation by a special counsel cleared him of any wrongdoing — but its concluding report included a devastating description of the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory”, who had been unable to remember when his eldest son Beau Biden had died.
The report unleashed an initial panic among Democrats about the president’s fitness for office. Meanwhile, his son Hunter was indicted — and then convicted — on gun charges in a federal court.
By May, with Biden still slightly trailing in national polls and in several crucial battleground states, his aides took the fateful gamble of an early presidential debate with Trump. Biden arrived in Atlanta in late June after five days of preparation at Camp David, and on the heels of two trips to Europe earlier in the month. He had a sore throat and was not feeling well.
But he flubbed. Democrats panicked, seeing the frailties of their candidate on primetime television. Moves to push him out began almost immediately.
“I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know! I know how to tell the truth! I know how to do the job!” he said.
Just over three weeks later, after pressure to bow out that some Democrats said had become irresistible following the assassination attempt on Trump — an act that immediately swung more momentum in favour of the Republican — Biden was out.
William Howell, a presidential historian at the University of Chicago, said Biden was faced with a very difficult decision in bowing out. “The core motivation of presidents [is] that they play for the ages. They care deeply about their legacies” and are always thinking about where they will sit in history.
On one hand, Biden would have wanted a second term to follow through on policy initiatives undertaken during his first. “All else equal, those presidents who serve multiple terms have bigger and greater legacies than those who serve just one term,” Howell said.
Biden’s decision to bow out of the race caps a life in public service that was marked by a steady rise to the top of American politics, occasionally punctuated by disappointments and setbacks, while personal tragedy lurked in the background.
After being elected to the Senate in 1972, and chairing the judiciary and foreign relations committees, he launched two failed presidential campaigns.
What propelled him to the White House was his tenure as vice-president under Barack Obama, with whom he occasionally clashed on policy, including on the plans to increase US troops in Afghanistan. In the 2016 election, Obama backed Hillary Clinton over Biden for the Democratic nomination — adding to strains between the two men that would persist over time.
The two big personal tragedies were part of Biden’s political persona. The first came in 1972, just after he was elected to Congress, when Biden’s first wife Neilia and their one-year old daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident as they were buying a Christmas tree. Their two sons, Beau and Hunter, survived the crash.
The second came in 2015, while Biden was vice-president, when Beau, the late attorney-general of Delaware, died of brain cancer. Biden would revisit these tragedies in public, and they infused his sense of empathy. Beau’s death also affected Hunter, whose addiction problems worsened after the loss of his brother.
In 1977 Biden married Jill Biden, his current wife, and their family would remain extremely closely knit. Biden, a devout Catholic, would return to Delaware almost every weekend, often with family members — and in many ways they remained his closest advisers.
Biden’s decision not to run for re-election will preserve his victory over Trump in the 2020 race as his crowning political achievement. He was often underestimated by Democratic elites in Washington, not least because of his penchant for gaffes and his unevenly delivered rhetoric.
But in 2017, after a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, he decided to launch his successful White House bid. He suffered through the primaries but ultimately prevailed after securing backing from crucial voting blocs within the Democratic party, including African-Americans led by Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat.
The 2020 campaign was waged during the coronavirus pandemic, and when he emerged victorious in November, he had been able to dispel all those doubts about his political skills in a pivotal contest for American democracy.
The admiration for Biden among Democrats has persisted throughout his presidency. Despite his age and long history of cross-party co-operation in the Senate, and big tensions over the war in Gaza, he has earned plaudits from younger progressive members of the party including rising stars such as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who backed his 2024 candidacy until the very end.
But he will be disappointed that within the space of three weeks after his disastrous debate performance, party elders including Obama, Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, and Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, left him in the lurch and with no more support.
Biden will point to his record in the White House as one of success. On the economy, he can point to high job growth and rising wages. But he also presided over a bout of high inflation, which peaked in 2022 and retreated steadily afterwards — but left many Americans upset about the cost of living.
On foreign policy, he led Nato in its response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and presided over rising tensions with China, though they never boiled over. The Middle East was his biggest source of trouble, from the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, to his support of Israel’s war in Gaza, which divided the party.
One of the highlights of his presidency was the appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black female justice on the Supreme Court. His vice-president, Kamala Harris, was also the first Black and Asian-American woman to occupy the office.
But his struggle to handle the heavy flow of migrants across the US border with Mexico was a blind spot exploited by Republicans but also criticised by Democrats.
While policy accomplishments — and how many people those policies affected — have traditionally been the focus of presidential legacies, they are not the only component.
Stepping aside may also bolster his legacy. A candidate without Biden’s political liabilities — possibly Harris — may now fare better against Trump. Equally, a race to find a candidate could bring new vitality to the party and its election chances, Howell said.
But Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University, said Biden should have stayed in the race and his party had acted “very foolishly” in pushing him out. “The lesson of history is clear: you create an open seat and a party fight, you’re going to lose,” Lichtman said, citing Harry Truman’s decision not to seek another term in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson’s shock announcement in 1968 that he was exiting the White House race.
Johnson told the country he wanted to devote the remainder of his presidency to his job as a leader of the nation — a statement echoed by Biden on Sunday when he dropped out “to focus solely on my fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term”.
But Democrats went on to lose the presidency in the 1968 election to Republican Richard Nixon.
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