Opinion

Interviewer on July 12: “We will 1,000 per cent, in your words, see you on the ballot this November?”

Joe Biden: “Unless I get hit by a train, yeah.”

Talk about a whistle stop.

The political battle for the White House south of the border was already promising to be a messy situation come the fall for the Democrats following the disastrous debate a few weeks ago by President Joe Biden in his one and only official meeting with former president and Republican candidate Donald Trump this year — one that made him look ineffectual and past his prime.

With the MAGA crowd all but owning the Republican Party — Republican now in name only — it has been clear for many months that the party was going to coalesce around Trump, a man who has been found criminally guilty of falsifying business records in a New York state court.

This is a man who, among other indictments, faces 10 criminal charges in Georgia related to alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump clearly lost. And yet he remains on the ticket, and in recent weeks polling suggested that Trump and Biden were nail-bitingly close.

And then the situation was further thrown into chaos with the failed assassination attempt against Trump last week. It was a wildcard moment that seemed only to energize the Republican/MAGA base, and served to increase the pressure within the Democratic Party and in public for Biden to step aside and let someone else — someone younger — carry the party banner.

Truth be told, Trump’s near miss has apparently meant that the train was leaving the station for President Biden’s re-election hopes. News hit the headlines yesterday afternoon that Democratic President Joe Biden has stepped away from that race and subsequently endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris for the job instead, inviting his party to unite behind her.

The Associated Press reported that the 81-year-old plans to serve out the remainder of his term in office, which ends at noon ET on Jan. 20, 2025.

“It has been the greatest honour of my life to serve as your president,” Biden wrote in a letter posted to his X account. “And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”

As AP noted, this announcement comes as the latest jolt to the campaign for the White House, for it leaves the Democrats in unknown territory. No party’s presumptive presidential nominee has ever stepped out of a presidential race so close to an election.

And yet, who knows? Biden’s decision to step down may be just the ticket to invigorate the Democrats. The party is set to hold its convention in Chicago on Aug. 19-22, and what was originally slated to be a Biden coronation has turned into an open contest, even with Biden’s endorsement of Harris.

What the political fallout will be from this decision will be difficult to prognosticate, but it will take a massive effort for a new challenger to get the Democrats’ hopes for the White House back on track.

A few Canadians may wonder why this particular American election should matter north of the US border, but it’s very clear that the stakes have never been higher in modern history — both for the United States and everyone else.

However imperfect they may be, the Democrats remain the standard bearer for democratic ideals and free elections in the US, while Trump and the new Republicans seem ready to toss aside those ideals in favour of an autocratic governance model in which power resides in the president, not Congress or the Senate, and where loyalty to Trump is the only thing that matters.

That bodes ill for Canada and other US allies, and the institutions that still manage to bring stability, trade and justice between nations.

As well, what happens next may well decide the fate of democracy in the United States and the future of ongoing conflicts on the other side of the planet, such as the ongoing Russian incursion into Ukraine, or the continuing conflict between the Palestinians in Gaza and Israel.

To quote former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, living next to the United States is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt,” Trudeau said.

And in the daily travelling circus act that is US politics, imagine an elephant that is ill-tempered and unfriendly to our interests.

» Matt Goerzen, editor