vox | Unwilling to reconsider his candidacy, Biden also proved averse to proving his mental fitness empirically, refusing to commit to submitting to cognitive and neurological tests and then sharing the results with the public.
Finally, the president ended the interview with a Trumpian bout of self-flattery, one that also served as an implicit rebuke of his vice president’s readiness to manage foreign affairs. “Who's gonna be able to hold NATO together like me?” he asked rhetorically. “Who's gonna be able to be in a position where I'm able to keep the Pacific Basin in a position where we're — we're at least checkmating China now? Who's gonna — who's gonna do that? Who has that reach?”
The Biden who spoke with ABC News Friday night was enfeebled, ineloquent, egotistical, and intransigent. He was a man who appeared both ready and willing to lead his party into the wilderness. Asked how he would feel if he stayed in the race and Trump were elected, Biden replied, “I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that's what this is about.”
This is not the president’s best self.
What this moment asks of Biden is no small thing: to forfeit immense personal power so as to give his party its best possible shot of keeping an authoritarian reactionary out of office. Many statesmen would not be capable of summoning the humility and selflessness necessary for doing so. I still hold out hope that the president’s commitments to liberal democracy and the Democratic Party are in earnest and that he can find his way to such heroic self-knowledge and sacrifice.
