“Dark Brandon is coming back,” President Biden told one voter earlier this month. Dark Brandon, to review, is the internet meme that satirizes the president’s low energy persona by depicting him as a laser-eyed figure cloaked in darkness obliterating malarkey. Its inversion of reality is the punchline. Biden, too, has increasingly inverted reality as he desperately clings to his party’s nomination after a devastating debate performance.
In an interview with ABC News, he denied numerous polls showing him down in almost every swing state. When confronted with his approval rating of 36%, he curtly replied “I don't believe that's my approval rating.” He declared that polls underestimated him in 2020, and therefore they are underestimating him now.
In 2020, however, polls consistently showed him defeating Donald Trump. If anything, polling overestimated Biden’s 2020 performance.
Weeks out from the debate, the numbers for Biden are calamitous. According to VoteHub, which aggregates high-quality pollsters, Trump is leading in every swing state and leads by 2.9 points in the “tipping point” state of Pennsylvania. Since the debate, almost every national poll has shown a deterioration in Biden’s margins, eating away at any edge he gained after Trump’s felony convictions.
In the face of these sobering numbers, apologists for Biden increasingly resemble the Republican Party’s cultish worship of Donald Trump. Hardcore Biden supporters argue that replacing him as the Democratic nominee would be undemocratic, considering his victory in the primaries. This, of course, ignores that some states (including Florida) canceled their primary to immediately hand their delegates to Biden. It also ignores concerning reports that the White House has been shielding Biden from public view to hide his deteriorating condition.
Factions within the Democratic Party have been raising alarms about the president’s ability to defeat Donald Trump. Ten Democratic house representatives and one senator have called for the president to step down as the nominee. Even Democrat officials who publicly support Biden have expressed doubts in private.
Biden, in turn, has doubled down. Last Monday, he sent a letter to Democrat lawmakers that he will not drop out. Any of his opponents, the letter goes on, can challenge him at the convention. The message quelled some dissent within the party, even as some swing-state Democrats shed “actual tears” in a private meeting.
The president, in short, will not go down quietly. Any fight to replace him would be long and drawn out, essentially threatening murder-suicide against his own party.
Biden’s actions since the debate have dismantled his image as the mature, elder statesman who came out of retirement to defeat Donald Trump and transition American politics to a younger generation of Democrat lawmakers.
Rather than embrace more spontaneous public appearances, unscripted interviews, or prove his mental competence, the president has failed to instill confidence in his abilities, reportedly taken in his felon, crack-smoking son as a “de facto gatekeeper” and demonstrated narcissistic delusions of grandeur. When asked how he would feel if he lost to Trump, he replied he would be at peace as long as he “gave it his all … because that’s what it’s about.”
The stakes of the 2024 presidential election are not about Biden’s feelings — they are dire. Project 2025, crafted by numerous conservative organizations, contains a detailed blueprint to overhaul the executive branch for the next Republican president including removing abortion pills from the market, banning pornography and slashing funding for renewable energy among other extreme proposals.
Countless down ballot candidates and the future of the Supreme Court also lay in the balance. With the court’s recent decision to grant the president immunity for “official acts,” who is in the White House has become more important than ever.
If Biden continues to petulantly cling to the Democratic nomination and loses to Donald Trump this November, as has become increasingly likely, his legacy will be cemented forever as the stubborn, senile narcissist who handed the presidency to a felon.
Rey Arcenas is a UF history and women’s studies senior.
