Can Democrats Replace Biden? Despite previous insults, Pope meets Argentine President Milei for the first time

In fact, a lot has gone wrong for Republicans in recent days. In the House of Representatives, Speaker Mike Johnson has embarrassed himself to the core by failing to win a vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

By rejecting a border deal they originally asked for, the Grand Old Party senators have shown everyone that they too are merely Donald Trump’s minions. The ex-president himself has now suffered a bitter defeat in the appeals court. The three responsible judges absolutely rejected his request for absolute immunity.

And what do all the media report in large letters? What are people talking about? About Joe Biden’s age. This is a problem that the president, by definition, cannot solve – and it has definitively become an obstacle that seriously jeopardizes his re-election.

It’s not just Democrats who are getting nervous. The New York Times, which is friendly to him, also states in an editorial:

However, it is precisely this evidence that Biden does not want to succeed. Although no economy has recovered from the Covid crisis better than America’s, although unemployment is at its lowest since the 1960s and the stock market is at an all-time high, although Congress has passed an unprecedented infrastructure program and the Green New Deal The first results show that Biden is achieving the worst results in the polls in living memory, and more than 70 percent of Americans say again and again: Biden is too old.

Biden and his staff rightly complain about how unfair it all is. Because he stuttered in his youth, the president is prone to slips of the tongue. He always has, not to mention that this is a trait that all older people have in common, just as older people tend to forget things and mix up names. Donald Trump, who is only about four years younger, does the same. He recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi in the most embarrassing way.

But all this bounces back on the ex-president. Why this is so cannot be rationally explained. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Biden is slim and fit, but he’s not trying to artificially hide his age. His hair has turned white and his gait wavers.

Trump, on the other hand, is tall and fat. He spends hours every day applying make-up and bundling his bleached hair so that his bald head is not visible. He acts macho, dances – or what he thinks it is – to disco music and gets away with it. As Carol Kinsey Goman, a fitness coach, explains in the New York Times, “When Trump makes a mistake, he simply ignores it and no one says, ‘Oh, he’s gotten old.’ He makes at least as many mistakes as Joe Biden, but because he makes them shamelessly, they are not seen as signs of senility. It looks like passion.”

Since Robert Hur – the special investigator who investigated Biden’s document affair – published his report, the president’s age has once again been at the center of the debate. Hur legally acquitted Biden, but at the same time politically underhandedly assassinated him by portraying him as a “well-meaning, friendly old gentleman with a memory problem.”

At the same time, Biden and the Democrats are failing to communicate their achievements to the people. When it comes to economic competence, Trump is eleven points ahead of Biden, according to a study by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan. The question of whether Biden should forgo re-election and make way for a younger candidate is no longer an academic question. It will likely be intensely discussed at this point, both within the Democratic Party’s racial leadership and in the White House. But is that still possible at all?

In principle yes. In 1968, with the Vietnam War increasingly proving to be a fatal mistake, then-incumbent President Lyndon Johnson briefly withdrew. It was only in March that he decided not to stand for re-election. At a chaotic party conference in Chicago, the Democrats then chose their candidate Hubert Humphrey. However, the result is anything but encouraging. Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in November.

Democrats have several candidates who could fill any gap if Biden follows Johnson’s example. Named are Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. However, the condition is that Biden voluntarily resigns. So far there are no signs of this and it is very difficult to force him to resign.

It is almost hopeless to try to challenge Biden’s candidacy in the primaries. The replacement candidates mentioned above will explicitly not do this, and those who oppose the president have no chance; for example, Dean Phillips, a representative from Minnesota whom no one knows.

Swearer Robert F. Kennedy wants to run as an independent. They are again joined by the green Jill Stein and the black eccentric Cornel West. The question is still open as to whether the No Name movement will send a candidate into the race. The name of Joe Manchin, the stubborn senator from West Virginia, is usually mentioned here.

Given the current state of affairs, it is clear that it will come down to a duel between Biden and Trump. Americans are therefore faced with the unattractive choice between a grandfather and a madman. This weekend he showed again how crazy Trump has become. He has encouraged Russia to attack NATO members who have failed to meet their financial obligations. At the same time, the ex-president is doing everything he can to prevent the US from providing Ukraine with urgently needed military aid.

Even the conservative opinion makers at the Wall Street Journal are pulling their hair out: “Donald Trump said a lot of provocative things, often deliberately, to irritate his opponents and dominate the headlines. However, his statements last Saturday (…) are the reason why many Americans will not vote for him, even against a President Biden whose mental strength is declining.