Biden brings the drama, at last

“Most consequential tweet in history?” Yesterday, NBC’s Sahil Kapur posed that question just minutes after President Biden told the world that he had decided not to run for reelection after all. Biden made the announcement in a letter posted to X, but Kapur was actually referring to the tweet that Biden posted in May accepting an unusually early presidential debate against Donald Trump on CNN—a debate, of course, that Biden would fumble horribly, sharply intensifying concerns about his age and setting in motion the chain of events that led to yesterday’s announcement. It’s curious to think, now, that the smart money earlier in the year was that the debates might not happen at all—just one more sign of the traditional media’s declining gatekeeper role. And yet here we are.

History will surely remember Biden dropping out as a direct consequence of the debate; indeed, its first draft is already talking in such terms. In doing so, it might gloss over an intervening moment that has been fascinating in its own right—a frantic, three-and-a-bit-week window in which a presidential race that journalists had widely written off as soporific suddenly became a seat-of-your-pants drama. It is a moment that has been telling, too, of the proclivities of those journalists, even if its lessons, at least for now, remain a matter of conjecture.

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