Democrats Sure Aren’t Acting as if Trump Beating Biden Is an Existential Threat to Democracy (2024)

For all the talk from congressional Democrats about Donald Trump being an existential threat to democracy, they sure aren’t acting like it. That’s true in how they are handling the situation with President Joe Biden’s precarious reelection campaign, but the problem goes much deeper.

To hear leading Democrats tell it, Trump is a major threat to the future of democratic institutions in the United States. After the events of Jan. 6, 2021, during which Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, seeking to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Biden after the Democrat won the 2020 election, Democrats sounded the alarm. Then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a statement calling on Trump Cabinet members to invoke the 25^th Amendment and immediately remove Trump from office. Rep. Bennie Thompson, who later chaired the special congressional committee investigating the attempted election subversion, said, “Though it has been apparent for years, it is more clear than ever that President Trump is a direct threat to the homeland.” Democrats’ rhetoric against Trump has been apocalyptic and existential since that moment.

House Democrats, to their credit, did impeach Trump for his actions with one week left in his term, with post-office conviction blocked by a divided group of Senate Republicans. And after a long delay, Democrats in Congress worked with Senate Republicans to pass legislation in 2022 that makes it much harder to steal elections via manipulating Electoral College rules, i.e., Trump’s goal on Jan. 6.

But more recently, Democrats have not done nearly enough to deal with the ongoing risks to democracy that they themselves repeatedly raise. They have supported election deniers running in Republican primaries in an attempt to ease the path for Democratic candidates in general elections. They have not made it a legislative priority to change or repeal the Insurrection Act, a law that could be a major tool in a second Trump administration to send federal troops into U.S. cities in what would surely be an invitation for violent clashes. They have sought to promote Trump’s dangerous rhetoric from 2020 opposing mail-in voting in the cynical, antidemocratic hope of tamping down Republican turnout.

Democrats’ reaction to the highly dangerous immunity decision from the Supreme Court has been muted despite the fact that Trump is now, remarkably, the leading candidate to be president in 2025, promising to be a dictator on Day 1 and newly empowered by the court to do just that should he win. The Supreme Court’s opinion opens the door to potential Trump lawlessness and violence, a risk exacerbated by the reality that Trump will have more loyalists and fewer principled Republicans carrying out his orders in a new administration. As House Republicans have used their majority to hold phony hearings on “weaponization” of the Department of Justice, Senate Democrats have done little with their majority to react to what they say is the very real threat of Trumpism. Where are the Senate hearings?

And this brings us to the situation with Joe Biden. He followed his worrisome debate performance, an appearance that raised questions about his mental competence, with scant activity to convince skeptical Americans that he has the mental stamina to do the job even now, much less to continue it for the next four and a half years.

A recent CBS poll showed that only 27 percent of people think Biden has the mental and cognitive health to serve as president, compared to 72 percent who think he does not. (A month ago, before the debate, the numbers were 35/65.) In swing-state polls, Biden is losing, and polls are moving in the wrong direction. Careful election analyst Dave Wasserman wrote on X: “The notion that the presidential is a Toss Up was a stretch even before the debate. Today, Trump has a clear advantage over Biden and a much more plausible path to 270 Electoral votes.” Dave Weigel notes that this is the first time in 24 years that a Republican is leading in polling averages after July 4. In July 2020, Biden was leading by 9 points. He ended up winning that race by exactly half that margin—a feat that raises further questions about his ability to overcome Trump’s growing lead.

Despite this, few congressional Democrats have spoken up to call on Biden to step aside now, before he is officially nominated, when it would be easy to have another Democrat’s name appear on the ballot. After the official nomination, state ballot access would be a huge mess. But who is to say how Biden will be doing physically and mentally in one, two, or three months?

Instead, most Democrats are silent or have expressed their support for Biden’s run. Yet, behind the scenes, according to numerous reports, Democrats expect a shellacking, one that could not only take down Biden but also ensure that Trumpist Republicans control the House and the Senate. That situation of unified Republican political control, combined with a compliant Supreme Court, is powerful and volatile. Yet Biden seems to be taking this in stride too, telling interviewer George Stephanopoulos, when asked how he would feel next January if he stayed in the race and lost to Trump, “I’ll feel, as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”

If it’s really true, though, that a second Trump term would be the kind of “five-alarm fire” that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned about in her dissent in the Supreme Court’s immunity case, and if Democrats really believe that a Biden loss is inevitable, then their failure to speak up now and intervene with Biden cannot be squared with their rhetoric of the Trump apocalypse of a second term.

If you genuinely believe that Democrats’ dire warnings about Trump and democracy are entirely reasonable, then their cowardice to have a hard conversation with Biden about the president’s path forward is itself a threat to the future of American democracy.