New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compared President Joe Biden to Donald Trump in a scathing op-ed Saturday over his not stepping back from the Democratic ticket in November.
Following Thursday’s CNN debate, Democrats privately and publicly have urged Biden to step back from his candidacy to allow a replacement to be selected to run against the presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump. Biden has ignored calls to pull out of the race and vowed to continue running against Trump during a recent speech.
Dowd’s article “The Ghastly vs. the Ghostly” likened the two candidates by claiming Biden’s “hubris is infuriating” and that he’s only running for the Oval Office “for himself.”
“He’s being selfish. He’s putting himself ahead of the country. He’s surrounded by opportunistic enablers,” Dowd wrote. “He has created a reality distortion field where we’re told not to believe what we’ve plainly seen. His hubris is infuriating. He says he’s doing this for us, but he’s really doing it for himself.”
“I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about the other president,” she wrote.
“in his misguided quest for a second term that would end when he’s 86, he has succumbed to behavior redolent of Trump,” she said. And he is jeopardizing the democracy he says he wants to save.”
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Throughout the piece, Dowd emphasized her point that Biden “has clearly been declining for the last couple of years” but that his desire “to prove he could be a better president than the one who sidelined him” has fueled him.
Dowd concluded that his debate performance was not just “an off night.”
“Biden looked ghostly, with that trepidatious gait; he couldn’t remember his rehearsed lines or numbers. He has age-related issues, and those go in only one direction,” she said. “It was heart-wrenching to watch the president’s childhood stammer return.”
“His wife and staff will build their protective wall ever higher and shoo away reporters, pressing on the age spiral, ever more vigorously,” Dowd wrote. “But Biden, Jill and Democratic leaders have to face the fact that this is an extraordinarily risky bet, with — as they drum into us — democracy on the line.”