Joe Biden was compelled to stand down — could Trudeau go next?
CBC
On Sunday afternoon, Justin Trudeau praised Joe Biden as an American patriot.
"He's a great man," the prime minister wrote on social media, "and everything he does is guided by his love for his country."
That sentence could be read broadly as expressing admiration for Biden's career of public service. It also could be read as praise specifically for the decision Biden took this weekend to relinquish the Democratic party's nomination for president — that was the message Barack Obama offered in his own statement, released about an hour earlier.
"I know he wouldn't make this decision unless he believed it was right for America," the former president wrote of his former running mate. "It's a testament to Joe Biden's love of country."
Either way, the subtext of Trudeau's four-sentence statement on Sunday was so obvious, it barely qualified as subtext. The prime minister, faced himself with calls to resign, was responding to another leader's decision to step aside. He was tipping his cap to a beleaguered counterpart, even while he seems committed to staying on.
Biden and Trudeau have much in common, even if it's largely a coincidence that they came to face leadership crises at the same exact moment this summer.
They're both progressive leaders. They're both contending with some of the same challenges and realities of political life in 2024 (inflation, social media, the legacy of a pandemic, a divisive war in the Middle East). They are both faced with populist conservative challengers.
For Trudeau, the doubts about his leadership became acute after the Liberals lost the byelection in Toronto-St. Paul's on June 24. Three days later, Biden struggled mightily through a televised debate with Donald Trump.
Neither Trudeau nor Biden immediately took those setbacks as their cue to leave, which is perhaps not all that surprising. You don't get to be a prime minister or president without possessing a high degree of self-confidence, a capacity to set aside doubt and an ability to withstand (or even ignore) criticism. (A decade ago, researchers found a correlation between a successful presidency and presidents who displayed signs of "grandiose narcissism.")
After great effort and sacrifice, the prospect of defeat — or even just the suggestion that someone else could do a better job — can be a difficult thing to face. And power is hard to relinquish.
All of that likely explains why Biden is the first president in nearly 60 years to willingly decline to seek re-election. Even in Canada — where the system of political leadership is arguably more flexible — roughly a half-dozen prime ministers could be said to have stepped aside of their own accord (the list gets smaller still if you exclude those whose health was ailing when they resigned).
Ultimately, Biden's exit from the race was driven by two factors: the state of his health and the stakes of the election. Those two factors drove the interventions by donors and senior Democrats that finally drove Biden out of the race.
The president and his supporters could insist that he was still up to the job, but they could not change the fact that he is 81 years old. Two thirds of Americans believed Biden was too old to be president. And he was not going to convince voters to ignore what they saw when he appeared and spoke in public.
Still, the calls for Biden to step aside might have been fewer in number if Democrats and commentators did not view the presidential election in existential terms.